dc.description.abstract | In recent years, the trend of interdisciplinary learning has arisen. Many colleges have offered various interdisciplinary programs for students in response to future employment needs. Cultivating cross-disciplinary talents has also become the main point of higher education. However, the wage effect of interdisciplinary programs is an important consideration for students when choosing such a program. Furthermore, given the richness of interdisciplinary programs in Taiwan, rewards related issues are worth exploring. This article uses the data from Taiwan Education Panel Survey and Beyond (TEPS-B) to mainly explore the impact of interdisciplinary programs on wage and use a few chapters to explore non-wage outcomes. First, we use Ordinary Least Squares to estimate the impact of interdisciplinary programs on monthly wage and the first full-time job wage. Then we use the panel regression to analyze the changes in wages over time. In addition, we investgate whether interdisciplinary programs can improve the probability of taking up a management position and entering high-paying occupations by the probit model, and how the programs affect people’s level of job satisfaction by the ordered-probit model.
The empirical results show that studying interdisciplinary programs can have higher wages in the labor market. And we find that the more difficult interdisciplinary programs will have better wage rewards. Take the first-full time job as an example. On average, there is a 3.8% wage premium for any interdisciplinary program of study, 4.9% for double majors, and 15.5% for teacher education program. But this premium gradually disappears as the time to enter the labor market increases. The reason for this may be that after entering the job market for many years, the determinants of wages may be rather related to personal work experience and work ability. Regarding non-wage rewards, taking credits program does help increasing the chances of taking up management positions and teacher education program is positively related to high-paying occupations and job satisfaction. According to the results, learning multi-skills by studying interdisciplinary program can either improve people’s human capital stock and hence their labor productivity or be a good signal in job market. We thus conclude that studying interdisciplinary program is helpful for both wages and career development. The more comprehensive the interdisciplinary programs, the higher the positive impact on wage and career development. As a result, it is recommended that the quality of the interdisciplinary program ought to be emphasized as designing the program, aiming to improve students’ professional skills and cultivate their "cross-disciplinary talents" that meet the needs of job market.
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