What are the economic consequences of starting, but not completing college? On this episode of the Matrix Podcast, Sarah Harrington, Program Manager at Social Science Matrix, spoke with Sarah Payne, a sociologist who recently published a paper in Sociology of Education that examined what happens when students begin college but fail to graduate. “Although non-completion yields higher income than never attending college, it also increases financial hardship among more-disadvantaged groups through the mechanism of student debt,” Payne wrote. “However, non-completers of most groups would have had greater income and experienced less financial hardship had they graduated.”

Payne is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Broad Center at Yale School of Management. She earned a PhD and an MA in sociology from UC Berkeley and bachelor’s degrees from Wellesley College. She studies culture, inequality, and organizations, particularly in contexts of education and precarious work, using quantitative and qualitative methods. Her research investigates how racial inequality is produced, reproduced, and mitigated, as well as the meaning people make of it. She examines PK-12 schools, higher education, and work in early adulthood as contexts where these processes happen. She is particularly interested in inequality at the intersections of race, gender, and class, and in how subjectivity (selves, emotions, mental health, social psychology, agency), culture, and debt relate to racial inequality in organizations and society. Payne’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows Program and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley.

Prior to graduate school, Payne worked in PK-12 public education and college access, state government, and public interest organizing. She has been a middle school teacher and college counselor in Louisiana, and she co-founded College Beyond, a college persistence non-profit serving Pell-eligible undergraduates in the Greater New Orleans region.

Listen to the complete interview below or on Apple Podcasts. A full transcript of the recording is included below.

Transcript

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Woman’s voice: The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sarah Harrington: Hello, and welcome to The Matrix Podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Harrington.

Today on the podcast we have Sarah Payne, a postdoctoral research associate at the Broad Center at Yale School of Management. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows Program, and the Institute for Research on Labor & Employment at UC Berkeley. Sarah studies culture, racial inequality, and organizations, particularly in context of education and precarious work.

Today, we’re focusing on her project, “Equalization or Reproduction? ‘Some” College and the Social Function of Higher Education,” which was published in Sociology of Education in April 2023. Sarah, welcome, and thank you for being here today.

Sarah Payne: Thanks so much for having me.

Harrington: So, let’s get started with a little bit of background. I understand that this project is rooted in some of your work experience that you had after college. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey from your undergraduate studies to your time as a college counselor and the choice to pursue your PhD in sociology?

Payne: Sure. Um, so my movement from New England, where I grew up and went to college, to New Orleans runs through Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which is where I moved after college to teach science in a public middle school. And it was during my time in Baton Rouge that I first started working on college access with local high schoolers.

So when I eventually moved to New Orleans, it was to take a full-time job in college counseling at a public high school there. And those combined experiences in education and community-based work ultimately led me to sociology and to the PhD program at Berkeley.

Harrington: Was there a particular experience in your counseling work that sparked your interest in studying educational inequality from a sociological perspective?

Payne: There were so many. And I think I think I would actually say that it started during my time as a classroom teacher in a Title I school, where I was experiencing intersecting social structures and how they were racialized how they were unequal and also how this profoundly shaped my students’ lives and their communities as well as my classroom. But I think, in terms of college counseling work specifically something that stands out was, would, I guess it would be conversations with students and families about debt and graduation rates at the schools that they were considering.

So the vast majority of our students were the first in their families to go to college. They worked incredibly hard and were so excited and proud, justifiably, when their acceptance letters started rolling in. We were all so proud of them and so excited for them.

But then they had some extremely difficult decisions to make. How much debt is too much debt? How should they balance debt against how good a college was at graduating its students?

Because we know that a given student is much more likely to graduate if they attend a college with a high completion rate, and the same student is much less likely to graduate if they attend a college with a low completion rate. So it’s much more about the institution than the individual. So then the question was something like, “Do I go to the school with a higher grad rate, but take out two or three times as much debt?

Do I go to a school with a lower grad rate and take out 25K in debt?” So my students were facing really difficult, almost impossible decisions at, you know, 17, 18, 19 that were also gonna be very consequential financially and in terms of their life trajectories. And of course, what was playing out in these very intense and important individual ways was also structural in the sense that it was shaped by economic, cultural, and I think about it as power-laden social systems.

So in studying sociology, I wanted to develop a much deeper understanding of those systems and of how they could be changed.

Harrington: That’s fascinating. And that’s, like, yeah, huge, weighty decisions for students who are so young. I am interested also in how the higher completion rates and higher tuition maybe aren’t aligned closely.

