By Justin Grosslight

Readers interested in understanding how typical Americans transition from college to work should savor this provocative book.

The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College by Jessi Streib. The University of Chicago Press, 256 pages, $27.50.

When it comes to attending college and transitioning into the American labor market, parents and students hope that a solid education will lead to fecund career opportunities. Indeed, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — now virtually common knowledge — affirms that holding a bachelor’s degree is almost essential in order to obtain a well-paying job today. But can hardworking students of varied socioeconomic backgrounds seamlessly enter and advance in the labor market after graduating from a well-regarded but non-elite four-year university?

Having spent five years interviewing students, speaking with employers, reading job ads, analyzing résumés, and observing university-sponsored career events, sociologist Jessi Streib comes to a startling conclusion in The Accidental Equalizer. Comparing both “class-advantaged” and “class-disadvantaged” students at “Southern State University” (defined as students having two and zero parents with at least a bachelor’s degree, respectively), Streib reveals that typical college graduates enter a mid-tier labor market having little control over what job they will receive, how much they will earn, or how to advance their career. Further, resources are not allocated by class but rather by luck – especially to those who guess well when it comes to deciding where to apply. Success in this environment is tantamount to playing the television game show Let’s Make a Deal — contestants run across a stage selecting one key at a time from a set of fifteen in hopes of unlocking a door that contains a prize before a buzzer blows. Streib dubs such an opportunity structure a “luckocracy,” one that is dictated by a low but even distribution of job information and class-neutral selection criteria. Over three sections, Streib explores how the luckocracy levels class inequalities.

Part I of The Accidental Equalizer outlines the structure of luckocracy. As students searched for work, they often found job ads and titles vague or misleading and could not figure out specific salary figures. Meanwhile, hiring agents “treated information sessions as commercials.” The point was to generate a feeling about the hiring organization rather than providing detailed work information. In addition, different employers had different filters for submitted résumés, there were no standard interview questions across companies. Most employers were interested in applicants having such traits as communication skills, teamwork, leadership ability, and a hunger for learning, but different hiring agents defined and valued these traits in various ways. Because students received no specific guidelines on how to impress specific employers, “what would get a student hired by one manager would get them passed over by another.” Further, hiring was not about spotlighting excellence. Rather than quantifying academic achievements or rewarding high grades, employers demanded that students meet minimum competency thresholds for job consideration. Given so many different approaches, the process ended up flattening socioeconomic differences: some employers sought traits that favored class-advantaged lifestyles (eg., Greek life and study abroad) while others sought traits that favored class-disadvantaged students (eg., greater work experience or in-service activities).

Part II articulates how students navigate the luckocracy. While a college cannot equalize resources, it can ensure that some are available to all. Required orientation and coursework, professionalization clubs, mentorship support, a college-sponsored jobs portal, and career center staff are available to each student, thus providing ample channels to help students meet the luckocracy’s low employment standards. Students of varied backgrounds, of course, coped differently: “Class-disadvantaged students typically accepted what they could not change. Class-advantaged students typically tried to change what they could not accept.” Often the former rehearsed only with school-trained interview questions (if at all), prepared résumés, according to guidelines from college clubs and courses, and rarely negotiated salaries while seeking common ground with hiring agents. The latter leveraged status symbols along with parent and professional contacts for résumé advice, interview preparation, and corporate information — all to no avail in the hiring process. On average, both class-disadvantaged and class-advantaged students received jobs after three interviews and with similar median salaries ($48000 and $45000, respectively). Meanwhile, the college instilled a sense that it was best to take initial offers, thereby giving job applicants little encouragement to compare offers or to negotiate salaries. Any form of professional employment was better than the potential of having no work at all.

