Educational Stratification in Sociology: Examining Graduate and Professional Education

The educational system plays a crucial role in status competition and social stratification. While sociologists have extensively studied stratification in elementary, secondary, and undergraduate education, the role of graduate and professional education has often been overlooked. This article aims to address this gap by examining how stratification theories can be applied to graduate and professional education, focusing on key junctures in the student pathway, from application to labor market outcomes.

The Growing Importance of Graduate Education

Several factors highlight the need to scrutinize graduate and professional education. The number of individuals holding graduate credentials has increased, and the economic resources available to those with these credentials have become increasingly disparate compared to those without them. Moreover, graduate and professional credentials are substantially more heritable than other levels of education, challenging the notion of equal opportunity.

Between 2000 and 2013, total graduate and professional degree enrollment in the US increased by approximately 35%, from 2.2 to 2.9 million students. Furthermore, the economic returns to graduate credentials constitute a nontrivial-and increasing-portion of the returns to higher education more generally. Since the 1990s, economic returns to college have increased modestly compared with the returns to graduate and professional degrees.

Stratification Theories and Graduate Education

Several theories can be extended to understand opportunity and attainment at the graduate level.

Human Capital Theory

Human capital theory posits that individuals invest in skills to enhance their productivity. Education, particularly specialized training in graduate and professional schools, contributes to field-specific human capital. To undertake the skill investment required for some forms of labor, the expected returns must outweigh the costs.

Rational Action Theories: MMI, EMI, and RRA

Sociological rational action theories, including maximally maintained inequality (MMI), effectively maintained inequality (EMI), and relative risk aversion (RRA), treat education as primarily a positional good. These theories originated in sociological studies that sought to account for the apparent decline in effects of parental education across educational transitions, as well as persistent stratification in the presence of educational expansion. MMI suggests that students make educational decisions based on expected costs and benefits, with those from more advantaged origins experiencing fewer barriers to educational success. EMI posits that advantaged children seek qualitative advantages in education, even when basic educational transitions are universally attained. Both MMI and EMI describe competition for educational advantages in which exclusion is de facto based on economic resources, skills, risk aversion, and changes in origin-specific marginal distributions of educational attainment.

Occupational Closure

Postgraduate credentials can be seen as a means by which elites legitimize exclusion, reduce the supply of labor in their fields, and drive up their compensation. Occupational closure via licensure or educational credentialing serves a manifest function of controlling professional quality, but it also reduces the supply of workers in those fields and thereby ensures that they will receive higher status and salaries. Kleiner & Krueger (2013) estimated that approximately one in three workers is employed in an occupation covered by a licensure requirement, with greater shares of those holding graduate and professional degrees in such occupations (44%) than lower education levels.

Cultural Explanations

Bourdieu argued that education systems select and promote students according to implicit and explicit forms of social and cultural capital that favor students who already hold considerable social privilege. Schools graduate these students with academic classifications (i.e., degrees, professional licenses) that are replete with elite social and cultural capital and thus carry value in the labor market.

Stratification at Key Junctures in Graduate Education

Stratification patterns persist at various stages of graduate education, including:

Application and Admission

Enrollment

Degree Attainment

Labor Market Outcomes

Persistent stratification, including pronounced educational inheritance and disparities in participation and degree attainment by race/ethnicity and gender are visible at each of these stages.

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Socioeconomic Stratification

Social origins continue to stratify destinations among the one in three college graduates who earn a postbaccalaureate credential. In fact, social origins continue to stratify destinations among the one in three college graduates who earn a postbaccalaureate credential. For both doctoral and professional degrees, but not master’s degrees, educational inheritance is striking. People whose parents have subbaccalaureate levels of education are underrepresented among those with doctoral and professional degrees, and those from homes in which the more educated parent had a doctorate or professional degree are increasingly overrepresented. The most recent estimates indicate that children of like-educated parents are three or more times as likely to attain that credential as they would be if parental education and degree attainment were independent.

Racial and Ethnic Stratification

Trends in graduate and professional degree attainment differ by parental education, race/ethnicity, gender, and national origin.

Gender Stratification

Attainment trends differ by gender as well. For example, women increased their shares of degrees awarded at each level of graduate education from 1992 to 2014. By 2014, the percentage of women who earned master’s degrees exceeded that of men (at just over 9%), and women approached men’s rates of attainment at the professional and doctoral levels. Gender differences in the median age at most recent graduate degree have also declined. The median age for terminal degrees for women declined from 35 in the 1970s to 27 in the 1990s, whereas for men over the same period the median age at final degree stayed between 28 and 30. This convergence suggests that differences in labor force continuity between men and women who ultimately pursue advanced degrees have dropped, a trend with important implications for total economic returns to education.

Global Perspectives on Educational Stratification

Globalization has emphasized the effects that educational attainment has on social stratification. Service-based organizations work to assist developing nations and regions in increasing educational levels among their populations, yet they often forget that research findings based on developed nations may not easily translate into success for developing nations. It is true that state and global forces impact educational opportunities and family background influences both educational attainment and social mobility. However, these impacts and influences are often very different based on the wealth and governmental structure of the country.

Governmental & Economic Structure Impacts Educational Opportunities

The United States American communities are structured by values and laws which encourage children to go to school and stay in school. For decades America has enjoyed a strong economy with high degrees of educational opportunity and occupational attainment and has been grounded in the notion of Equal Educational Opportunity. Based on the privileges of life, liberty, and property secured for all people in the United States and the precedent for equal access set forth by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), several federal acts have been signed into law to guarantee basic educational rights to all students. This intricate web of subordinate laws has been developed and enforced in order to support American educational values.

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Developing Countries In America, the literacy rate stands at 99% for both males and females (CIA, 2008). Developing countries do not enjoy similar literacy rates. The lowest literacy rates are concentrated in three regions: South and West Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arab states (CIA, 2008) despite the attention and assistance provided to them via foreign governments, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Bank, Unite for Children (UNICEF), and American Peace Corps these countries have not experienced a magnitude of success as quickly as hoped (UNESCO, 2008). When a developing country implements laws to support compulsory education, it often lacks the resources and governmental support necessary to provide children access to a quality education (Buchmann & Hannum, 2001).

Family Structure American nuclear families typically consist of one to two parents and some children. Early sociological and educational research suggests education can work as a sorting mechanism; helping to sort people into various levels of occupations and social positions (although most people end up in the same stratification as their parents) (Blasko' & Robert, 2007; Nesbit, 2006). As the research became more sophisticated, it was noted that family structure (and the families' concomitant socioeconomic status, available resources, and power to influence) impacts each students' educational opportunities and stratification mobility potential.

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