Post Recession, Share Of Job Vacancies Requiring A Bachelor’s Degree Increased From 23 Percent In 2007 To 37 Percent In 2019

From "Structural Increases In Skill Demand After The Great Recession" by Peter Q. Blair and David J. Deming, NBER Working Paper 26680:

ABSTRACTIn this paper we use detailed job vacancy data to estimate changes in skill demand in the years since the Great Recession. The share of job vacancies requiring a bachelor’s degree increased by more than 60 percent between 2007 and 2019, with faster growth in professional occupations and high-wage cities. Since the labor market was becoming tighter over this period, cyclical “upskilling” is unlikely to explain our findings.

PAPEROur main finding is that skill demand has increased substantially in the decade following the Great Recession. The share of online job vacancies requiring a bachelor’s degree increased from 23 percent in 2007 to 37 percent in 2019, an increase of more than 60 percent. Most of this increase occurred between 2007 and 2010, consistent with the finding that the Great Recession provided an opportunity for firms to upgrade skill requirements in response to new technologies (Hershbein and Kahn 2018).

We present several pieces of evidence suggesting that the increase in skill demand is structural, rather than cyclical. We replicate the findings of Hershbein and Kahn (2018)and Modestino, Shoag, and Ballance (2019), who show that skill demands increased morein labor markets that were harder hit by the Great Recession. However, when we extendthe sample forward and adjust for differences in the composition of online vacancies, we find that this cyclical “upskilling” fades within a few years. In its place, we find longrun structural increases in skill demand across all labor markets. In fact, we show that the increase in skill demand post-2010 is larger in higher-wage cities. We also find much larger increases in the demand for education in professional, high-wage occupations such as management, business, science and engineering.***Our results suggest that increasing demand for educated workers is likely a persistent feature of the U.S. economy post-recession.