Looking at long-term considerations in Part III, Streib shows that the lukocracy’s effects extend far beyond students’ entry into the mid-tier labor market. Surveying students a year into their first jobs, Streib notes that “a majority of respondents from all class backgrounds said that their job did not meet their original expectations.” Whether students received responsibilities, skill-building opportunities, or mentorship depended on the firm that hired them. Payment offers in job letters were often misleading, and knowledge learned at work was not always transferable. Similarly, when seeking a promotion, raise, or job at a new company, students struggled to estimate their predicted salary, making it difficult for them to plan a career trajectory; recent graduates of all backgrounds also struggled to take initiative in the right ways, thus obscuring routes for advancement.

Ultimately, Streib concludes that the luckocracy is durable because corporations are incentivized to keep it: the system is cheap to maintain and provides corporate flexibility in hiring standards. In addition, it does not cater to those with a class-advantaged lifestyle, hides information on race and gender, values employees’ personal growth over professional achievement, and encourages worker solidarity. And while a luckocracy could make salaries more transparent — and expand itself to include more workers without bachelor’s degrees — it equalizes outcomes better than other opportunity structures such as a meritocracy (where access to information is equally available to all rather than hidden, thereby favoring the advantaged who can access it more easily), or meritocracy-luckocracy hybrids.

According to Streib, typical college graduates enter a mid-tier labor market having little control over what job they will receive, how much they will earn, or how to advance their career.

All in all, The Accidental Equalizer provides a critical and probing investigation into entering the mainstream American work force. The text is impressive both in its comprehensiveness and its rich and textured dialogue with other literature. Implicitly, the book builds upon Jake Rosenfeld’s You’re Paid What You’re Worth: And Other Myths of the Modern Economy (2021) by rejecting the notion that individual pay is tied to performance or a specific occupation. Like Rosenfeld, but with a narrower view, Streib highlights that compensation is determined by social forces and business needs in a hiring hierarchy that’s riddled with labor market imperfections. The book also adds substantial empirical meat to journalist Jeffrey Selingo’s claim in There is Life After College: What Students and Parents Should Know About Navigating School to Prepare for the Jobs of Tomorrow (2016) that employers fail to plan in advance for hiring needs, which means that they evaluate college graduates heavily by instinct, thereby mismatching talent with opportunity. More potently, Streib’s study reveals that, in a luckocracy, middle-class children raised with what sociologists call “concerted cultivation” or who are imbued with “privilege” from tony secondary boarding schools are unable to use their instilled institutional navigation and negotiation skills to curry favor in the labor market. Lastly, and more loosely, Streib concludes that education and social standing has a weaker impact on career trajectory than Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan found in their classic study, The American Occupational Structure (1967) — their work, of course, is now somewhat dated and focuses on a broad data set of working age men rather than 21-to-24-year-old college graduates of both sexes.

Along with nuanced assessments, Streib explicitly outlines her key theoretical contributions in Appendix A. Critiquing sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), Streib argues that the mid-tier luckocracy as a “field” does not yield, as expected, greater rewards for those with more class-related social, economic, or cultural capital. Further, Bourdieu assumes considerable rigidity in how individuals perceive and engage with the world based on their rearing — that is, their “habitus.” In entering a classless luckocracy, however, students must embrace new social mores and unpredictable definitions of merit, thus challenging the persistence of Bourdieu’s “habitus.” This raises questions about the institutional “fit” that is necessary for employment success. Streib also overtly challenges sociologists of network theory who have long contended that “weak ties,” or loose social connections, can help individuals secure jobs; this simply does not hold in a luckocracy. That she only addresses these points in an appendix is, to me, a double-edged sword. On one hand, the approach relieves readers of having to grapple with dense clumps of academic theory. On the other hand, assessing Bourdieu and network theory most likely are requisites for a budding sociologist seeking to earn her stripes. These respected sources had to appear somewhere in the text to give the author professional legitimacy.