That’s sort of surprising, and that’s something that sounds probably really tricky to navigate for students. For our listeners who haven’t read the article, can you give us a broad overview of what your research is exploring? Why is the “some” college group so important to look at in particular?

Payne: Yeah. So my article in Sociology of Education uses causal inference and national survey data to look at the financial consequences of starting college but stopping out with a degree. And it’s really important to look at that group, because they make up almost half of all college-goers in this country.

And among some groups, like minoritized and low-income groups, they make up much more than half. In some sense, it’s the median college student, for some groups anyway. So very important when it comes to understanding higher education processes and also inequality.

So what I find in the paper is that people who have some college, who started but ultimately didn’t graduate, have higher incomes than they would have had if they had never gone to college, but they also experience more financial hardship than they otherwise would have. And I show that this is specifically because of student loans. At the same time, if people with some college had instead finished their degrees, the other counterfactual, they would have had even higher income and would have had less financial hardship despite having more debt accrue from a longer time in college.

So, the findings really underscore the importance of college completion. There are real financial benefits of a degree, but starting and taking out debt without finishing can leave people worse off financially, and I show that this is particularly true for lower-income and minoritized young adults. In other words, both college access and college completion really matter to whether inequality is mitigated or worsened through higher education.

Harrington: That’s super interesting. So when you’re looking at this data, why is it important to hold both of those counterfactuals in view at the same time? So, students who start college but don’t finish compared with students who maybe never attend college or who have completed a degree?

Payne: Yeah. I think thinking counterfactually is so useful when it comes to making policy choices. So, if we’re only comparing people with some college to people who never went and finding that they’re worse off, then the policy implication might be, these people shouldn’t have gone to college.

But if you also consider the counterfactual of, well, what if they had finished, then we see that their financial lives could have been much easier if they had finished. And so, looking at only one counterfactual really could change the policy picture. If we recognize that people who leave college without a degree could have had a different trajectory had they finished, we might support college completion much more.

Harrington: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense and is a nice transition into a few things I want to talk about, kind of practically what comes from this work. One of your key findings is that non-completers, folks who start college but don’t finish, on average earn more than people who never go to college, but they don’t necessarily experience less financial hardship.

Can you unpack that specific contradiction a little bit and talk a little bit about what financial hardship looks like in your data?

Payne: Yeah. So, financial hardship is sort of a complex experience. I operationalize it in my data by looking at people’s experiences of harassment by bill collectors and needing to use payday loans.

And so when I say that people in this sample, which is nationally representative, are experiencing more financial hardship, it means they’re experiencing more of both of those things.

Harrington: So you also touch on how those patterns are not the same for everyone, that race, gender, and family wealth matter when you’re considering outcomes for students. Can you talk about what makes some college more risky for some folks? What’s happening there?

And then one thing that I noted while I was reading was quote, ‘College completion yields the greatest benefit to students who are least likely to enroll,’ unquote. Does it also present a higher risk?

Payne: Okay, that’s a great question. So the finding that the returns to college are greatest among people who are least likely to go, that I find, it, it’s consistent with a lot of prior research, so I’m thinking of work by Mike Hout or by Jenny Brand that also find this. And in general, your question about how do returns vary is really important.

So in my case, with people who are least likely to go to college, the returns are greater if they do complete, but also the negative consequences if they leave without a degree are also worse. So, in general, the stakes are higher for folks in this group.

Harrington: That makes sense and that sounds pretty scary. So a little bit more about the data that you’re working with. Methodologically, you said you’re working with the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and using augmented inverse probability weighting. For a non-methods audience, can you explain what that dataset and approach allowed you to do that maybe a simple comparison might not?

Payne: Yeah. Two things. One, this survey is an ongoing national survey with many waves.

Survey respondents have been contacted many, many times since 1997, so we have good longitudinal data on the same group of people and we can observe change over time. So, that’s very important to answering this question about the relationship between what happens in college and then what are your income outcomes, income outcomes looking like by age 30? So that’s one thing that this dataset uniquely does.

The approach of augmented inverse probability weighting is useful because it enables causal inference. It allows me to analytically up-weight people on the margin, people who are very, very similar and who have different outcomes. So we might think that people who are very similar but have different outcomes could have easily had the opposite outcome, and so then measuring the difference becomes very useful.

So I think those are the two big things. The data lets me think about what’s happening nationally and longitudinally, and also make causal inferences.

Harrington: That’s super interesting. Thanks for explaining that a little bit deeper. Can you also talk about now zooming out to you just a little bit, how did your background influence how you approached this research? Do you think there were moments where your kind of personal insight or experience and perspective helped, or whether it complicated sometimes your role as a researcher?

