Abstract
We ask what resume content can teach us about labor market signaling and the value of college credits and degrees. To do so we scrape a large corpus of resumes from an online jobs board and match these with actual records of college attendance and graduation from the National Student Clearinghouse. We then observe whether job seekers strategically omit schools they did not graduate from, and what worker and school characteristics predict this. These exercises serve three purposes. First, they provide novel evidence of job seekers’ valuation of non-completed degrees vis-a-vis the negative value of dropping out by school and job-seeker characteristics. Second, these results allow us to test assumptions relied upon in standard models of returns to schooling, labor market signaling and employer learning. Lastly, they permit a weak test of the signaling vs. human capital value of omitted schooling by observing employment differentials between omitters and non-omitters.