Job outlook for college graduates - the supply and demand in Nebraska

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CL Higher Education Center

CL Higher Education Center has just released the data behind the 'workforce supply/demand higher education - Nebraska' report. The methodology is discussed in 'college workforce supply/demand - methodology'.

The released Excel workbook contains few worksheets. One for the oversupply academic programs and one for the under supply academic programs. Besides these two worksheets, there are worksheets that help reader look into how the oversupply and under-supply lists are derived.

In the case of oversupply academic programs, let's look at the academic program: 130301 - Curriculum and Instruction - Master Degree. If we look at the XWalk_ByCIP worksheet, we found that the only appropriate occupation for this CIP is the Instructional Coordinators. That occupation has an annual job opening of 37 while Nebraska colleges produced 523 graduates in the academic year of 2008-09.

An example for the under-supply academic program should provide enough exercises for reader to understand the result better. Look under the XWalk_ByCIP worksheet for the CIP of 521001, it is clear that seven occupations are appropriate for graduates from this CIP. The seven occupations provide a total of 340 job openings a year. By looking under the RvlCIP worksheet for this CIP, we notice that three of the seven occupations can also accept graduates from two other CIPs: 521005 and 521003. These 2 CIPs produce a total 5 graduates in the 2008-09 academic year. The net result is that there can have at least 335 job opening for our focus CIP of 521001. Since during the 2008-09 academic year, there were 226 Nebraska college graduates that are from this CIP, the net results is that there will be at least 109 jobs remain unfilled.

An interesting question to ask is what's the economic implication of all these?