College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item Inequality in the College-to-Career Transition: Self-Scarring and Underemployment(2020) Dernberger, Brittany Noel; Kleykamp, Meredith; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A recent college graduate working as a coffee shop barista, earning minimum wage and carrying thousands of dollars in student loan debt, is a familiar trope in conversations about the value of a bachelor’s degree. In the college-for-all era, young people are encouraged to attain a bachelor’s degree to bolster their labor market opportunities (Rosenbaum 2001), yet 42 percent of recent college graduates, and 35 percent of all college graduates, are working in jobs that do not require a college degree (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2020). The American Dream posits that individual perseverance will lead to increased economic security. Young people invest in college as a pathway to a good job. Why does a degree not equally benefit all graduates, and how do graduates respond when their college investment does not pay off? I employ restricted-access Monitoring the Future panel data (1976 – 2015) and interviews with 60 recent college graduates to examine how college graduates transition from school-to-work, and how they respond when it does not go as planned. I contribute to studies of underemployment scarring by extending the context from workplace consequences to individual decision-making, unpacking how and why young people make choices related to their post-graduation employment outcomes. By examining how graduates engage as students and connecting that to post-college employment outcomes, I illustrate how graduates self-scar by making choices that diminish their ability to quickly translate their degree into a good job along three dimensions: 1) not engaging in outside-the-classroom activities during college, which are critical for career exposure and career-relevant skill-building; 2) downshifting job expectations in response to underemployment; and 3) making labor market choices that elongate underemployment. However, graduates’ decisions are not made in a vacuum, and preexisting inequalities – in economic resources, first generation student status, and social and cultural capital – are often perpetuated in the wake of underemployment. Graduates often blame themselves for their lack of labor market success. This project illuminates how inequality is replicated during the college-to-career transition through graduates’ self-scarring decisions and contributes to our understanding of who can achieve economic mobility through returns on a college education.Item Who Cares? Student-Faculty Interaction at a Research University(2015) Smith, Margaret Austin; Collins, Patricia H; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)High quality interaction with faculty is central to undergraduate student success (Kuh et al. 2010). A wealth of existing research uses students' ratings of quality of interaction with faculty to analyze undergraduates' engagement in educationally purposive activities. But how do students actually make meaning of the interactions that inform their ratings? What do undergraduates at a public research institution in the early 21st century United States count as high quality interaction with faculty? For Becker and colleagues (1968), a "GPA perspective" provided the lens through which all undergraduates made meaning of interaction with faculty. But do such generalizations adequately explain how students make meaning of quality of interaction with faculty now? The answer is: it's complicated. Specifically, I find that from students' perspectives, high quality interaction happens when faculty care. Caring, in the view of undergraduates participating in this study, means supporting students in embodying or coming to embody perceived institutional ideals. But students' perceptions of institutional ideals are not uniform. In an ethnographic study involving 35 voluntary undergraduate participants for three years in in-depth interviews and participant observation, as well as a content analysis of an instructor-reviewing web site, I analyze students' perceptions of institutional ideals, how they see themselves in relation to those ideals, and these understandings shape their approaches to with faculty. Specifically, I find two evaluative stories for what counts as care in interaction with faculty, with social class strongly shaping - but not determining - meanings made and interactions elicited. In the first, care entails "remaking the grading." In the second, care both produces and is produced by educationally purposive practices. I find that the institution, in spite of its stated ideals and stated commitment to student engagement, tends to reward the former understanding of care much more directly than the latter.