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Many undergraduates leave college without completing a degree or credential. Some researchers characterize this as a waste of the student’s time because (they assert) college short of a degree does not yield any advantage in the labor market. Using data for an entire cohort of students graduating high school in Texas in one year, we compare the employment and earnings years later of those who do not go beyond high school with those who enter college but do not complete a credential. Using techniques that address selection bias, we find that students with “some college” are considerably more likely to be employed fifteen years after high school graduation and tend to earn significantly more than their counterparts who do not go to college. These benefits are found across student subgroups, with low-income students, women, and students of color generally experiencing the greatest improvements in labor outcomes from college attendance. While college dropouts do not fare as well as college graduates, incomplete college nevertheless functions for many as a stepping-stone into a better labor market position.

Considerable research has focused on the academic outcomes of part-time undergraduates, but few studies have addressed their post-college labor market outcomes. This study compares the post...

This paper compares claims making and gender wage gaps in the United States and Norway, and asks how public sector employment moderates the association between gender segregation and the gender gap in wages in the two countries. Using nationally representative data and hierarchical linear modeling, we analyze gender wage gaps within and between job types. The analyses show that job types heavily concentrated in the public sector, effectively insulated from regular market dynamics, have small if any gender wage gaps. Drawing on relational inequality theory, we argue that this results from the absence of opportunities for individual level claims making. Dynamics of Claims Making and Gender Wage Gaps in the United States and Norway

In the United States, students’ ability to perform well in school mathematics is important for gaining access to a selective college and affects entry into sought-after majors. We find that the gatekeeper function of mathematics is not a function of general academic prowess and operates separately from advantages attributable to family background. Moreover mathematics is especially important for educational attainment among youth from higher socioeconomic status families. Human capital theory implies that schooling’s emphasis on math reflects its functional importance in the workplace. However, our analyses of skills used in workplaces indicate that very small proportions of educated workers ever use “school math.” We draw out the implications of this disjuncture both for theories of class reproduction and for human capital theory.

Studies relating the selectivity of colleges to the earnings of their graduates report inconsistent findings. Some find no effects; most report statistically significant but quite small earnings benefits from attending a more selective college; and a few studies report large effects. Analyzing two recent national longitudinal studies of college graduates, with models sensitive to selection bias, we find large earnings payoffs from attending a highly selective college both four and ten years after graduation. However, those returns are uneven: full-time working women graduates earn a lot less than their male counterparts from equivalent colleges, college majors pay differently, and family background also affects earnings over and above one's college's selectivity. Nevertheless, earnings differences attributable to college selectivity are striking.

Numerous studies have investigated the consequences of vertical transfer on students’ higher education outcomes in comparison to “native 4-year students”—those who went straight from high school into a bachelor’s program. However, the long-term labor market outcomes for vertical transfer students are understudied. Using nationally-representative data from the National Survey of College Graduates 2015, we estimate the relationship between starting in a community college (vs. at a 4-year college) and postcollege earnings and employment, in ways that correct for selection bias and overdispersion. We estimate a roughly 14% earnings disadvantage for baccalaureates who started at a 2-year rather than 4-year institution, regardless of college major. No effect was found on graduates’ employment chances.

Higher education in America is characterized by widespread access to college but low rates of completion, especially among undergraduates at less selective institutions. We analyze longitudinal transcript data to examine processes leading to graduation, using Hidden Markov modeling. We identify several latent states that are associated with patterns of course taking, and show that a trained Hidden Markov model can predict graduation or nongraduation based on only a few semesters of transcript data. We compare this approach to more conventional methods and conclude that certain college-specific processes, associated with graduation, should be analyzed in addition to socio-economic factors. The results from the Hidden Markov trajectories indicate that both graduating and nongraduating students take the more difficult mathematical and technical courses at an equal rate. However, undergraduates who complete their bachelor’s degree within 6 years are more likely to alternate between these semesters with a heavy course load and the less course-intense semesters. The course-taking patterns found among college students also indicate that nongraduates withdraw more often from coursework than average, yet when graduates withdraw, they tend do so in exactly those semesters of the college career in which more difficult courses are taken. These findings, as well as the sequence methodology itself, emphasize the importance of careful course selection and counseling early on in student’s college career.