Author Jessi Streib. Photo: Duke Today

Moving beyond how theoretical contributions were dealt with, I am slightly unsettled about how Streib defines the boundaries of the mid-tier labor market, which she sandwiches between the elite and the low-wage markets. Comparisons with the former can be seen as a foil to Lauren Rivera’s Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (2016) and are relatively clear. Unlike elite labor markets, where, generally speaking, salaries are disclosed, job descriptions are clear, costly extracurricular activities matter, and a prestigious college degree is favored, nothing on the former checklist characterizes the mid-tier luckocracy. But what, besides wages, distinguishes the mid-tier labor market from the low-wage one? Streib notes that the latter more likely includes dangerous work, unpredictable schedules, and impoverished workers. But she also notes that mid-tier laborers “are hired for meeting the same standards as low-wage workers: possessing soft skills, the ability to complete work that many can do, and meeting employers’ idiosyncratic preferences.”

Perhaps the mid-tier labor market has a higher percentage of college graduates, as “nearly two-thirds of business and human resource leaders do not consider applicants without bachelor’s degrees, even when they meet all other qualifications.” Even so, the low bar set for entry-level work in Streib’s luckocracy means that, for most employers, “a college degree is little more than an expensive piece of paper” (it would have been interesting if she had cited economist Bryan Caplan). While it would seem natural for Southern State University’s College of Business mainly to advertise jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree, it would be interesting to have known whether any of the students that Streib had interviewed one year after receipt of their first post-college job had coworkers who had not attended a traditional four-year college or who did not hold a bachelor’s degree. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the latter is a growing constituency. The divide between low-wage and mid-tier business work remains blurry.

Also, certain claims in The Accidental Equalizer feel askew. For example, Streib naively assumes that a luckocracy not only exists for mid-tier business careers but “likely exists in the mid-tier technology, healthcare, science, and engineering markets too.” While scholars have not collected data in these arenas, one would think that entering STEM-related fields would require more rigor or content mastery than business with its low bar for entry (indeed, scholars Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have noted in their 2011 book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses that, of the college majors they surveyed, business majors made the smallest gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills). Further, Streib understates the connection between a student’s college location and his or her subsequent job compensation and placement. Location does not just affect job placement — it is more critical than that. Most young American graduates gravitate towards a handful of metropolitan areas where businesses are abundant and where they can best cultivate personal and professional networks (the American Institute for Economic Research, example, has published a list of top cities and towns for college graduates seeking jobs). Some even attend college near these locations. Few such cities are in the American South, which presumably is where Streib conducted her fieldwork. Other claims seem obvious: if indeed “over half of the college-educated workforce” is employed in an information-scarce luckocracy, is there much surprise that salaries within it would vary wildly?

These questions aside, the sadly ludicrous anecdotes peppering Streib’s text make for memorable reading. Among the examples of absurdity: a student moved six hundred miles from home to take a job in “visual merchandising” — only to discover that it meant straightening tee shirts in a retail store. Readers also learn of a student who received a well-paid job offer while trying to purloin a water bottle at a career fair. And then there was the graduate who, because she applied to companies based on alphabetical search results, was hired handsomely by a firm whose name began with the letter “A.” Stories about the haplessness of the hiring process are particularly disappointing for a country that prides itself on the notion that hard work and merit beget success.

Unfortunately, this haphazard labor milieu is reality for the typical American college graduate. Sadly, Streib shows that college is not, as advertised, the “great equalizer,” leveling class differences. Rather, college prepares students for a peculiar, irrational job market that “accidentally” equalizes by chance. Most mid-tier companies do not demand skill or talent — just workers who can faithfully do their job. That said, given all the academic studies written about elite schools and labor markets, The Accidental Equalizer adds an incisive contribution: the volume draws back the curtain on the mainstream American job market and the role that selective but non-elite four-year colleges play in helping students enter it. Readers interested in understanding how typical Americans transition from college to work should savor this provocative book.

Justin Grosslight is an academic entrepreneur interested in examining relationships between science, society, and business. He has published academic articles in mathematics and history of science, book reviews on a wide range of topics, and several vocabulary development and test preparation books. A graduate of Stanford and Harvard, Justin currently resides in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, working as a consultant and mentor. He has traveled extensively throughout China and to all 11 Southeast Asian nations, as well as through parts of Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania.