Doctoral Dissertation Research: Credentials and Markets: An Inquiry into the Structure of Practice

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

ES-0221390 Charles Bidwell Robert Petrin University of Chicago This Doctoral Dissertation Improvement project examines ways in which post-secondary educational institutions (PSEIs) contribute to stratification of technical personnel in the contemporary American economy. Among the specific questions it seeks to address are: (1) do PSEIs that science and engineering graduates attend have pervasive effects on subsequent occupational outcomes, and (2) does the functional differentiation among science and engineering graduates reflect differences in their social backgrounds and the regional clustering of technologies and industries. In order to shed light on these questions this research will develop a framework for embedding post secondary educational institutions in labor market analyses by providing a description of labor markets and career structures segmented by relations between PSEIs and regions. Several post-industrial trends have led to the re-evaluation of structuralist concepts from economics and sociology and contributed to a resurgent interest in theories of labor market segmentation. The role of regions and education in science and engineering suggests that PSEIs might play a role in structuring labor markets. Indeed, prior research on science and engineering has found that rewards in technical subsystems are often products of institutions' positions in networks of information and resource exchanges. Therefore, in the proposed research the structure of science and engineering practice is posited as manifest, at the individual-level, in the distribution of individuals from various social backgrounds and with various educational credentials across fields and functional roles in the economy. At the college and university-level, the structure of practice is believed to be manifest in enduring relationships between PSEIs and other key actors in their environments which shape the opportunities available to graduates over the course of their careers. The primary data for this research will be drawn from selected national data on college graduates collected by the Nations Science Foundation (i.e., Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System and Survey of Earned Doctorates). These data will be matched to a number of other sources to generate a composite data set linking science and engineering graduates to relevant information on the PSEIs they attended, as well as economic data on regional and sectoral conditions believed to be correlated with labor market processes. Since employer characteristics play important roles in determining returns to education, it will be necessary to collect and include these types of supplementary data in analysis, as well as data on PSEIs' relationships with key actors in their environments. Analysis will consist of two major phases. The first will provide a description of PSEIs' positions in labor markets. The second will examine individuals' functional roles in the economy as correlates of their socioeconomic background and characteristics of their degree granting institutions. Career trajectories will be similarly analyzed using appropriate methods for multicohort data.