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Educational Authority in the "Open Door" Marketplace

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Labor Market Consequences of For-profit, Nonprofit, and Fictional Educational Credentials

Nicole M. Deterding and David S. Pedulla (Equal Authorship)

2016. Sociology of Education, 89 (3): 155-170.​

 

    Plain Language Summary

As for-profit higher education became the fastest-growing sector of U.S. higher education, a central question remains: how do employers evaluate educational quality for emerging institutions? We conducted a field experiment, sending over 1,200 job applications to administrative positions across three major labor markets to test how employers value associate’s degrees from for-profit, nonprofit, and fictional institutions. The results show that while having a degree matters, employers treated all three types of schools essentially the same, with no measurable preference for one over the other. These findings suggest that for many entry-level roles, the degree signal overrides institutional quality. The lack of employer sorting means that market competition alone is unlikely to drive improvements in program quality, leaving students to potentially pay a significant price premium for for-profit degrees that offer no additional labor market advantage.
 

    Key Takeaways​

• Testing "Educational Authority" as a Mechanism: Uses a fictional college as a control to demonstrate that the "signal" of institutional quality in the sub-baccalaureate market is remarkably weak.

• The Signal of "Any Degree": Reveals that for entry-level administrative roles, employers prioritize the possession of a credential over the specific reputation or type of institution that granted it.

• Price vs. Value: Highlights the financial risk for students who pay several times more for for-profit programs that yield the same callback rates as more affordable community colleges.

• Market Competition Failure: Challenges the idea that employer demand will naturally improve education quality; if employers don't differentiate between schools, there is little market incentive for institutions to upgrade.

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• Understanding Employers' Responses to For-profit Colleges. ASA Work in Progress Blog, invited contribution.

• Does it Matter Where You Get Your Two-year Degree? Poverty Research and Policy Podcast. Institute for Research on Poverty at University Wisconsin-Madison.​​

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Widening the Net

 

National Estimates of Gender Disparities in Engineering

Clemencia Cosentino de Cohen and Nicole M. Deterding

2009. Journal of Engineering Education, 98 ​(3): 211-226.​​​

 

    Plain Language Summary

While much of the debate around gender equity in STEM focuses on women "leaking out" of the career pipeline, we use national data to show that women who enroll in engineering are as likely as men to persist and graduate. By analyzing retention rates across various engineering disciplines, we find that the primary driver of underrepresentation is not a lack of persistence, but a significant disparity in initial enrollment. In most fields, once women start an engineering major, they stay at rates comparable to their male peers. These findings suggest that the gender gap is rooted in the recruitment phase, necessitating new focus on expanding outreach in K-12 curricula, building stronger pathways from two-year colleges, and diversifying the pool of students who consider engineering in the first place.
 

    Key Takeaways

• Challenging the Leaky Pipeline: Demonstrates that, at a national level, women are not dropping out of engineering majors at higher rates than men; this "leak" is not the primary cause of the gap.

• Similar Persistence: Shows that women's persistence rates do not differ from men's across most engineering subfields, suggesting that once women enter the field, individual persistence and existing retention efforts have results.

• The Enrollment Gap: Identifies initial recruitment and enrollment as the fundamental bottleneck for gender equity in the engineering profession.

• Reframing the Solution: Pushes the policy conversation beyond improving campus climate to ensuring more women enter engineering pathways from the start.
   

 AI Transparency: I sped drafting of plain language summaries with the assistance of Google Gemini v3. AI-drafted language was revised for accuracy, nuance, and voice by me.