Social Background, Credential Inflation and Educational Strategies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The primary goal of this article is to examine the impact of credential inflation on educational attainment in twentieth-century United States. To do so, we create a measure of ‘intergenerational credential inflation’ (intergeneration inflation factor) and include it in regression models predicting educational transitions. Using the General Social Surveys of 1972–2000, we find that people are generally less likely to invest in schooling if its value is relatively low. An exception is the final transition to a postgraduate degree, where we find that when its value is low children of parents with postgraduate education are more likely to take it. This finding supports relative risk aversion theory, which assumes that the main goal of children is to avoid downward social class mobility. Perhaps most important, we find that credential inflation is particularly influential on transition probabilities if parents had made the same transition. This pattern is consistent with the information differential thesis that children are more informed about the value of education if their parents acquired it.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it