Status: Upcoming

Using deidentified administrative records for non-international undergraduates graduating from 2014–2023 at a large, diverse public research university in the western United States, this study examines how family of origin structures college major choice and how incomplete measurement of family influences may bias estimates linking majors to early occupational status. Leveraging a comparative dyad design, we assess concordance in major selection and divergence in post-baccalaureate occupational standing and post-BA educational attainment across four groups that share progressively more family context: random cohort pairs, non-kin pairs matched on observed sociodemographic characteristics, sibling pairs, and twin pairs. We operationalize occupational standing with a Hauser–Warren–style Socioeconomic Index derived from linked employment records (Steppingblocks/Lightcast), with post-BA education outcomes drawn from National Student Clearinghouse data.

Young adult workers confronting marginalization and growing precarity use cultural repertoires to interpret their situations and take action. Yet many of these cultural tools can seem contradictory, and exposure to contradictory tools can create confusing signals about how to pursue advancement. Data from life story interviews with low-income, Black-identifying youth from New Orleans, Louisiana, instead demonstrate how marginalized young adults synthesize heterogeneous cultural schemas, and how resulting cultural aggregates relate to mobility. Abductively building on theory linking cultural ends and means, evidence shows how actors combine common cultural schemas regarding self, opportunity structure, and social action. These produce shared cultural models, or ideal-typical mobility ideologies oriented around themes of inner transformation, outer mobilization, and social emancipation. Despite persistent precarity, mobility ideologies perpetuate social myths of agency among respondents by aligning self and action in three corresponding narrative identities: metaphorical gardeners, climbers, and seekers, respectively. Mobility ideologies interact and align with both actor resources and social expectations to varying degrees. Counterintuitively, cultural mismatch or incongruence between actor mobility ideologies and ecological expectations correlates with advancement when it helps respondents work against reproductive forces like stereotyping and labor market discrimination. Findings highlight how combinatory and interactive cultural processes—as opposed to cultural repertoires alone—relate to inequality.