Payne: Yeah. That’s really interesting, and I should say that this paper was sort of a first step in a larger project that also in, or in which I’m also interviewing people about their experiences after college, and looking at people who did complete and people who stopped out without a degree. And I think that my background as a college counselor directly drove the questions that I was posing in this Sociology of Education article because when I entered grad school, there was very little work in sociology on people with some college, and none of it had looked at how starting but not finishing college interacts with student loans.

And of course, that’s exactly what I spent years worrying about with my students, so that very directly inspired the research that would become the article. But I think my experiences as a college counselor also really shaped the interviews that I conducted as part of my dissertation. So my experiences helped me, I think, recognize more quickly what kinds of questions to ask and how to ask them, and I think to also better understand the meaning of what my participants shared.

On the flip side of that, it also meant that I needed to be mindful about asking people I interviewed to really spell out their perspectives rather than assuming that I knew what they meant because I had some shared reference points.

Harrington: Yeah. That’s super interesting. Like, maybe you’d heard things that sound similar and you need a way to see if, is it, like, truly similar or is it different?

Payne: Exactly. It’s a good moment to probe further when you have that sense of recognition, yeah. 

Harrington: Thinking a little bit more broadly, maybe about the implications of this work, what do your findings suggest about how we might rethink the role of school counselors or college access programs?

Payne: Mm-hmm. So school counselors wear many hats in addition to college counseling. They work on everything from scheduling and tracking course credits to meet graduation requirements to like providing counseling to students in emotional distress.

Their rosters often include upwards of 300 or 400 students, and so it’s virtually impossible to offer the kind of college access support that so many students and communities need and that counselors want to offer when counselors are stretched so thin. So one thing that we need to do with regard to school counseling specifically is to really build out robust college access programs, including with dedicated staff. We need to start well before 12th grade because the work of preparing for college is a cumulative process, and we need to help students apply to more reach and match schools where they will receive better financial aid and be more likely to graduate instead of just applying to safeties, where we know they will be admitted. So absent dedicated college access staff, we also need to do more to train school counselors as college counselors. 

And increasingly, I would add that college access programs are thinking about college completion as two processes that are very intricately combined, and I think that is crucial and we should continue in that direction. 

Harrington: That’s super helpful, and I really can’t imagine, the role of a school counselor sounds so big and really, a tough job. So, yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense, like support and earlier can make that a lot less heavy. 

In your article, you argue that higher education doesn’t just equalize or reproduce inequality, but also produces ambiguity that people can be both better off and worse off at the same time. Can you speak a little bit on what that means and what the function of this ambiguity, like, is and how that plays out in the context of higher education in the U.S.? 

Payne: It was interesting to me in doing this analysis to find a contradiction, which was that higher education both can help make people who are worse off better off. It can have an equalizing effect, and that happens primarily when people complete college.

When people don’t complete college, higher education can have a, what sociologists would call a “reproductive effect.” It can just recreate existing inequalities or sometimes make them worse by creating situations where people who are already unlikely to complete, don’t, and are somehow then sometimes worse off because they have this debt. So that was really interesting to me.

We have one sort of institutional pathway, higher education, producing both equalizing and reproductive effects, and that’s ambiguous. So like, if I’m a student, how do I make a decision about that? If I’m a policymaker, how do I make a decision about that?

And my argument in the article about or my argument about ambiguity is really to say we have to grapple with this. We can’t act as if higher education is either only equalizing or only reproductive. It actually serves both functions in society, and if we can recognize that and address it, sort of honestly, we could engage with it and potentially boost the equalizing effects and minimize the reproductive effects.

Harrington: That’s so interesting, and of course it is both, right? That makes a lot of sense intuitively, but I know we often, we love like, “Is college good for you? Yes or no?” And the answer here is it depends, it seems, which is tough and nuanced, but I think really important to understand more deeply. 

Thinking about policy a little bit, given your findings, how do you think about proposals like targeted student debt relief or reforms that are focused on students who leave school before completing a degree?

Payne: Yeah, I mean, I think the basic reality is that college in the United States is too expensive, and one of our main current funding mechanisms for it, which is personal debt, is too burdensome, both individually and socially.

So, we need to lower the cost of college for new cohorts of folks, and we need to relieve some of the debt burden for cohorts that have already gone through higher ed. And I think that reinvesting in local and regional public institutions is one important step toward that. But I think it’s a both/and. We need to be reducing costs and relieving debt. 

Harrington: Has doing this research changed how you might talk with a student who’s on the fence about enrolling in college or about staying in college if they’re facing strain? Like how does this maybe inform yourself from the past?

