This paper studies the teaching of frontier knowledge in higher education and its impact on students. Using text analysis on 2 million course syllabi and 20 million academic articles, we develop a measure called “frontier knowledge proximity,” capturing how closely course content aligns with current scholarly research. We document significant variation in frontier knowledge proximity across courses, even within the same institution, and demonstrate that these differences substantially affect student outcomes. Linking syllabi to individual student records from Texas and leveraging unexpected syllabus updates, we show that increases in proximity improves both educational outcomes (graduation, major retention, and graduate school enrollment) and earnings. Educational gains are notably larger among median-ability and lowerincome students, whereas earnings benefits disproportionately accrue to higher-ability and higherincome students. These findings indicate that frontier knowledge exposure can narrow socioeconomic disparities in education but remains complementary to students’ existing resources. We conclude by showing that instructors, particularly research-active faculty, are the main drivers of differences in frontier knowledge proximity.
Contact person: Anastasiia Lutsenko
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