Increasingly, undergraduates take more than 4 years to complete a baccalaureate, a situation widely perceived as a waste of time and money, for students, their families, and taxpayers. We first identify several phenomena that result in a longer time to degree and document the frequency of such delays. Then, using nationally representative data from the Baccalaureate & Beyond 1993–2003 surveys, we estimate the relationship between delayed time-to-degree and later employment and postcollege earnings, using negative binomial hurdle models. We find that delayed time-to-degree is not related to employment chances but is associated with lower post-college earnings: averaging 8–15%, depending on the length of delay. This average disadvantage is in line with signaling theory. The unique contribution of this study is its thorough analysis of different types of delay, as caused by stopping out and employment. Contrary to the popular assumption that delay is a waste of college resources or a student’s time, we find that delayed graduation in combination with working full-time during college has no negative relationship to post-college earnings. We discuss the time-investment trade-offs and the implications for the applicability of human capital theory to college graduation delays.

Low completion rates and increased time to degree at U.S. colleges are a widespread concern for policymakers and academic leaders. Many ‘full time’ undergraduates currently enroll at 12 credits per semester despite the fact that a bachelor’s degree cannot be completed within 4 years at that credit-load. The academic momentum perspective holds that if, at the beginning of their first year in college, undergraduates attempted more course credits per semester, then overall graduation rates could rise. Using nationally-representative data and propensity-score matching methods to reduce selection bias, we find that academically and socially similar students who initially attempt 15 rather than 12 credits do graduate at significantly higher rates within 6 years of initial enrollment. We also find that students who increase their credit load from below fifteen to fifteen or more credits in their second semester are more likely to complete a degree within 6 years than similar students who stay below this threshold. Our evidence suggests that stressing a norm that full time enrollment should be 15 credits per semester would improve graduation rates for most kinds of students. However, an important caveat is that those undergraduates whose paid work exceeds 30 h per week do not appear to benefit from taking a higher course load.

Using college transcripts, we separate the effects of remedial coursework from high school preparation. For two-year colleges, taking remedial classes was not associated with less academic success. In four-year colleges, there are negative effects of remedial coursework, but many minority students who complete a bachelor's degree do so after taking remediation.

Rates of involuntary job loss (from plant closures, downsizing, and so on) have been increasing in the United States during the past 15 years. Using several cross-sectional surveys from the Current Population Survey, and longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this article demonstrates that the likelihood of job displacement differs according to marital status, the presence or absence of young children, and single-parenthood, even after controlling for employees' age, sex, race, education, industry, occupation, and other pertinent factors. Divorce is associated with the subsequent loss of their jobs. Conversely, job displacement also raises the risk of subsequent marital breakdown. Thus the waves of job displacement have not been neutral with regard to family structure. These findings are discussed in terms of theories of work-family conflicts.

The concept of skill plays an important role in sociological research, from studies of the labor process to debates over equal worth. This article provides a theoretical analysis of the ambiguities and difficulties involved in current sociological conceptions of skill, contrasting four distinct approaches to skill: positivist, ethnomethodological, Weberian, and Marxist. Some of the impasses in industrial sociology arguably stem from the fact that opposed traditions are using very different notions of skill or are blind to their own preconceptions regarding skill. The article draws out the implications of this for empirical research.

This paper provides a commentary on Robins and Webster's article "Computer Literacy: The Employment Myths" within the broader context of critiques of computer literacy. The author argues that the various critics of computer literacy are participants in wider disputes over pedagogical method, the purposes of education, and the role of education in a class society. In some ways computer literacy provides a pretext for these more general controversies, and the particular merits and problems of educational computing frequently become submerged under these wider debates. The author concludes that many of Robins and Webster's points are overdrawn, and that computer literacy is neither as useless nor as dangerous as they imply. Keywords: computers, employment, education, cognition.

The thesis that capitalism continues to degrade and deskill work in the twentieth century, creating an ever more unskilled proletariat, has been forcefully argued by Harry Braverman and his colleagues. In this article I present a series of theoretical, empirical, and methodological criticisms of the deskilling position, drawing upon a diverse literature, and upon original research. Particular attention is given to the application of the deskilling thesis to contemporary trends in the computerization of clerical work, as a way of highlighting methodological weaknesses in the deskilling approach.