A Means to an End or the End in Itself? Exploring the College-to-Career Culture of Undergraduate Students at Emory University Open Access
Braverman, Jennifer (Spring 2021)
Abstract
This study aims to uncover how Emory University students navigate college-to-career culture: a peer-prestige system created and perpetuated through interaction on Emory’s campus. My research questions are grounded in the theoretical framework of Amy Binder and her colleagues in a 2016 study of undergraduate career funneling at Stanford and Harvard, particularly her findings about socialization of undergraduates into elite jobs. My research seeks to understand how a different university context (Emory) influences students’ own notion of prestigious majors and occupations and their own career paths. Emory’s undergraduate context is shaped by two undergraduate units with unique institutional and cultural differences: the Emory College of Arts and Sciences and the Goizueta Business School. I focus on a comparison of students in these two units: I compare students in the Business School to those in the College of Arts & Sciences (non-STEM) to see how they experience college-to-career culture on campus and how this culture shapes their own academic and career path. To gather such data, I conducted in-depth interviews with 22 undergraduate students: 10 Business School students and 12 College students. I found that individuals across the College and Business School acknowledge a rigid major and career hierarchy placing non-STEM College majors and career choices as low status while medical and business pre-professional tracks and corresponding occupations reined high status. Many students describe this hierarchy as being due to the pre-professional nature of the school. However, there is a clear divide of students on the fairness of this hierarchy, creating a divide on campus and animosity between individuals in the College and Business School. Individuals in the College describe deliberately disregarding the peer-prestige system on campus and prioritize their own values while individuals in the Business School describe possessing work values that correspond with high status jobs. My findings are similar to the work of Binder et al (2016) in that students at Emory certainly create a hierarchy of worthy majors and jobs. However, the division on campus between majors that are considered to be high status and low status is not seen as clearly in other empirical works.
Table of Contents
I: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1
II: Theoretical Framework……………………………………………………………………….3
III: Empirical work……………………………………………………………………………...10
IV: Conceptualization and Research Questions…………………………………………………16
V: Methods………………………………………………………………………………………19
VI: Findings……………………………………………………………………………………...24
VII: Implications and Discussion………………………………………………………………..53
VIII: References…………………………………………………………………………………60
IX: Appendices…………………………………………………………………………………..65
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