Status: Past

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.

We’ll start by previewing a refresh of pathways.stanford.edu — designed to better convey the network’s core task of specifying a new science of progress in school and at work. We welcome your input.

We’ll devote most of the hour to hearing from Network affiliate Blake Silver about his brand-new book, Degrees of Risk: Navigating Insecurity and Inequality in Public Higher Education (Chicago 2024). Congratulations Blake!

More about the book: Institutions of higher education are often described as “ivory towers,” places of privilege where students exist in a “campus bubble,” insulated from the trials of the outside world. These metaphors reveal a widespread belief that college provides young people with stability and keeps insecurity at bay. But for many students, that’s simply not the case. Degrees of Risk reveals how insecurity permeates every facet of college life for students at public universities. Silver dissects how these institutions play a direct role in perpetuating uncertainty, instability, individualism, and anxiety about the future. Silver examines interviews with more than one hundred students who described the risks that surrounded every decision: which major to choose, whether to take online classes, and how to find funding. He identifies how the college experience plays out differently for students from different backgrounds. For students from financially secure families with knowledge of how college works, all the choices and flexibility of college felt like an adventure or a wealth of opportunities. But for many others, especially low-income, first-generation students, their personal and family circumstances meant that that flexibility felt like murkiness and precarity. In addition, he discovered that students managed insecurity in very different ways, intensifying inequality at the intersections of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other sociodemographic dimensions.

The courses and programs of study college students select are the building blocks of academic progress and degree completion. Yet academic selection is a complex phenomenon, especially under elective curriculums, common in the US, which present students with serial selection tasks as they move through academic time. This paper reviews prior work in this domain, notes its assets and limitations, and provides a conceptual framework for theorizing, observing, and modeling academic selection. We offer the idea of selection architectures: the scale and arrangement of selection tasks students must complete in order to obtain degrees. To fully understand and model academic selection, researchers must consider (a) the character of specific selection architectures; (b) how students navigate these architectures; (c) and how architectures are maintained and changed by academic planners. A cumulative science of academic selection can inform the design of postsecondary programs to improve transparency, efficiency and equity in course/program selection and degree completion.

Understanding college student career exploration, preparation and job search behavior in relationship to college-career trajectories has been hampered by a dearth of observational data. At The University of California – Irvine, we found a way to bridge this gap. We leverage detailed student-level information from the Handshake career services platform to examine student career exploration, preparation, advising on internships, job searches, employer campus visits, career fairs, and job applications, and link these data with students’ administrative, learning management systems and survey data to capture student career development in college and its impact on initial forays into the labor market. The presentation will outline the project motivation, scope, data, and initial findings.

In a landscape where the gap between the need for skilled talent and the availability of job opportunities is broad, Year Up stands out as a transformative force for economic mobility. For over two decades, this national nonprofit organization has served over 43,000 young adults—90% of whom identify as persons of color with training and opportunity— to connect to jobs that offer livable wages and opportunities for growth. Through an overview of Year Up’s innovative program model, this presentation will illustrate how the organization has achieved the highest wage gains among sectoral training programs as evidenced by robust evaluations setting a benchmark for success in job training and employment support. Motley also will discuss Year Up’s future directions, including its commitment to expanding its reach and deepening its impact through research in industry to ensure that our work is what employers are demanding. Many scholars and researchers are wondering what the most important components of sectoral trainings are to replicate in other settings. Year Up does not believe the answer is simple (i.e. we need technical skills training, wrap around student supports, and coaching); however, it does contend the piece that really differentiates its program is high-quality job placement.