What is the worth of a college degree when higher education expands? The relative education hypothesis posits that when college degrees are rare, individuals with more education have less competition to enter highly-skilled occupations. When college degrees are more common, there may not be enough highly-skilled jobs to go around; some college-educated workers lose out to others and are pushed into less-skilled jobs. Using new measurements of occupation-level verbal, quantitative, and analytic skills, this study tests the changing effect of education on skill utilization across 70 years of birth cohorts from 1971 to 2010, net of all other age, period, and cohort trends. Higher-education expansion erodes the value of a college degree, and college-educated workers are at greater risk for underemployment in less cognitively demanding occupations. This raises questions about the sources of rising income inequality, skill utilization across the working life course, occupational sex segregation, and how returns to education have changed across different life domains.

Past research shows a statistically significant relationship between college completion and sociopolitical attitudes. However, recent scholarship suggests the effects of college on social outcomes may be confounded with unobserved family background. In this study, we leverage the shared family and social background of siblings to better identify the effect of college on sociopolitical attitudes. We draw data from the Study of American Families and General Social Survey and use sibling fixed effects to assess the effect of college on political orientation, support for civil liberties, and beliefs about gender egalitarianism. We find that earning a four-year college degree has a significant impact on support for civil liberties and beliefs about gender egalitarianism, but the effect of college on political orientation is confounded by family background.

The role of leadership in the management and delivery of health and allied health services is often discussed but lacks empirical research. Discrepancies are often found between leaders’ self-ratings and followers’ ratings of the leader. To our knowledge no research has examined leader–follower discrepancies and their association with organizational culture in mental health clinics. The current study examines congruence, discrepancy, and directionality of discrepancy in relation to organizational culture in 38 mental health teams (N = 276). Supervisors and providers completed surveys including ratings of the supervisor transformational leadership and organizational culture. Polynomial regression and response surface analysis models were computed examining the associations of leadership discrepancy and defensive organizational culture and its subscales. Discrepancies between supervisor and provider reports of transformational leadership were associated with a more negative organizational culture. Culture suffered more where supervisors rated themselves more positively than providers, in contrast to supervisors rating themselves lower than the provider ratings of the supervisor. Leadership and leader discrepancy should be a consideration in improving organizational culture and for strategic initiatives such as quality of care and the implementation and sustainment of evidence-based practice.

What is an activist identity? Prior answers have focused almost exclusively on collective identity, without a) considering the possibility of role-based identities or b) grounding collective identities in broader social-psychological theories. The present study investigates activist identity through the lens of role-based and category-based identities, and reports two major findings. First, there is a distinct role-based activist identity, one that involves internalizing role responsibilities and the expectations of friends and family. Second, collective identity represents a relationship between a social identity and an injustice frame; it either involves incorporating an injustice frame into a pre-existing social identity, or using the injustice frame to create a new in-group. The present findings help to illuminate the processes underlying collective identity, indicate that a great deal of role-based activist identity is mistaken for collective identity, and suggest new directions for the study of micro-mobilization and organizational forms and tactics in social movements.

, the UNC Culture and Politics Workshop, and five anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Additionally, I would like to thank Y. Claire Yang for feedback on my preliminary analyses.

, and the UNC Inequality workshop for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. 2 AbstractHow does job quality predict subjective well-being in the United States? Prior research suggests that various job quality dimensions such as job security and individual task discretion affect subjective well-being, but the theoretical mechanisms are implied rather than tested and aspects of job quality are rarely tested together. I use structural equation modeling and General Social Survey data to assess the impact of five job quality dimensions-individual task discretion, monetary compensation, job security, low work intensity, and safe work conditions-on subjective well-being. Then, I show that job quality influences subjective well-being by improving social life, altering class identification, affecting physical health, and increased amount of leisure time. Finally, while I find that job quality dimensions do have statistically significant effects on subjective well-being, the way in which job quality affects subjective wellbeing differs by job dimension. In other words, job quality has a statistically significant impact on subjective well-being, but different job quality domains are connected to subjective wellbeing in different ways.Keywords: work, job quality, subjective well-being, happiness 3 Dimensions of Job Quality, Mechanisms, and Subjective Well-Being in the United StatesHow does job quality predict subjective well-being in the United States? American adults spend more time at work than in any other activity (Hermanowicz 2010), and the effects of work often spill over into other life domains (Settersten Jr. 2003). Thus, scholars have long suggested the importance of job quality to happiness (Green 2006;Jencks, Perman, and Rainwater 1988;Kalleberg 2011). However, the theoretical mechanisms connecting job quality to subjective wellbeing are implied rather than tested, and there are very few studies showing how a single job quality dimension matters in the presence of other job quality characteristics. While there is a general assumption that job quality leads to greater subjective well-being, we have surprisingly little evidence to prove it.The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the how different job quality dimensions predict subjective well-being via multiple potential mechanisms. I first estimate the effect of individual task discretion, monetary compensation, job security, low work intensity, and safe work conditions on subjective well-being. Then, I show that social life, higher class identification, better physical health, and greater leisure time mediate the relationship between various job quality dimensions and subjective well-being. As a result, the present analysis provides stronger evidence for the importance of "good job" characteristics, as each job quality dimension has a statistically significant effect on subjective well-being but is mediated by a different set of mechanisms. The Multi-Dimensional Nature of Job QualityWhat makes for a "good job"? Scholars note that experiences at wo...

Do life course events stimulate migration during the transition to adulthood? We identify nine specific life events in the family, education, and employment domains and test whether they lead to migration in the short term, using fixed-effects models that remove the influence of all stable individual-level characteristics and controlling for age. Marital and school completion events have substantively large effects on migration compared with individual work transitions, although there are more of the latter over the young adult years. Furthermore, young adults who are white and from higher class backgrounds are more likely to migrate in response to life events, suggesting that migration may be a mechanism for the reproduction of status attainment. Overall, the results demonstrate a close relationship between life course events and migration and suggest a potential role for migration in explaining the effect of life course events on well-being and behavior.

Why does volunteer participation by college social justice activists decline dramatically following graduation? Using a new, multimethod longitudinal study that spans college and the early post-graduate years, I test existing theory about how changes in time constraints, social support, and organizational opportunities affect volunteer activist participation in social justice movements. Analyzing qualitative data from semi-structured interviews to further understand decreases in activism, I find no evidence showing that changes in time constraints or social support lead to changes in activist volunteering, but there is evidence to support the effects of organizational opportunities. Findings from the qualitative data further emphasize that activist opportunities are easier to access on college campuses, specifically because activism is physically convenient to the potential participant. Future research and practice should explicitly address the spatial proximity of potential activists to social movement opportunities, and should additionally remain sensitive to different needs of activists at different points in the life course.