Payne: Yeah. The paper at Sociology of Education really underscores that completion matters, and that going to college and finishing college can open the door to people who otherwise might be facing very limited labor market prospects. So, I think college really matters, and college completion, and what we do to support college completion really matters.

My follow-up interviews in New Orleans that kind of came after these quantitative findings really get at the meaning-making that people do as they navigate both higher education and, in particular, the labor market, and their trajectories afterward. And what I’m seeing there is that the way that people make sense of the opportunity structure, their selves, what self means, and the action that they’re gonna take can really be consequential, and it can be better or less well fit to the situations in which they find themselves. So, something that I would say to a student who is preparing to enter college is, there are a lot of narratives out there about what success looks like and how to get it. Whether you are looking at social media or you are on ChatGPT, there’s a lot of possible information about what to do. You have to think very critically about it. You have to think about what your beliefs are. You have to sort of step back and get to sort of a more meta level about how you’re strategizing and think about what your beliefs are and how they are fit or misfit to the situations that are– that you’re confronting or that are confronting you.

At the same time, I think that in conversations with young folks, it’s very easy to adopt a very individualized and individualizing lens. And so, I think it’s really important to stress to young folks an understanding of the social systems within which they’re operating, which we know are unequal.

Opportunity is not equally distributed in this society. There’s a raft of sociology evidence to that point and— and to which my research also contributes. So I think that both counseling people to make the best of the situations that they find themselves in, and to maintain an awareness about the structural nature of those situations is also important.

Harrington: What advice would you give to graduate students or young researchers who wanna connect their lived experience with their academic work, sort of how you have been able to do? 

Payne: Hmm. I’d say go for it. It can be really rewarding, and I think it also both broadens and strengthens what we know as social scientists and how we know it. So in that sense, it can be really important to do, as well. I’d also say that connecting my own prior experiences with my academic work has pushed me to be reflexive in my research in ways that might have appeared less necessary if I were studying a topic farther away from my lived experience, and I think that reflexivity is something I’ve found valuable.

I think I would tell graduate students that studying topics close to your own experience will probably stir up a variety of emotions. That’s great. Interrogate those emotions, and the work will probably be all the better for it.

Harrington: Yeah, that’s great advice. It sounds like this project has continued with some interviews. What’s next for your research, both within this project and beyond? Are there new projects or new directions that you’re excited about as you continue your work?

Payne: Yeah, there are a few. I’m excited to be following up with my original interview participants with, in a series of longitudinal interviews, which I’m turning into a book. I’m very excited about that. Another exciting project is a collaboration with Jayanti Owens here at the Broad Center. Right now, we’re thinking a lot about the precursors to college access, or for instance, outcomes during high school, and specifically about racial disparities in school discipline.

So we’re drawing on 170 interviews that we’ve conducted with public school teachers all across the country, and we’re learning about how cultural logics related to classroom management are racialized, and about how those logics could be sort of deployed differently in order to better protect minoritized students who are disproportionately impacted by zero-tolerance school discipline policies and the school-to-prison pipeline, for instance. So that’s one new project that I’m really excited about. 

And also, I think in the longer term, my interviews with young adults in New Orleans have also really underscored how student loans are important, but are still one piece of the broader puzzle of debt. So student loans combine with so many other kinds of debt, whether that’s credit card debt, car loans, medical debt, legal debt, payday loans. I mean, there’s a long list of other kinds of debt that people contend with, and debt is one of the ways that precarious workers stay afloat, but it can also sink them. So, I’m thinking about new work examining that relationship between work precarity and accumulated debt, not just student debt, and how those relationships between precarious work and accumulated debt shape individual and family trajectories in terms of socioeconomic advancement, but also schooling.

Harrington: That’s super interesting and sounds like another context where you might find that contradiction, like internal contradiction, right? So, like, it either enables or causes severe hardship, maybe both. 

Payne: Right. There’s an interesting literature that exists on debt, and it makes that point, that it kind of talks about good debts and bad debts. Good debts are wealth-building debts, and bad debts are not, and are debts that can really entrap people. Um, and so I’m– I, I think that’s probably part of why I’m really interested in debt, is because that, that same ambiguity seems to exist in this case as well.

Harrington: Yeah, that’s fascinating. Um, Sarah, can you tell us where people can learn some more about your work?

Payne: Sure. They can check out my website, which is sarahscpayne.com.

Harrington: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and speaking with me about the nuanced risks and opportunities afforded by higher education.

Payne: Thanks so much, Sarah. It’s been really fun.

Woman’s Voice: Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.

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