Paul Attewell
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 105469 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Paul Attewell |
| NOMBRES | Paul |
| APELLIDO | Attewell |
| FIRMA | ATTEWELL P |
| AFILIACIONES | City University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4578-2416 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 51 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 383 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1974 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Characteristics or Returns
Explanations for the persistent pay disparity between similarly qualified men and women vary between women's different and devalued work characteristics and specific processes that result in unequal wage returns to the same characteristics. This article investigates how the gender wage gap is affected by gender differences in detailed work activities among full-time, year-round, college-graduate workers in the US using decomposition analysis in t…
Closure and matching payoffs from college majors
This article examines the undergraduate major as a closure mechanism in occupations among college graduates, using the American Community Surveys. We measure the college major density of occupations, termed "major specialization", finding that greater major specialization of an occupation is associated with higher earnings, over and above previously identified closure devices (licensure, unionization, and vertical educational credentialing), and …
Bending the Curve
Occupational marginalization, underemployment, and earnings inequality among college graduates
College Promise Programs as Symbolic Politics
Since the Tennessee Promise's 2014 launch, 'free college' or 'Promise' programs have proliferated rapidly and converged on design features: a 'last-dollar' award and community college applicability. Researchers who study these programs' effects generally presume they are tuition-reducing endeavors. In contrast, we argue that many such programs are exercises in 'symbolic politics,' that is, they perform organizational altruism and meet survival im…
Black-White incentive inequality for college persistence
Despite similar educational aspirations, black students persist in higher education at much lower rates than white undergraduates. This paper advances a theoretical explanation for the racial gap in persistence by examining whether the differential attrition in college reflects contrasting incentives for educational persistence. To account for the highly unequal hurdles faced by black men and women in college and in the labor market, we propose a…
The STEM grading penalty
The low number of baccalaureates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is often viewed as problematic for the US's economic competitiveness, leading scholars to search for explanations for STEM retention. Our analyses of the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study indicate that the notion of a so‐called “leaky STEM pipeline” out of STEM majors overstates the problem because it neglects the substantial influx into…
Reconsidering the ‘meritocratic power of a college degree’
Previous research has shown that the intergenerational transmission of advantage disappears once individuals obtain a bachelor's degree. This is known as the equalization thesis: the 'meritocratic power' of a college degree. This paper revisits the question of origin-destination association among college graduates. We improve on earlier studies by using three large sample (40,000+) of the National Survey of College Graduates, consisting of birth …
The Relationship Between Work During College and Post College Earnings
Prior research suggests that undergraduates employed during term time are less likely to graduate. Using transcript data from a large multi-campus university in the United States, combined with student earnings data from state administrative records, the authors find that traditional-age students who worked for pay during college on average earned more after leaving college than similar students who did not work. This post-college earnings premiu…
The Value of an Incomplete Degree
Many undergraduates leave college without completing a degree or credential. Some researchers characterize this as a waste of the student's time because (they assert) college short of a degree does not yield any advantage in the labor market. Using data for an entire cohort of students graduating high school in Texas in one year, we compare the employment and earnings years later of those who do not go beyond high school with those who enter coll…
The Vertical Transfer Penalty among Bachelor’s Degree Graduates
Numerous studies have investigated the consequences of vertical transfer on students’ higher education outcomes in comparison to “native 4-year students”—those who went straight from high school into a bachelor’s program. However, the long-term labor market outcomes for vertical transfer students are understudied. Using nationally-representative data from the National Survey of College Graduates 2015, we estimate the relationship between starting…
Dynamics of Claims Making and Gender Wage Gaps in the United States and Norway
