Status: Past

How do college students select courses? The question is important because course selection is directly implicated in commitment to major and timely completion, yet social scientists have remarkably little empirical knowledge of how course selection occurs “in the wild” of everyday undergraduate life. Our work fills this gap by leveraging data from a longitudinal study of undergraduates considering and selecting courses at Stanford University from their initial entry in 2019 through to graduation. We find that course selection is complex and contingent, in five ways. First, students confront many more curricular offerings than they can reasonably expect to be aware of, let alone comprehend. Second, salient aspects of any course are endogenous: each option represents a bundled choice of content, instructor, grading regime, workload, and meeting time.  Third, students have virtually no control over curricular offerings, such that each selection is a tradeoff. Fourth, academic coursework is only one component of personal utility, which often also includes multiple extracurriculars with serious time demands. Fifth, personal utility is often dynamic, changing over time as college experiences unfold. Findings overall encourage scholars and practitioners of undergraduate academic progress to attend directly to the organizational conditions of course selection.

Social scientists have long emphasized the material benefits of postsecondary degree attainment, even while everyday Americans routinely report moral, expressive, and community-focused motivations for pursuing and earning college credentials. This paper builds theory to explain the plural meaning and political significance of bachelor’s diplomas, specifically, in the contemporary US. Integrating insights from the sociology of culture and political-historical sociology, we argue that attainment of a bachelor’s diploma became a categorical mark of status honor in post-WW II America. Drawing on interviews with 61 US adults making substantial investments in obtaining college degrees in midlife, we show that adults routinely express moral projects alongside economic goals for degree attainment. Recognizing the plural meanings of college degrees helps to explain otherwise puzzling features of educational decision-making; highlights hazards of predatory inclusion for degree-seekers; underscores the deep political salience of educational credentials in contemporary American culture; and calls for a comparative sociology of the meanings of higher education worldwide.

Educational institutions face pressing challenges regarding student persistence, time to graduation, and underrepresentation of women and minorities in STEM fields (1–5). Developing targeted and effective solutions to these problems requires a concrete understanding of how diverse student groups progress through academic programs. In light of this, there are growing calls for a new science of educational pathways (6), but this idea remains more metaphor than methodology. Transcript data hold the promise of revealing the paths students take through a curriculum (7, 8), but existing frameworks do not provide a fine-grained, processual account of how students arrive at their academic destinations. In this study, we present a theoretically grounded, data-driven framework for translating transcript data into academic pathways. Our framework delivers information about students’ movements both through the space of possible majors and within a particular program. This information is remarkably detailed, but its richness creates statistical challenges in that the analyst must allow for temporal dynamics, diverse pathways, and the possibility that the most likely path for a given type of student differs across contexts (e.g., fields of study, colleges, or universities). We develop a question- and data-driven statistical model that leverages the richness of pathways data, with each level tuned to nonparametrically extract a different kind of information about trajectories, student demographics, and how their relationship varies across contexts. We apply this framework to data from a large public university to reveal how students of varying backgrounds, including historically underrepresented groups, enter and exit fields of study.

Patterned variation in commitment to fields of study by gender, race and social class persists in US higher education, reinforcing social stratification among those who receive college degrees. Yet how students and fields of study come together in college remains opaque, largely due to elective curriculums that oblige students to make numerous and iterative course selections as they move through academic time. This paper provides a framework for theorizing academic selection and guiding empirical work forward. We describe academic selection as a two-sided phenomenon, in which organizational processes provide courses offered and students select courses enrolled. Insights from social psychology, decision theory and organizational studies highlight complexity and contingency on both sides of academic selection. We argue that elective curriculums create garbage-can conditions in which commitments to fields of study consistently resist individual-level prediction, with implications for educational stratification and its legitimation in the United States.

I recently received a grant to conduct a five-year longitudinal interview study with a group of entering college students, with the goal of understanding how US institutions might reduce inequality in pathways from college to work. I am now designing the first year of data collection (as well as the broader project) and seek advice and peer review on my research design. I’ll provide a an overview of the grant proposal, my goals for the project and its basic design, and seek input from all of you.

