Status: Past

Although general education requirements comprise one-third of U.S. four-year degree requirements, we know little about their role in shaping student course-taking pathways. Drawing on administrative data from Texas linked with general education requirements at 32 four-year institutions, I study the role of general education in U.S. higher education. I show that general education requirements dramatically shape student course-taking, particularly in the first two years of a student’s academic career. Using a difference-in-differences design, I estimate the causal effect of adding a general education designation to a pre-existing course: adding a general education designation increases course enrollments by 43 percent and departmental enrollments by 49 percent. These enrollment increases translate into increased instructional staffing and course offerings within affected departments. I argue that changing general education designations offers state policymakers a seemingly neutral mechanism that reshapes student pathways while reallocating resources and instructors according to their ideological priorities.

College majors are important stratification mechanisms, shaping occupational trajectories, postcollegiate earnings, and patterns of inequality by gender, race, and class. Yet the processes through which students and fields of study come together have received limited theoretical and empirical attention. We advance a theory of major selection as a form of organizational differentiation that both builds on and mediates parallel processes earlier in the life course. Our longitudinal conceptualization links the development of academic subjectivities in K-12 education with postsecondary organizational conditions. Compared with their prior schooling, college students exercise greater agency over their course-taking, face greater ambiguity about the purposes of school, and confront complex curricular choice architectures. These conditions are sustained by an organized anarchy in the provision of courses and majors that simultaneously enables and constrains selection. Our theory recognizes the cumulative and contingent character of major differentiation and illuminates enduring problems of stalled college progress.

AI-supported digital tools offer great promise for improving college students’ academic engagement and progress, yet little research has focused on whether and how the character of tool implementation might influence tool uptake in specific campus contexts. Our study documents variation in implementation of the same digital tool across four public university campuses in a large state system. Scaled computational observation across campuses reveals substantial variation in magnitude and style of tool use. Site visits and qualitative interviews with university staff reveal parallel variation in how the tool is embedded in technical infrastructures and inter-office divisions of labor and how data are used to inform tool use. Findings suggest that the uptake of digital tools, and consequently their sustained adoption, is partly dependent on how tools are embedded in socio-technical systems that intertwine technologies, organizational conditions, and interpersonal relationships in context- specific ways.

This presentation examines two projects looking at the decision to change majors at a large West Coast research university. In the first, we examined individual differences in changes of major relating to the gender composition of each major. While many students changed their majors, only a minority changed to one of a different gender composition. Students who persisted in or changed to a female-dominated major were more likely to cite prosocial career goals as a motivating factor in their studies. In the second project, we tracked the timing and frequency of changes in university major, finding that first-generation students make later and more frequent major changes. Relatedly, first-generation students are also more likely to enter university with an undeclared major and to wait longer to declare a major. Furthermore, first-generation students are less likely to switch to a similar major (e.g., biology to human biology) compared to other students. This has notable costs in terms of time-to-graduation and extra credits earned.

Collaborators: Nayssan Safavian (University of California, Irvine), Yannan Gao (University of Tubingen), Ann-Lena Dicke (University of California, Irvine), Sirui Wan (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Jutta Heckhausen (University of California, Irvine), Jacquelynn S. Eccles (University of California, Irvine), Richard Arum (University of California, Irvine).

Schooling is most closely connected to work at the highest levels of education. As a growing share of adults return to higher education after beginning work, we ask how individuals draw on their work experience and career values to select a graduate program. We draw on two independent but complementary interview studies to examine this question across higher- and lower-status fields of study: business and teaching. We find that within both fields, students’ career values and aspirations guide them toward distinct tiers of educational prestige. In higher-status graduate programs, students’ perceived prospects are broadened or limited by occupational attributes. Our findings illuminate how both occupational and institutional status shape educational decision-making in the context of growing labor market uncertainty and economic precarity.

