Student Debt and the University-to-Workforce Transition: The Role of Risk and Socio-Economic Background
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Post-secondary education has increased in importance for economic prosperity and in cost, which has led to rising student debt in many nations. Researchers have lagged in determining how student debt affects new post-secondary graduates and, in particular, how it affects the labour market transitions of new university graduates? This dissertation explore this topic using nationally representative data on 2010 Canadian graduates. The effects of student debt on labour market transitions and outcomes are tested in three empirical studies. In Chapter 2, high levels of student debt are found to be associated with graduates reporting that they could not wait for the job they wanted, that they were actively looking for a different job despite currently being employed, and, for first-generation students only, that they were willing to move cities if it improved their job prospects. In Chapter 3, I find that highly indebted graduates are more likely to take a temporary first job and to have had more employers since graduation. I also find that highly indebted first-generation graduates have fewer job benefits and lower estimated incomes both two and three years after graduation. Not surprisingly given the aforementioned adverse effects of high student debt found for first-generation graduates, in Chapter 4 I also find that they report lower satisfaction levels. Specifically, compared to all other graduates, highly indebted first-generation graduates report lower job and life satisfaction, and are significantly less likely to say they would do the same education if they could choose again. Taken together, these findings have implications for higher education policy and the ability of university to function as a great equalizer. The findings are alarming given that upwards of 60% of students rely primarily on debt to fund their higher education. They suggest that student debt creates desperation in the job searches of new university graduates, which leads to greater job precarity, reduced job quality, and lower job and life satisfaction. Overall, this research casts doubt on the effectiveness of using student loans as s primary means of providing access to higher education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".