This paper examines the relationship between job mismatch and entry into entrepreneurship, testing whether the latter helps individuals escape mismatch and increases their job satisfaction. We consider different types of job mismatch, distinguishing between horizontal mismatch (when a person’s job is not consistent with their field of study), vertical mismatch (when a person’s job is not aligned with their level of education), and wage mismatch (when a person’s pay is lower than that of their peers). We also consider different types of entry into entrepreneurship, distinguishing between self-employment and new business creation. Using data from a longitudinal survey of 102,085 college graduates in the labor force, followed in the first five years after graduation, we show that vertically or wage mismatched individuals are more likely to be self-employed and – to a lesser extent – to start a new business than their non-mismatched counterparts. However, mismatched individuals who start a new business are significantly more satisfied than those who engage in self-employment or change occupations.

We examine the impact of Maryland’s 2017 ban on out-of-school suspensions for grades PK-2, assessing whether a top-down state-initiated policy can influence school discipline practices. The ban, which allows suspensions only in cases where a student poses an “imminent threat,” aims to reduce exclusionary discipline. We address three questions: (1) What was the effect of the ban on discipline outcomes for students in both the targeted early grades and upper elementary grades not subject to the ban? (2) Did schools circumvent the ban by increasing in-school suspensions or by coding more incidents as threatening? (3) Were there differential effects on historically marginalized student groups who are typically suspended more frequently? Using a comparative interrupted time series strategy, we show that the ban significantly reduced, but did not eliminate, out-of-school suspensions in the targeted grades, without a corresponding increase in in-school suspensions. However, racial and other disparities in suspension rates persist.

To further explore the broader implications of school discipline, we link K-8 educational data from the Maryland State Department of Education with incident-level data from the Department of Juvenile Services, observing students’ academic and disciplinary histories leading up to their initial interactions with the juvenile justice system. This analysis tests whether out-of-school suspensions at different grade levels affect the likelihood of early entry into the juvenile justice system, focusing on disparities by race and gender. The results provide insight into the relationship between exclusionary discipline practices and juvenile arrests, contributing to a deeper understanding of the school-to-prison pipeline and the role of school-discipline strategies in shaping student outcomes.

Colleges and universities are under increasing pressure to demonstrate their effectiveness in enhancing student success and employability. Traditional metrics used by researchers and policymakers—such as time to degree completion, postgraduate employment and income—have predominantly overlooked the diversity of student pathways during and after college. The narrow focus has prompted calls for a more comprehensive framework that emphasizes a broader spectrum of pathways to student engagement and success. We introduce a novel multi-engagement model of the research university environment that highlights the significance and interconnectedness of various college experiences: academic engagement in classroom settings; research activities; and extracurricular, civic, and career development. We show that these different experiences and their variable combination are related to distinct and diverse pathways to success. Leveraging over 800,000 survey responses collected between 2012 and 2023 by the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium, the study examines trends in student engagement at 22 US research-intensive universities across five domains: academic, research, extracurricular, civic, and career. We explore interplay among these forms of engagement and their relationship to learning outcomes and student plans.

Scholars of STEM education worry that curved grading discourages students by facilitating  competitive classroom environments, yet scholars rarely directly observe how students make sense of this evaluation regime in real time. Our longitudinal interview study enables us to learn how students apprise and navigate courses with curved grades before, during, and after course completion. Observing 74 undergraduate students enrolled in 22 courses with curved grades, we find little evidence of sentiments of competition. Detailed longitudinal observation of 8 students in a single chemistry course reveal that students calibrate their own capacities relative to peers, then select strategies, from exit to cooperation, to navigate the course. Students consistently express uncertainty about their own grades during the course, then feelings of gratitude about final grades, suggesting that curves may serve to enforce the authority of instructors and the curriculum. Findings encourage researchers to be sensitive to student-level variation in the dynamics of sense-making when considering the relationship between grades and academic progress.