Work in progress

Selected ongoing projects

The Changing Socioeconomic Profile of College Campuses in American Academia, 2001–2016

It is well established that students from different socioeconomic backgrounds attend colleges that differ in their location, degree offerings, selectivity, and focus. This paper examines how these disparities, in the aggregate, shape distinct socioeconomic profiles on college campuses. Using information on all accredited 4-year colleges in American higher education from 2001 to 2016, I track changes in the distribution of college campuses' socioeconomic profiles and evaluate how macro-level changes may contribute to these patterns. I find that despite greater equality in access to colleges, disparities in the socioeconomic profile of colleges increased over time. Moreover, over time, dimensions of socioeconomic context became more crystallized, so that colleges characterized by an advantage (or disadvantage) in one dimension were more likely to have an advantage (or disadvantage) in other dimensions in later years. Decomposition analysis suggests three main factors are associated with these changes: college tuition, the racial composition of colleges, and the expansion of for-profit colleges. Other commonly cited factors — such as admission policies, size, revenues, or local competition — did not significantly influence the distribution of colleges' socioeconomic profiles. These results highlight the significance of college pricing and funding policies in shaping patterns of socioeconomic segregation in higher education.

Social Change in Occupational Sex Segregation in the United States

with Kim Weeden (Cornell University)

Characterization of trends in gender inequality as a “stalled revolution” are ubiquitous in the gender inequality literature. The empirical underpinnings this characterization rest on analyses that privilege period-based chance over cohort change or age-based change (life cycle change). We offer a new approach to describing social change in occupational sex segregation at the population level, as indicated by the index of dissimilarity, and at the group level, as indicated by sex-specific trajectories in the probability of working in a male-dominated occupation. Using Current Population Survey data from 1971 to 2023, we show that some cohorts of women experienced a slower integrative shift than others, but very few cohorts made no integrative progress, and the most recent cohorts seem to be integrating more rapidly than their immediate predecessors. Life cycle change is steadily integrative for women and inverted-U-shaped for men. These patterns vary somewhat by parental status and education: for example, successive cohorts of non-college-educated men, but not college-educated men, decrease their probability of working in a male-dominated occupation. These descriptive results suggest important caveats to the “stalled revolution” story and can thereby help fine-tune our theories of social change.

Matching Skills to Work: Gendered Patterns of Skill Utilization and Earnings Across College-Supply Contexts

with Limor Gabay-Egozi(Bar Ilan University)

In the “college-for-all” era, expanded higher education participation has reshaped the relationship between education, skills, and pay. Prior work shows that in high college-supply contexts, women’s credentials increasingly outpace their measured cognitive skills – especially numeracy – and that the wage payoff to credentials declines relative to the payoff to skills (Gelbgiser & Gabay-Egozi, 2025). Building on these insights, this project further advances our understanding of how college supply contexts are linked with gendered patterns of earning by examining variation in the match between individuals’ cognitive endowments and their on-the-job skill utilization, how it varies by gender, and college-supply contexts. We then examine whether the earnings returns to aligned versus misaligned skill profiles differ by gender across college-supply contexts.

Organizational Identity and Student Diversity in US Colleges and Universities

with Erez A. Marantz (Tel Aviv University)

Despite various policy efforts, college enrollment patterns remain highly stratified by race and ethnicity, even among students with similar academic profiles. In this paper, we draw insights from the organizational literature to examine the role of organizational identity — colleges' self-understandings of their central, distinctive, and enduring characteristics and mission — in shaping the diversity of their students. We assess the influence of organizational identity on diversity with original data containing the mission statements of all accredited colleges and universities in 2008 and 2018, along with comprehensive data on the organizational characteristics of all colleges obtained from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Our unique measures of organizational identity are derived from machine-learning models that enable us to identify reoccurring themes in mission statements and to characterize the identity of colleges in relation to other colleges in their environments. We then use fractional regression models to test how the distinctiveness of colleges' identity — and the extent to which they draw on multiple identity archetypes — is related to the share of underrepresented minorities on campus. We find that colleges' organizational identities are highly consequential for student diversity, even after accounting for key structural and academic characteristics (e.g., selectivity, location, revenues, degree offerings, sector). Our results underscore the importance of organizational identity dynamics in shaping stratification in higher education, providing promising new avenues for future policies aimed at increasing diversity in US colleges.