Status: Upcoming

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.

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.

The debate over the value of postsecondary education has become increasingly narrow, often reducing the complex landscape of degrees and certificates to a single metric: the wage premium. While earnings are critical, this “one-size-fits-all” approach fails to capture the diverse motivations that drive individual decisions regarding postsecondary credentials, from a learner seeking a career pivot to an employer seeking to minimize hiring risk. This presentation proposes a new framework for evaluating value by applying the “Jobs to Be Done” theory to postsecondary credentials. By shifting the focus from the credential itself to the specific progress a stakeholder is trying to make, we highlight a nuanced taxonomy of distinct “jobs” across learners, employers, policymakers, and education providers. This approach provides a common language to align educational design with real-world needs, moving the conversation beyond simple ROI to a more precise understanding of utility and success.