ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author investigates how one symbolic manifestation of education, credentialling, varies across industrial labor markets in the US economy. The underlying premise of this analysis is that education can play a different role in different labor market contexts. For example in some settings, those with more education may be more highly rewarded because of the trained capacity they have acquired. In other situations, those with higher levels of formal schooling may do better because of their greater exposure to and knowledge of high status culture. Rather than postulating a constant cultural tendency to attend to the symbolic side of educational achievement, the author hypothesized that different parts of the economic structure would show greater and lesser proclivities in this direction. In the credential or "stair-step" specifications, the coefficient for the overall education term indexes the change in income per year of education within each threshold block, where the slopes are assumed constant.
