Should English majors take computer science courses? Labor market benefits of the occupational specificity of major and nonmajor college credits

Using administrative data for college graduates, we model earnings and employment probabilities as functions of a credit-weighted index of the occupational specificity of college coursework, decomposed into within-major, within-discipline (but outside the major), and nondisciplinary components. We define the occupational specificity of each college field as the likelihood that a student majoring in that field subsequently works in an occupation requiring specific skills acquired in the field. We find that occupationally-specific, non-disciplinary courses are strongly associated with earnings; e.g., a five percentage-point shift among English majors from their least occupationally-specific courses outside the humanities to computer science is associated with a 0.055 increase in log-earnings.