The Knowledge Structure of Individuals and Cohorts in American Knowledge Economy

Siri Warkentien, Johns Hopkins University

This paper seeks to describe and explain the dynamics of knowledge structure along the individual timeline and the cohort timeline in American knowledge economy. Three advances in our investigation include: (1) a theory-based 3-dimension knowledge categorization that extracts the essence of numerous degree fields and occupation fields; (2) a conceptual model that integrates the interdependent institutional transformations of higher education and industry and the impact of immigration; and (3) an application of the latent transition analysis (LTA). LTA first abstracts the 3-dimension categorization for fields at each level of degrees and occupation into two latent classes. It then analyzes each transition among the latent classes, from which we can identify the knowledge structure throughout all transitions. The analysis uses the uniquely rich data on degree and occupation fields for a large, nationally representative sample of about 100,000 college graduates from the National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG 2003).