Scholarlink

<p>A long-standing expectation in research on educational mobility holds that additional educational attainment can compensate for earlier disadvantage. Within mass higher education systems experiencing credential inflation, however, whether subsequent credential accumulation actually offsets initial educational sorting remains underexplored. This article introduces “credential stickiness”, the phenomenon whereby initial educational positioning proves resistant to later credential investments, and uses it to specify a cross-stage boundary condition for educational stratification theories whose focal mechanisms are articulated at within-stage transitions. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with master’s students and 8 supplementary interviews with employers in China, we examine how undergraduate institutional prestige continues to shape labour-market evaluation in the accounts of students and employers, even after subsequent graduate credential acquisition. We identify three mechanisms underpinning this stickiness: signal persistence of standardised initial sorting, network exclusion from alumni communities, and employer cognitive schemas treating first credentials as biographical anchors. Credential stickiness operates differentially by class background:&#xa0;students from resource-rich families can buffer its effects through alternative capital mobilisation, while students from resource-poor families lack such pathways, a dynamic we capture through “capital-constrained heuristics”. These findings extend rather than challenge Effectively Maintained Inequality theory by making explicit a cross-stage scope condition its original formulation leaves unaddressed, contributing to the analysis of credential dynamics in stratified higher education systems more broadly.</p>

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

Credential stickiness: how initial educational sorting conditions the value of later credentials in Chinese graduate education

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月24日

查看全文
  • Haoshuang Wang

摘要

A long-standing expectation in research on educational mobility holds that additional educational attainment can compensate for earlier disadvantage. Within mass higher education systems experiencing credential inflation, however, whether subsequent credential accumulation actually offsets initial educational sorting remains underexplored. This article introduces “credential stickiness”, the phenomenon whereby initial educational positioning proves resistant to later credential investments, and uses it to specify a cross-stage boundary condition for educational stratification theories whose focal mechanisms are articulated at within-stage transitions. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews with master’s students and 8 supplementary interviews with employers in China, we examine how undergraduate institutional prestige continues to shape labour-market evaluation in the accounts of students and employers, even after subsequent graduate credential acquisition. We identify three mechanisms underpinning this stickiness: signal persistence of standardised initial sorting, network exclusion from alumni communities, and employer cognitive schemas treating first credentials as biographical anchors. Credential stickiness operates differentially by class background: students from resource-rich families can buffer its effects through alternative capital mobilisation, while students from resource-poor families lack such pathways, a dynamic we capture through “capital-constrained heuristics”. These findings extend rather than challenge Effectively Maintained Inequality theory by making explicit a cross-stage scope condition its original formulation leaves unaddressed, contributing to the analysis of credential dynamics in stratified higher education systems more broadly.