OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 14th January 2022, 2:30 pm / 4 pm
Online conference via Zoom

 Education and social mobility: Rethinking old work in light of new results

Michael Hout

Professor of Sociology, University of New York

Education mediates much of the association between class origins and destinations — more so for people from lower classes than upper classes. Florencia Torche famously call the pattern “the great equalizer.” It is a special case of heterogenous returns to education.

I will summarize recently published results on negative selection (Cheng et al. 2021), forthcoming results on college graduation (Voss, Hout, and George 2022), and unpublished results on heterogeneity by occupation (Hout and Martin-Caughey 2022) and discuss their implications for how we understand other findings about heterogeneity. I conclude that university admissions are too uniform in their criteria for admission and limit mobility relative to their potential due to their lack of variation.

PAPERS

• 2021, Siwei Cheng, Jennie E. Brand, Xiang Zhou, Yu Xie and Michael Hout, “Heterogenous returns to college over the life course”, Science Advances, 7 (51): abg7641.
• 2022 (Forthcoming), Kim Voss, Michael Hout and Kristen George, "Persistent inequalities in college completion, 1980–2010”,  Social Problems, n° 69.
• 2022, Michael Hout and Ananda Martin-Caughey, “Returns to education by occupation” [To be presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, April 2022].

Registration is mandatory (the link for the videoconference will be sent one day before)

To find out more: Website mikehout.com or Homepage at NYU