Occupational credentials provide an additional - and, at times, alternative - path other than traditional academic degrees for individuals to increase productivity and demonstrate their abilities and qualifications to employers. In the United States, these credentials typically take the form of licenses and certifications. Although a critical part of the workforce landscape, the literature on the returns to credentials is inadequate, with prior research typically relying on Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions which do not sufficiently control for selection. Using questions that identify credential receipt from the 2015 and 2016 United States' Current Population Surveys, we construct an instrumental variable of local peer influence using the within-labor market credential rate of individuals sharing the same sociodemographic characteristics, while controlling for the same group's average wages and a suite of demographic and geographic controls. We use this instrument in a marginal treatment effects estimator, which allows for estimation of the average treatment effect and determines the direction of selection, and we estimate the effects of credentials on labor market outcomes. We find large, meaningful returns in the form of increased probability of individual employment, an effect which is concentrated primarily among women. The effect of having a credential on log wages is higher for those in the sub-baccalaureate labor market, suggesting the potential role of occupational credentials as an alternative path to marketable human capital and a signal of skills in the absence of a bachelor's degree. © 2022 Matthew D. Baird et al., published by Sciendo.

We use data on over 14,000 teacher candidates in Washington state, merged with employment data from the state's public schools and Unemployment Insurance system, to investigate the career paths of recently certified teacher candidates in the state. About two thirds of these candidates are observed as public school teachers at some point within 5 years after completing student teaching, many of whom transition from nonteaching education positions into public school teaching positions within a few years of student teaching. We also find that candidates with STEM endorsements and candidates who graduated after the Great Recession are far more likely to be employed in public K-12 teaching positions within the first several years after student teaching.

We use a novel database of student teaching placements in Washington State to investigate teachers' transitions from student teaching classrooms to first job classrooms and the implications for student achievement. We find first-year teachers are more effective when they teach in the same or an adjacent grade, in the same school type, or in a classroom with student demographics similar to their student teaching classroom. We document that only 27% of first-year teachers are teaching the same grade they student taught, and that first-year teachers tend to begin their careers in higher poverty classrooms than their student teaching placements. This suggests that better aligning student teacher placements with first-year teacher hiring could be a policy lever for improving early-career teacher effectiveness.

Online courses provide flexible learning opportunities, but research suggests that students may learn less and persist at lower rates compared to face-to-face settings. However, few studies have investigated more distal effects of online education. In this study, we analyzed 6 years of institutional data for three cohorts of students in 13 large majors (N = 10,572) at a public research university to examine distal effects of online course participation. Using online course offering as an instrumental variable for online course taking, we find that online course taking of major-required courses leads to higher likelihood of successful 4-year graduation and slightly accelerated time-to-degree. These results suggest that offering online courses may help students to more efficiently graduate college.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many school accountability systems that rely on student- level achievement data. Many states have encountered uncertainty about how to meet federal accountability requirements without typical school data. Prior research provides an abundance of evidence that student achievement is correlated to students' social background, which raises concerns about the predictive bias of accountability systems. The focus of this quantitative study is to explore the predictive ability of non-achievement based variables (i.e., students' social background) on measures of school accountability in one Midwest state. Results suggest that social background and community demographic variables have a significant impact on measures of school accountability, and might be interpreted cautiously. Implications for policy and future research are discussed.

Our work focuses on women and underrepresented minority (URM) students' cultural models of engineering success (CMES) or beliefs about doing well in engineering. Because of its consequential effect on persistence, we pay special attention to the fit domain of CMES-student feelings of belonging in their engineering program. We examine 1) how student fit is affected by participatory social capital (i.e., participation in professional engineering organizations [PEOs] that have as part of their mission a goal to assist students in their STEM education and careers), as well as 2) the factors that affect students' decisions to participate in PEOs. Due to the traditional prioritization of majority norms in engineering programs, women and URM students' CMES may conflict with the cultures manifested in engineering departments. Analysis of interviews with 55 women and URM engineering students shows that PEOs, particularly gender- and race-focused PEOs, affect students' feelings of fit. PEOs affect student fit positively and primarily through expressive social capital-emotional support wherein students feel they fit in because PEOs provide a sense of community and opportunities to be around successful women and URM engineers. PEOs also allow students to build instrumental social capital, such as academic and professional skills, including networking and knowledge development. Encouragement from others and their desire to be around people like themselves played a central role in students joining PEOs. However, students identified time, financial, and fit issues that discouraged them from participating in PEOs. This investigation illuminates how socially distant others from PEOs affect student fit, extending previous work which uncovered how more proximal others affect fit as well as previous work finding that URM students participating in PEOs were more likely to persist in their engineering program. Research, theory, and practice applications are presented.