College Education Found to Improve Job Opportunities

Because more people have the opportunity to go to college, the level of inequality in job opportunities for men and women in the United States has plummeted since 1972, a sociologist reports.

The level of job-opportunity inequality has dropped 30% since 1972, inversely proportionate to the increase in people earning college degrees, Michael Hout of UC Berkeley reported in the May issue of the American Journal of Sociology.

Because more people are able to overcome socioeconomic disadvantages and receive college degrees now, Hout said, more people can enter the job market and ascend the corporate ladder based more on ability and talent than on sex.

The study did not specifically address wages, which continue to vary among men and women holding similar positions, a phenomenon known as the “gender gap.”

Questions Raised

Hout, an associate professor of sociology, said that while his study focused on mobility--the relationship between socioeconomic origins and current employment status--he found it also raised greater questions about the public funding of higher education.

The Reagan Administration’s goal of shifting education costs to the individual overlooks the many important ways society benefits from making higher education available to all of its citizens, the report says.

The new study is also the first published account of trends in women’s occupational mobility, Hout said, and he found that they have benefited equally with men. Further, partly because larger numbers of women have attended college in recent decades, their numbers in the labor force have grown more rapidly than men.

Analyzing interviews with workers conducted between 1972 and 1985, Hout concluded that socioeconomic status has become less important for the occupational mobility of men and women.

“The association between men’s and women’s socioeconomic origins and destinations decreased by one-third between 1972-1975 and 1982-1985,” Hout said. “This trend is related to the rising proportion of workers who have college degrees. The more college graduates in the work force, the weaker the association between origin status and destination status.”

Stall in Mail Room

Hout noted that the relationship between origin status and destination status--some careers stall in the mail room while others zoom straight up to the executive suite--remained quite strong among workers without college degrees.

“Education is the key factor in occupational mobility,” Hout said. “Education is such an important variable that (it) is highly unlikely that a change as significant as the 30% reduction in inequality of opportunity . . . could come about without a contribution from the changes in the systems in educational stratification.”

As for the broader public policy implications of the research, Hout said, “the success of human capital theory as an account of why people go to college has, on occasion, been used to prescribe who should pay for college.”

Money Burden Shifted

Hout pointed to views expressed in the Reagan Administration’s 1988 federal budget proposal: “Students are the primary beneficiaries of their invesdment in higher education. It is, therefore, reasonable to expect them--not the taxpayers--to shoulder most of the costs of that investment.”

Common Good

That view, Hout maintains, runs counter to the notion that equal educational opportunity benefits the common good of a society.

“College education is an investment decision made by individuals for the benefit of individuals,” he said. “But as long as ‘equality of opportunity’ is a value in American society, then increasing the proportion of workers with college degrees benefits society by making occupational opportunity independent of social origins.”