This paper examines the production and diffusion of up-to-date knowledge by exploring the content of higher-education courses. We build new measure, the “education-innovation gap,” defined as the textual similarity between course syllabi and frontier knowledge published in academic journals. We estimate this measure comparing the text of 1.7 million university syllabi and 20 million articles published in scientific journals since 1975. With this measure, we document four findings. First, the gap varies substantially both across and within schools. Second, the gap is lower in more selective schools; even within selectivity tiers, it is lower in schools serving fewer economically disadvantaged and minority students. Third, courses see their gap decline when the instructor changes, and more research-active instructors teach courses with lower gaps. Fourth, the gap is correlated with students’ graduation rates and incomes after graduation, and these correlations remain when accounting for a large host of school observables. Our results suggest that the education-innovation gap is can be useful to understand how frontier knowledge is disseminated.