A Degree of Choice: The Role of Occupations in Educational Decision-Making

• In Event: Beyond Lortie: New sociological perspectives on professions and their application to teaching

Abstract

Purpose. This paper examines how graduate students in both business and teaching make sense of their educational choices in the context of broader professional values and growing economic precarity. We situate this study within contemporary discussions of how professions operate in an open system (Abbott, 2016). Specifically, we ask: (1) How do workers draw on career values and expectations in order to choose among many master’s programs in a given field?, and (2) To what extent does the relationship between career values expectations and program choice vary across professional fields with different levels of prestige?

Framework. To address these questions, we draw on three bodies of literature: (1) education as a set of diverse pathways rather than a linear pipeline (Kizilcec et al., 2023); (2) school-to-work linkages (Bol et al., 2019; DiPrete et al., 2017); and (3) the sociology of the professions (Abbott, 2016). Together, these perspectives raise questions about the role of licensure, employer expectations, and occupational norms in shaping graduate students’ choices.

Methods & Data. We study how students’ educational choices are aligned with occupational values and socialization across graduate programs varying in institutional status and professional status (Figure 1). The data include semi-structured interviews with graduate students in business (n=25) and teaching (n=38) at graduate institutions across the US. Our analysis included four stages: (1) developing and applying an a priori codebook, (2) identifying emergent codes, (3) finalizing the full codebook and recoding, and (4) using matrices to analyze patterns across programs and occupations (Miles et al., 2018).

Results. Across both business and teaching, we find that students’ work values and orientations guide them toward distinct tiers of educational prestige. We find that in the de-professionalized context of teaching, the structural constraints of the profession—e.g., flat career ladders and low pay—dampen the perceived payoff of more high-status programs. While students in higher-status business programs envision their degree may open doors to an array of restricted, elite fields, students in higher-status teaching programs report fewer opportunities to progress in their careers. Instead, students’ choices to enroll in higher-status teaching programs are not driven by status-seeking as much as they are by perceived values-alignment and technical factors like cost and location. Respondents in lower-status business and teaching programs sought a more immediate professional outcome (e.g., economic returns), with less information guiding their decisions.

Significance. This study contributes to scholarship on graduate education and the sociology of professions by highlighting how occupational structure and status shape students’ motivations for pursuing advanced degrees. Our findings underscore how the de-professionalized and low-status nature of teaching limits the perceived value of credentials among aspiring teachers. Whereas business students’ pursuit of elite programs is often driven by aspirations for symbolic capital, teachers are more likely to pursue even higher-status graduate degrees for technical capital—e.g., skills, licensure, or job eligibility. Together our findings point to the limitations of licensure as a lever for professionalization; without improving the material conditions of a profession, licensure may be an insufficient mechanism for social closure.

Authors

• Maya Kaul, University of Pennsylvania

• Ellen Bryer, Brown University