Universities have become central crossing points in modern society. They coproduce the narratives of our time, ranging from politics over neurogenetics to climate change. Universities educate students for diverse roles in society: nurses, musicians, lawyers, physicists, managers, neuroscientists, and philosophers have all been credentialized by higher education systems. In recent decades, there has been a consistent increase in the number of participants in higher education. The move from elite to mass education, as described by Martin Trow (1970), has led to the emergence of an expansive, self-enforcing dynamic, which cannot be contained by governments and educational administrations (Lutz 1983, p. 238f; Meyer et al. 2007; Palfreyman and Tapper 2009). In fact, only authoritarian regimes so far have been able to temporarily reverse this trend (Baker et al. 2007).
Mass education implies that higher education has become crucial to securing access to labor markets, especially to positions with higher social status (Meyer 1977; Collins 1979; Bourdieu 1998). Over the decades, scholars have confirmed that educational credentials are often door openers, which legitimate exclusive access to high-status professions and lead to occupational attainment (cf. Collins 1987; Abbott 1981, 2005). With the expansion of higher education, a growing differentiation, professionalization, and stratification within higher education systems can be perceived (Teichler 2008; Vaira 2009; Neave 2006). Surprisingly, there has been less attention paid to how exactly the organization and (vertical) structure of higher education impacts on social structures and occupational attainment.1 Beyond acknowledging the role of higher education in constructing elites, there has been a serious lack of research on the link between higher education and high-status positions. Zald and Lounsbury (2010, p. 964) see this as a result of the separation of research streams that were connected in the past:
[S]tudents of occupations and professions, organizations, and social stratification barely talk to each other today, whereas in earlier periods the linkages were more visible and apparent to many scholars.
Organizational approaches that address stratification concentrate on the system or field2 of higher education. They either study differences along the lines of research stratification (e.g. âworld-class universities,â see next section) or specific aspects of teaching, without considering the effects on social stratification. Numerous pieces of research have outlined institutional hierarchies â or resistance to such hierarchies â established through national regulation (Trow 1984; Neave 2006). Such research has, for instance, contrasted the decentralized and stratified American system with the non-stratified systems that prevailed in continental Europe until at least the 2000s. It has explored differentiation in the tertiary sector between universities and institutions with a more professional or technical orientation, and observed the differential impacts of neo-managerialism and the commodification of higher education on such institutions (Paradeise et al. 2009). Organizational patterns spread among universities not only through competition but also through various forms of isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Here, stratification evolves between organizations that imitate others and those that are imitated (Meyer 1994). In such approaches, social stratification and class theory â if only for analytical reasons â are superseded by a perspective on society as functionally differentiated; higher education is analyzed as an entity of its own. The relationship between organizational ordering in the field and its effects on the labor market are seldom explored (Zald and Lounsbury 2010).
The study of elites, on the other hand, predominantly takes a reproductionist view, which sidelines ordering processes immanent to higher education in order to expose higher education as a central distributor of inequality (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990; Bourdieu 1998). Such processes can be seen as directed toward the legitimation of power structures; they imply a homology between organizations or specific higher education sectors and social stratification. From this perspective, top universities maintain societal inequality by overwhelmingly enrolling high-income and elite social groups (Brown et al. 2010). Their credentials legitimate the reproduction of social stratification (Kieserling 2008). Changes in the positions of certain educational organizations and/or organizational arrangements result from conflicts among elite groups (Bourdieu 1998; Brown 2001; Karabel 2005).
In a third group of theories, stratification in higher education is understood as a functional response to the societal need for skills and talent (Davis 1942; Davis and Moore 1945). The most prominent approach is human capital theory, which assumes that education is an individual investment of time (and money) that increases productivity and signals competence (Arrow 1973). A position with higher status and income is a legitimate return on such an investment (Becker 1983). From this perspective, stratification is determined through the objective demands of society and individual esteem. Similar to the reproductionist perspective, but for different reasons, national and organizational specificities and differences in higher education can ultimately only be explained by reasons outside their (sub)field or system (cf. Hölscher 2016, p. 19).
To bring together these various perspectives, we have to loosen up some of their fundamental premises (separated and autonomous systems or fields, power homology, functional inequality, and methodological individualism) and to anticipate and follow the empirical work that has so far been done on organizational pathways from education to work and academia.
The differences among (higher) education systems and how they impact on occupational attainment have been investigated in comparative studies of factories in the UK, France, and Germany during the 1970s. In similar studies by Lutz (1976) and Maurice et al. (1980), employment positions and career options were shown to relate to their respective educational systems. Hierarchical structures within companies thus vary in relation to the hierarchical structures in education (Lutz 1983). DiPrete et al. (2016) expand this view by testing the strength of the linkage between education and occupations in France, Germany, and the United States. Their study shows that the strength of linkage not only varies between countries but also between disciplines. They also confirm results from the sociology of professions that a high linkage strength supports higher wage income; however, they also argue for a more granular perspective that addresses linkages individually. In fact, the linkage logic within professions differs considerably from pathways to bureaucratic and free market positions (Brown 2001; Strathdee 2009). Klein (2016) argues for the German case that educational expansion has been accompanied by an increase in free market jobs, which has led to a wider heterogeneity of pathways from education to the labor market. A specific organizational and educational setting that builds linkages and career pathways thus demands more scrutiny (cf. Schwinn 1998, p. 14f). This fits with a strand of new institutionalist approaches, which emphasize the cultural and cognitive role of education but which have, to a large degree, been less interested in social stratification (Stevens 2008; Meyer 1969, 1977; Meyer et al. 2007; Baker 2009, 2011).3 In addition to sharing the reproductionist perspective on the increasing role of credentials, these approaches also ascribe a transformative power on society to higher education, an aspect that is absent from most elite-centered approaches. Both as an education provider and a research institution, the university âforms basic ideologies and creates academic degrees and expertise around these ideologiesâ (Baker 2014, p. 84). As a âsieveâ, âincubatorâ or âhubâ of society (Stevens et al. 2008), it both co-constructs and legitimizes ânew classes of personnel with new types of authoritative knowledgeâ (Meyer 1977, p. 56; cf. Armstrong and Masse 2014, p. 808).
Although the educational and occupational worlds each follow their own logics, with the increasing role of credentials, they become structurally coupled in a wid...