Do organizational actors in colleges and universities play a role in orchestrating and facilitating student segregation processes by creating new credentials, abandoning others, and offering a specific menu of credentials tailored to their student constituencies? How do organizational structures and student constituencies interact dynamically over time in the marketplace of credentials? Can we begin to visualize credentials as constituting a larger symbolic system that is socially organized and capable of adapting to ongoing social change? In answering these questions, this dissertation tests the provocative thesis - derived from key findings in economic sociology and the sociology of culture - that institutional categories such as credentials constitute symbolic boundaries that are grounded in societal cleavages, and organized into meaningful systems through the collusion of individual choice and organizational fiat. Using annual survey data on student characteristics and degree choices (Cooperative Institutional Research Program) as well as organizational characteristics and degrees conferred (National Center for Educational Statistics), I employ a comparative strategy, analyzing two carefully selected fields of higher education (business and engineering) since 1970 - a period when the constituencies of these fields change dramatically, especially in terms of gender. I employ social network methods to both (1) model credentials as institutional categories competing for position within a dynamic socio-demographic space of student consumers, and (2) relate the position of business and engineering credentials within this consumer space to processes of organizational differentiation and student segregation within the field of U.S. colleges and universities. I employ more standard regression techniques to test key hypotheses concerning how these two levels interact over time. Although it is well understood that the unequal distribution of credentials plays a central role in reproducing racial, class and gender inequalities, there has yet to be a sociology of credentials that connects such societal-level outcomes explicitly to the dynamics of credential markets themselves. Broader impacts of this project therefore include the following: Theoretically, this work helps to further bridge a gap between micro and macro level approaches to student segregation processes, while further linking two important areas of sociological research - the study of organizational dynamics and the culturally focused analyses of social inequality. Substantively, a more organizationally grounded understanding of segregation processes will help inform those concerned for scholarly or policy reasons with addressing the persistent and underlying causes of inequality within higher education as well as the workplace. Methodologically, this research develops a unique approach for modeling and testing field-level hypotheses that is tailored for this project, but will be of value to other researchers concerned with organizational dynamics.
