American Sociological Review 2020
Horowitz, Jonathan. 2018. “Relative Education and the Advantage of a College Degree.” American Sociological Review 83(4):771–801.
Abstract
While working on a follow-up project, I discovered errors involving data merges in my August 2018 ASR article “Relative Education and the Advantage of a College Degree.” I am the first to discover these errors, and I would like to take the opportunity to correct the record. The original study investigated the value of a bachelor’s degree in obtaining a skilled job, and how the value of a bachelor’s degree changes as higher education expands. The main argument was that the value of a college degree is relative to the level of education of peers. People in birth cohorts where college education is relatively rare are viewed by employers as elite, in terms of their skill level or cultural aptitude. In contrast, in cohorts that have more bachelor-degree holders, the bachelor’s degree is more of a minimum qualification than a mark of distinction. Thus, the relative education hypothesis states that workers with bachelor’s degrees should be more likely to obtain skilled jobs when college degrees are relatively rare, compared to when college education is relatively plentiful. The original study used CPS data from 1971 to 2010 and age-period-cohort models to determine whether individuals with bachelor’s degrees obtain less-skilled jobs as higher education expands. These analyses demonstrated that workers in cohorts with a higher proportion of bachelor’s degrees enter jobs requiring less verbal, quantitative, and analytic skills. Workers with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly being displaced into less-skilled jobs as bachelor’s degrees become more common. Moreover, because workers without bachelor’s degrees are increasingly entering higher skill occupations, the advantage of a bachelor’s degree over no college experience is declining even more than the absolute declines in skill utilization. The decline was consistently stronger for men than for women in the original study. Based on an analysis of the corrected data, the main conclusions from the original publication are robust: workers with bachelor’s degrees enter less-skilled jobs as cohort-level education rises, and the gap between workers with four-year degrees and those without any college experience has shrunk at an even faster rate as workers without any college increase their cognitive skill utilization. The findings still support the relative education hypothesis. Effect sizes for men are weaker in the corrected results, however, and are no longer consistently larger than women’s.
- DOI
- 10.1177/0003122419897572
- Sources
- semanticscholar openalex