This paper compares claims making and gender wage gaps in the United States and Norway, and asks how public sector employment moderates the association between gender segregation and the gender gap in wages in the two countries. Using nationally representative data and hierarchical linear modeling, we analyze gender wage gaps within and between job types. The analyses show that job types heavily concentrated in the public sector, effectively insu…
Family Background and Earnings Inequality among College Graduates
Stratification researchers have reported that the relationship between family background and socio-economic outcomes drops to near zero for individuals who have a baccalaureate degree, leading one scholar to conclude that “This ... provides a new answer to the old question about overcoming disadvantaged origins. A college degree can do it.” We present contrary evidence from two nationally representative samples of college graduates: the Baccalaur…
Contrasting Perspectives on School Violence and Safety
School Mathematics as Gatekeeper
In the United States, students’ ability to perform well in school mathematics is important for gaining access to a selective college and affects entry into sought-after majors. We find that the gatekeeper function of mathematics is not a function of general academic prowess and operates separately from advantages attributable to family background. Moreover mathematics is especially important for educational attainment among youth from higher soci…
The earnings payoff from attending a selective college
Rethinking Education and Poverty
The Community College Route to the Bachelor’s Degree
It is well established that students who begin post-secondary education at a community college are less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than otherwise similar undergraduates who begin at a 4-year school, but there is less consensus over the mechanisms generating this disparity. We explore these using national longitudinal transcript data and propensity-score methods. Inferior academic preparation does not seem to be the main culprit: We find f…
Inequality in the Promised Land
The Bridge and the Troll Underneath
College graduation rates in the United States are low in both real and relative terms. This has left all stakeholders looking for novel solutions while perhaps ignoring extant but underused programs. This article examines the effect of “summer bridge” programs, which have students enroll in coursework prior to beginning their first full academic year, on associate’s and bachelor’s degree completion. We make use of the Beyond Postsecondary (BPS) t…
College Selectivity and Degree Completion
How much of a difference does it make whether a student of a given academic ability enters a more or a less selective four-year college? Some studies claim that attending a more academically selective college markedly improves one's graduation prospects. Others report the reverse: an advantage from attending an institution where one's own skills exceed most other students. Using multilevel models and propensity score matching methods to reduce se…
White Flight/Black Flight
Competing Explanations of Undergraduate Noncompletion
In this paper we analyze longitudinal data from a nationally representative panel of college entrants to test and compare several theoretical explanations of college degree attainment and noncompletion. So far, relatively little emphasis has been placed on determining the relative and combined predictive power of competing explanations or mechanisms of college noncompletion. We utilize a methodological tool—the sheaf coefficient—to combine multip…
Riddle Remains in Academically Adrift
Growing Gaps
As inequality grows rapidly both in post-industrial societies and in the high-growth economies of the developing world, its centrality and ubiquity among problems of interest to social scientists is becoming only more apparent. And among all of inequality's causes and manifestations, access to education is key to understanding and combating it, both for improving a person's individual life chances and for increasing countries' national wealth. Th…
What is Skill
The concept of skill plays an important role in sociological research, from studies of the labor process to debates over equal worth. This article provides a theoretical analysis of the ambiguities and difficulties involved in current sociological conceptions of skill, contrasting four distinct approaches to skill: positivist, ethnomethodological, Weberian, and Marxist. Some of the impasses in industrial sociology arguably stem from the fact that…
The Deskilling Controversy
The thesis that capitalism continues to degrade and deskill work in the twentieth century, creating an ever more unskilled proletariat, has been forcefully argued by Harry Braverman and his colleagues. In this article I present a series of theoretical, empirical, and methodological criticisms of the deskilling position, drawing upon a diverse literature, and upon original research. Particular attention is given to the application of the deskillin…
The Winner-Take-All High School
Across the United States, families seek schools with reputations for academic excellence for their children, assuming that such schools improve a talented child’s prospects for college admission. This article shows that students from “star” public high schools experience a disadvantage in entering elite colleges that stems from the attention played to class rank. In response, some high schools have developed “winner-take-all” characteristics, enh…
New Evidence on College Remediation
Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul AttewellPaul Attewell and David Lavin are professors of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Thurston Domina is a postdoctoral fellow at the office of Population Research at Princeton University. Tania Levey is an assistant professor of sociology at York College, CUNY.David LavinPaul Attewell and David Lavin are professors of sociology at the Graduate Center of the Ci…
Reconsidering the ‘meritocratic power of a college degree’
Previous research has shown that the intergenerational transmission of advantage disappears once individuals obtain a bachelor's degree. This is known as the equalization thesis: the 'meritocratic power' of a college degree. This paper revisits the question of origin-destination association among college graduates. We improve on earlier studies by using three large sample (40,000+) of the National Survey of College Graduates, consisting of birth …
Competing Explanations of Undergraduate Noncompletion
In this paper we analyze longitudinal data from a nationally representative panel of college entrants to test and compare several theoretical explanations of college degree attainment and noncompletion. So far, relatively little emphasis has been placed on determining the relative and combined predictive power of competing explanations or mechanisms of college noncompletion. We utilize a methodological tool—the sheaf coefficient—to combine multip…
Ethnomethodology since Garfinkel
Black Canadians and black Americans
Using census data, we compare the economic status of blacks and whites in two neighbouring countries - the USA and Canada - examining the effects of international migration of people of colour upon systems of racial hierarchy. At first impression, the racial income gap is markedly smaller in Canada than in the USA. However, this is largely due to the relative sizes of first-, second- and third-plus-generation immigrants in each country. Once this…
The earnings payoff from attending a selective college
The Impact of Family on Job Displacement and Recovery
Rates of involuntary job loss (from plant closures, downsizing, and so on) have been increasing in the United States during the past 15 years. Using several cross-sectional surveys from the Current Population Survey, and longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this article demonstrates that the likelihood of job displacement differs according to marital status, the presence or absence of young children, and single-parenthood, e…
What Do Computers Do
Few studies using representative methods have explored the effects of computing in a cross section of different kinds of organizations. This study presents results of detailed interviews in a representative sample of some 184 computerized private sector firms. Contrary to some skeptical analyses of computerization, managers of most of these organizations appeared to have shrewd instrumental rationales for their decisions to computerize. Moreover,…
Big Brother and the Sweatshop
Several authoritative sources have raised the possibility that computer counting and monitoring of work in automated workplaces will transform offices into electronic sweatshops. This paper examines this idea from the vantage point of industrial sociology and managerial theory. Five theoretical models are developed, each of which generates hypotheses about the contexts in which work monitoring becomes important. A brief history of clerical work i…
Computers and Young Children
Using time-diary data from a national sample of young school-age children, we examine the correlates of time spent at home on computing for cognitive and other measures of well-being. We observe modest benefits associated with home computing on three tests of cognitive skill, and on a measure of self-esteem. Most young children who spend time at home on computer-based activities spend no less time on activities such as reading, sports or outside …
The Value of an Incomplete Degree
Many undergraduates leave college without completing a degree or credential. Some researchers characterize this as a waste of the student's time because (they assert) college short of a degree does not yield any advantage in the labor market. Using data for an entire cohort of students graduating high school in Texas in one year, we compare the employment and earnings years later of those who do not go beyond high school with those who enter coll…
School Mathematics as Gatekeeper
In the United States, students’ ability to perform well in school mathematics is important for gaining access to a selective college and affects entry into sought-after majors. We find that the gatekeeper function of mathematics is not a function of general academic prowess and operates separately from advantages attributable to family background. Moreover mathematics is especially important for educational attainment among youth from higher soci…
Inequality in the Promised Land
The Clerk Deskilled
For some, the history of clerical work epitomizes the way in which technological change and the division of labor result in the deskilling and degradation of work. This paper argues that this perception of clerical deskilling is mistaken, the result of an inaccurate portrayal of traditional clerking, and of a theoretical tendency to (mis)read declines in the prestige and pay of an occupation as stemming from changes in skill. Focusing on Victoria…
The Vertical Transfer Penalty among Bachelor’s Degree Graduates
Numerous studies have investigated the consequences of vertical transfer on students’ higher education outcomes in comparison to “native 4-year students”—those who went straight from high school into a bachelor’s program. However, the long-term labor market outcomes for vertical transfer students are understudied. Using nationally-representative data from the National Survey of College Graduates 2015, we estimate the relationship between starting…
The black middle class
Government Policy and Local Practice
Pressman and Wildavsky's (1973) popular view that government policy becomes ineffectual in the face of local exigencies is questioned. In contrast, using a case study of government policy on methadone treatment for heroin addiction, we show that federal decision making has profound impact even at microsociological levels of clinic life. A model drawn from organizations theory is developed to explain the efficacy of federal action. Policy is seen …
College Selectivity and Degree Completion
How much of a difference does it make whether a student of a given academic ability enters a more or a less selective four-year college? Some studies claim that attending a more academically selective college markedly improves one's graduation prospects. Others report the reverse: an advantage from attending an institution where one's own skills exceed most other students. Using multilevel models and propensity score matching methods to reduce se…
Comparing Stratification Theories
The Bridge and the Troll Underneath
College graduation rates in the United States are low in both real and relative terms. This has left all stakeholders looking for novel solutions while perhaps ignoring extant but underused programs. This article examines the effect of “summer bridge” programs, which have students enroll in coursework prior to beginning their first full academic year, on associate’s and bachelor’s degree completion. We make use of the Beyond Postsecondary (BPS) t…
Closure and matching payoffs from college majors
This article examines the undergraduate major as a closure mechanism in occupations among college graduates, using the American Community Surveys. We measure the college major density of occupations, termed "major specialization", finding that greater major specialization of an occupation is associated with higher earnings, over and above previously identified closure devices (licensure, unionization, and vertical educational credentialing), and …
College Promise Programs as Symbolic Politics
Since the Tennessee Promise's 2014 launch, 'free college' or 'Promise' programs have proliferated rapidly and converged on design features: a 'last-dollar' award and community college applicability. Researchers who study these programs' effects generally presume they are tuition-reducing endeavors. In contrast, we argue that many such programs are exercises in 'symbolic politics,' that is, they perform organizational altruism and meet survival im…
Ethnomethodology since Garfinkel
Connections
The Heroin Epidemics
Government Policy and Local Practice
Pressman and Wildavsky's (1973) popular view that government policy becomes ineffectual in the face of local exigencies is questioned. In contrast, using a case study of government policy on methadone treatment for heroin addiction, we show that federal decision making has profound impact even at microsociological levels of clinic life. A model drawn from organizations theory is developed to explain the efficacy of federal action. Policy is seen …
Comparing Stratification Theories
The New Class?B. Bruce-Biggs
Radical Political Economy since the Sixties
Biographical Dictionary of Neo-Marxism
This Dictionary comprehensively surveys major twentieth-century neo-Marxian (non-orthodox) thinkers and activists throughout the world. This thorough research aid contains over 200 biographical essays which include pertinent biographical details; a summary of the entrant's significant and unique contributions to neo-Marxian theory and practice; and a bibliography of relevant primary and secondary works. The essays are prepared by a wide range of …
Imperialism within Complex Organizations
This paper is concerned with a recent empirical trend observed in large, computerized formal organizations, and with a theoretical problem or lacuna in organizational sociology which is highlighted by this empirical development. With the widespread introduction of computers into complex organizations, there has been a growth and elaboration of certain kinds of organizational statistics. Specifically, in large bureaucracies or enterprises which ha…
Big Brother and the Sweatshop
Several authoritative sources have raised the possibility that computer counting and monitoring of work in automated workplaces will transform offices into electronic sweatshops. This paper examines this idea from the vantage point of industrial sociology and managerial theory. Five theoretical models are developed, each of which generates hypotheses about the contexts in which work monitoring becomes important. A brief history of clerical work i…
The Deskilling Controversy
