Doctoral Dissertation Resarch: Women's College Completion Rates and the Value of Higher Education

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project asks whether women's gains in earning college degrees leads to a devaluing of a college degree, such that college degrees become increasingly less important for securing high paying jobs. If so, women's gains in education might lead to unintended disadvantages in the labor market. Past research has found that occupations with higher proportions of women have lower average wages for both women and men. Does a similar process occur when women earn a higher proportion of college degrees? More specifically, this project seeks to improve our understanding of how the gender composition of colleges and universities may impact the value Americans assign to the four-year college degree. By examining the relationship between college completion rates of men and women and the value of the college degree, the project will enhance our understanding of the complex and unintended ways in which social progress can lead to social disadvantage. By identifying how gender progress can result in unintended labor market disadvantage, this project's findings will provide important research evidence for policymakers who wish to understand and address persistent inequality between women and men. Using an original survey experiment, the research will investigate the ways in which gender composition of colleges and universities influences cultural and economic value assigned to the college degree. Accordingly, do Americans rate the cultural value of the four-year college degree lower when exposed to information that women complete college at higher rates than men? Are hiring managers less likely to hire female applicants when similarly exposed to information of women's advantage in college completion? To address these questions, the extent to which women outpace men in four-year college degree completion is experimentally manipulated to establish its causal effect on several outcomes, including perceived competency of college graduates, hiring preferences, and salary decisions. Taken together, the survey experimental designs utilized in this project advance social demographic theories on the causal mechanisms that impact gender inequality and provide compelling data that observable differences in valuation of the four-year college degree are driven by true valuation differences directly conditional on Americans's perceptions of the gender composition of colleges and universities. This research contributes to sociological inquiry by identifying and addressing emergent forms of gender inequality, as well as providing practical implications for policymakers and hiring managers alike interested in promoting gender progress at home and in the workplace.