Frontier Knowledge in Higher Education
This paper studies the dissemination of frontier knowledge through higher education. Using natural language processing on 1.7 million university course syllabi and 20 million academic articles, we construct frontier knowledge proximity, a measure of how closely a syllabus is connected to recent research in its field. We document three facts. First, courses differ in frontier knowledge proximity, even within field, course level, and year. Second, instructors shape course content: proximity rises when instructors change and is higher for research-active instructors, especially when their research matches the course topic. Third, access is unequal: advantaged and faculty-intensive schools offer more frontier-oriented courses.
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Copy CitationBarbara Biasi and Song Ma, "Frontier Knowledge in Higher Education," NBER Working Paper 29853 (2022), https://doi.org/10.3386/w29853.Download Citation
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