The thesis that capitalism continues to degrade and deskill work in the twentieth century, creating an ever more unskilled proletariat, has been forcefully argued by Harry Braverman and his colleagues. In this article I present a series of theoretical, empirical, and methodological criticisms of the deskilling position, drawing upon a diverse literature, and upon original research. Particular attention is given to the application of the deskillin…
The Attack on Computer Literacy
This paper provides a commentary on Robins and Webster's article "Computer Literacy: The Employment Myths" within the broader context of critiques of computer literacy. The author argues that the various critics of computer literacy are participants in wider disputes over pedagogical method, the purposes of education, and the role of education in a class society. In some ways computer literacy provides a pretext for these more general controversi…
The Clerk Deskilled
For some, the history of clerical work epitomizes the way in which technological change and the division of labor result in the deskilling and degradation of work. This paper argues that this perception of clerical deskilling is mistaken, the result of an inaccurate portrayal of traditional clerking, and of a theoretical tendency to (mis)read declines in the prestige and pay of an occupation as stemming from changes in skill. Focusing on Victoria…
The Process of Technological Change
What Do Computers Do
Few studies using representative methods have explored the effects of computing in a cross section of different kinds of organizations. This study presents results of detailed interviews in a representative sample of some 184 computerized private sector firms. Contrary to some skeptical analyses of computerization, managers of most of these organizations appeared to have shrewd instrumental rationales for their decisions to computerize. Moreover,…
What is Skill
The concept of skill plays an important role in sociological research, from studies of the labor process to debates over equal worth. This article provides a theoretical analysis of the ambiguities and difficulties involved in current sociological conceptions of skill, contrasting four distinct approaches to skill: positivist, ethnomethodological, Weberian, and Marxist. Some of the impasses in industrial sociology arguably stem from the fact that…
The Impact of Family on Job Displacement and Recovery
Rates of involuntary job loss (from plant closures, downsizing, and so on) have been increasing in the United States during the past 15 years. Using several cross-sectional surveys from the Current Population Survey, and longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this article demonstrates that the likelihood of job displacement differs according to marital status, the presence or absence of young children, and single-parenthood, e…
The Winner-Take-All High School
Across the United States, families seek schools with reputations for academic excellence for their children, assuming that such schools improve a talented child’s prospects for college admission. This article shows that students from “star” public high schools experience a disadvantage in entering elite colleges that stems from the attention played to class rank. In response, some high schools have developed “winner-take-all” characteristics, enh…
Computers and Young Children
Using time-diary data from a national sample of young school-age children, we examine the correlates of time spent at home on computing for cognitive and other measures of well-being. We observe modest benefits associated with home computing on three tests of cognitive skill, and on a measure of self-esteem. Most young children who spend time at home on computer-based activities spend no less time on activities such as reading, sports or outside …
The black middle class
Middle-Class Woes
New Evidence on College Remediation
Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul AttewellPaul Attewell and David Lavin are professors of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Thurston Domina is a postdoctoral fellow at the office of Population Research at Princeton University. Tania Levey is an assistant professor of sociology at York College, CUNY.David LavinPaul Attewell and David Lavin are professors of sociology at the Graduate Center of the Ci…
Raising the Bar
Using national transcript data, the authors examine inequality in access to an advanced curriculum in high school and assess the consequences of curricular intensity on test scores and college entry. Inequalities in curricular intensity are primarily explained by student socioeconomic status effects that operate within schools rather than between schools. They find significant positive effects of taking a more intense curriculum on 12th-grade tes…
When Teenagers Leave Home
Growing Gaps
As inequality grows rapidly both in post-industrial societies and in the high-growth economies of the developing world, its centrality and ubiquity among problems of interest to social scientists is becoming only more apparent. And among all of inequality's causes and manifestations, access to education is key to understanding and combating it, both for improving a person's individual life chances and for increasing countries' national wealth. Th…
Sociology (37 obras) · Psychology (29 obras) · Economics (26 obras) · Political science (25 obras) · Higher Education Research Studies (19 obras) · Demographic economics (17 obras) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (13 obras) · Computer Science (11 obras) · Economic growth (10 obras) · Mathematics (10 obras)