by Chelsea Barabas and J. Phillip Smith
Higher education serves as a critical vehicle for upward mobility and equal opportunity in the U.S. labor market. First, it provides opportunities for workers to develop critical skills and competencies, and more generally pursue goals for self-improvement throughout their lives. Second, higher education provides a process for obtaining credentials, which play a critical role in differentiating workers in the labor market by providing signals that represent their skills, competencies, and accomplishments. In an ideal world, credentials would be tightly coupled with the skills and competencies that a student obtains from an educational experience. In reality, traditional academic credentials function more like roughly hewn proxies for ability, whose signaling power must be supplemented by other information. This tends to entrench social stratification rather than transform it. This shortcoming of traditional credentials is evidenced by the disparities in employment along race and class lines that continue to persist even after the massive expansion in higher education opportunities in the United States in the decades after World War II.
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