A growing literature identifies U.S. colleges and universities as causal contributors to inequality in students’ college experiences and outcomes, particularly regarding bachelor’s degree completion. A much smaller literature describes the organizational mechanisms driving that causal impact. Drawing on theories of relational inequality and racialized organizations, together with literatures in the sociology of education on tracking and cumulative (dis)advantage, we develop a new conceptual framework explaining how colleges and universities generate, reproduce, and sometimes mitigate inequality. We draw on three rounds of student interview data gathered over a single academic year, combined with ten years of administrative records, to build this framework, examining the relationship between the resources students bring with them to college, the demands or “claims” that students make on their colleges, organizational responses to these claims over time, and the student experiences and outcomes that result. We find that while differences in students’ pre-college resources predispose them towards distinct claims-making behavior, colleges often amplify these differences by tracking students into distinct organizational niches with unequal capacities to respond to students’ claims, and in turn, to support students’ progress to degree. Yet we further find that this process does not always increase existing inequalities: in some instances, colleges’ tracking responses can disrupt patterns of cumulative advantage stemming from students’ pre-college resources to produce better and more equitable outcomes than pre-college resources may suggest. By describing the mechanisms driving these patterns, we develop a generalizable conceptual approach for scholars seeking to explain colleges’ organizational impacts on student inequality. We also discuss how this approach can directly support higher education leaders working to produce better and more equitable degree completion outcomes for all students.

Leveraging rich data on the universe of Texas high school graduates, we estimate how the relationship between geographic access to public two- and four-year postsecondary institutions and postsecondary outcomes varies across race-ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We find that students are sensitive to the distance they must travel to access public colleges and universities, but there are heterogeneous effects across students – particularly with regard to distance to public two-year colleges (i.e., community colleges). White, Asian, and higher-income students who live in a community college desert (i.e., at least 30 minutes driving time from the nearest public two-year college) substitute towards four-year colleges and are more likely to complete bachelor’s degrees. Meanwhile, Black, Hispanic, and lower-income students respond to living in a community college desert by forgoing college enrollment altogether, reducing the likelihood that they earn associate’s and reducing the likelihood that they ultimately transfer to four-year colleges and earn bachelor’s degrees. These relationships persist up to eight years following high school graduation, resulting in substantial long-term gaps in overall degree attainment by race-ethnicity and income in areas with limited postsecondary access.

Sociology has recently found itself lumped in with a group of subjects on the STEM periphery or in the humanities that stand accused of not offering undergradaute students adequate career preparation and skills — leading to questions about whether universities, families, and students should invest in them. This is despite the fact that Sociology’s curriculum develops the combination of analytical skills and interpersonal understandings that employers, including in technologically intensive fields, praise as ideal for their potential employees.

This talk will describe the development and pilot implementation of the Sociology Pathway and Career Exploration Resource (SPACER) – a tool that helps undergraduate Sociology students at UT-Austin more effectively link their courses of study to their career pathways. Funded by the National Science Foundation and developed in collabroation with campus Career Services experts, SPACER (a working title) runs alongside a semester-long Sociology course through course management software. After onboarding specific to their class year, students have access to 15 modules including Marketing Your Sociology Degree, Transferable Skills, and Networking and Informational Interviews; links to existing campus resources for those pursuing graduate, medical, or law school that have been scaffolded with additional material specific to Sociology students; and receive weekly announcements from Career Services targeted to Sociology students. Pilot implementation and informal and formal assessment occurred in a Research Methods course enrolling approximately 20 students, mostly juniors and seniors. In the future, we will test the tool in courses of varying sizes and develop a version for dissemination to other colleges and universities.

As a greater proportion of workers earn college and graduate degrees, it is less clear what job should count as the beginning of a students’ ‘career line’ (Spilerman 1977). About half of college graduates eventually return to enroll in some sort of graduate degree program (NCES 2022). Around 85% of these students, however, have at least one spell of employment between college graduation and re-enrollment. These jobs may shape their career and educational trajectories, but there is a little evidence on how this process unfolds. How should we think about students’ post- college employment in this changing education and labor market landscape, and the consequences of jobs they hold between spells of enrollment for their later educational and career trajectories? Given changes in career trajectories and in the higher educational landscape, the relationship between baccalaureates’ first jobs and their occupational and educational outcomes has shifted over time. There is little work considering how specific post-college employment is related to future educational and occupational trajectories, and how these relationships may differ across cohorts or demographic groups. In this paper, I will focus on a growing subset of the population: those who are college-educated. Using four nationally representative panel studies to capture cohort changes over 40 years, I will examine employment and enrollment trajectories within four years of college graduation. I will focus on how early work experiences may influence students’ educational and occupational choices and consider how changes across cohorts in trajectories inform our understanding of the nexus of higher education credentials and occupations.