Credentials, Signals, and Screens: Explaining the Relationship between Schooling and Job Assignment

The empirical relationship between educational attainment and credentials with socioeconomic attainment is well established, but why this relationship arises remains in doubt. The author of this article discusses seven types of middle-range theories meant to explain the relationship: human capital,...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Review of educational research 2003-12, Vol.73 (4), p.441-469
Main Author: Bills, David B.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic degrees
Compulsory Education
Credentialism
Credentials
Cultural Capital
Education
Education Work Relationship
Educational Attainment
Educational sciences
Educational Sociology
Educational Status Comparison
Employers
Employment
Employment Level
Employment Potential
Higher education
Hiring
Human Capital
Job Applicants
Job evaluation
Job opportunity, qualification, labour market
Job Performance
Keywords
Labor Economics
Labor Market
Labor markets
Life-long education and employment
Occupational Information
Occupations
Personnel Selection
Productivity
Professional certification
Socioeconomic factors
Sociology
State Regulation
Success
Wages
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Summary:The empirical relationship between educational attainment and credentials with socioeconomic attainment is well established, but why this relationship arises remains in doubt. The author of this article discusses seven types of middle-range theories meant to explain the relationship: human capital, screening (including filtering), signaling, control, cultural capital, institutional, and credentialist theories. In each, the central causal mechanism concerns how employers and job seekers acquire and use labor market information. The author argues that occupational status attainment and wage determination models are not adequate to explain the mechanisms underlying the process whereby the highly schooled become the highly placed in job hierarchies. He indicates the implications of transformations of the American labor market for further assessment of the relationship between educational credentials and job assignment.
ISSN:0034-6543
1935-1046
DOI:10.3102/00346543073004441