Discrimination in the Credential Society: An Audit Study of Race and College Selectivity in the Labor Market

By Michael Gaddis. 2015

354 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Racial inequality in economic outcomes, particularly among the college educated, persists throughout US society. Scholars debate whether this inequality stems from racial differences in human capital (e.g., college selectivity, GPA, college major) or employer discrimination against black job candidates. However, limited measures of human capital and the inherent difficulties in measuring discrimination using observational data make determining the cause of racial differences in labor-market outcomes a difficult endeavor. In this research, I examine employment opportunities for white and black graduates of elite top-ranked universities versus high-ranked but less selective institutions. Using an audit design, I create matched candidate pairs and apply for 1,008 jobs on a national job-search website. I also exploit existing birth-record data in selecting names to control for differences across social class within racialized names. The results show that although a credential from an elite university results in more employer responses for all candidates, black candidates from elite universities only do as well as white candidates from less selective universities. Moreover, race results in a double penalty: When employers respond to black candidates, it is for jobs with lower starting salaries and lower prestige than those of white peers. These racial differences suggest that a bachelor’s degree, even one from an elite institution, cannot fully counteract the importance of race in the labor market. Thus, both discrimination and differences in human capital contribute to racial economic inequality.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6bf9218b3547302981e8a4153964c2cec17d7aed

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Citations in the corpus

Whitened Résumés (2016, methodology): “She received her Ph.D. in organizational behavior from the University of Maryland. at STANFORD UNIV MEDICAL CENTER on April 4, 2016asq.sagepub.comDownloaded from András Tilcsik is an assistant professor of strategic management and a Lee-Chin Institute Fellow at the Rotman School of Management, Univ”
Name Norms: A Guide to Casting Your Next Experiment (2018, background): “For example, names can signal socioeconomic status (Gaddis, 2015; Joubert, 1994); indeed, it is likely that social class inferences played a significant role in the competence ratings made by our participants.”
How Black Are Lakisha and Jamal? Racial Perceptions from Names Used in Correspondence Audit Studies (2017, neutral): “Whereas some find that individuals’ racial perceptions from names are not biased by these SES-based practices (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004), other research suggests this may not be true in all instances (Figlio 2005; Gaddis 2015; Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991).”
Field experiments across the social sciences (2017, background): “Again, recent studies are using the Internet to identify openings and apply for them (Blommaert et al. 2014, Gaddis 2015, Pedulla 2016).”
The Mark of a Woman’s Record: Gender and Academic Performance in Hiring (2018, methodology): “…patterns.13 The overall callback rate was 12.9 percent—slightly higher than audit studies of professional workers (Correll et al. 2007; Rivera and Tilcsik 2016), but similar to what others have found in audit studies of recent college graduates in the entry-level labor market (Gaddis 2015).”
Criminal records and college admissions: A modified experimental audit (2018, background): “A criminal record can be interpreted as a “negative credential” that can be used to restrict opportunities in much the same way that a college degree can be interpreted as a “positive credential” to expand opportunities (Gaddis, 2015; Pager, 2003).”
The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market: An Experimental Study (2014, neutral): “Whereas public institutions receive subsidies from state and local governments, for-profit colleges are more heavily reliant on federal student aid.”