The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College

Join the Center for the Study of Inequality and Sociology Department  this Friday to welcome Jessi Streib (Sociology, Duke University) with the Cornell Population Center. Prof. Streib will talk on her newest book, The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College,. This talk will be held on Friday, September 6, at 3:00pm in Uris G08, as part of the Center for the Study of Inequality’s 2024-25 speaker series. Additional information on Professor Streib’s talk can be found below.

If you need support in accessing this programming, please contact John Niederbuhl at jwn3@cornell.edu.

Talk Abstract:

There's a fact so surprising as to be nearly unbelievable: students from disadvantaged and advantaged class backgrounds who graduate from the same college go on to earn the same amount. This fact is nearly unbelievable because it upends much of what we know about how inequality is reproduced. Class-advantaged students tend to know more professionals, maintain higher GPAs, complete more internships, understand more professional norms, and display more status symbols than their class-disadvantaged peers. Each of these factors is thought to matter for how much job-seekers are paid. But despite these inequalities, class-advantaged and class-disadvantaged college graduates go on to receive about the same average pay.

How does this happen? Based upon interviews with college students and hiring agents, observations of career fairs and events, and content analyses of students’ cover letters and resumes as well as employers’ job ads, I show how inequality is transformed into equality among business majors from non-elite universities. Here, it occurs through a newly unearthed opportunity structure: a luckocracy. Luckocracies hide information about where and how to get ahead from people of all classes, and they evaluate individuals using class-neutral criteria and processes. Because information is hidden, students from all class backgrounds must guess how to get ahead, and because they are evaluated in class-neutral ways, their guesses are equally likely to pay off. In this system, those who get ahead aren’t those with the most resources. Instead, they’re the lucky ones who guess well.

About Jessi Streib:

Jessi Streib is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Duke University and the co-recipient of the 2023 Early Career Award from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section of the American Sociological Association. Her work focuses on how people stay in or move out of their childhood class position and how class, gender, and racial inequalities are maintained and challenged.

She is the author of The Power of the Past: Understanding Cross-Class Marriages, Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall, the #1 new release in sociology The Accidental Equalizer: How Luck Determines Pay After College, and the forthcoming co-authored book, Is it Racist? Is it Sexist? Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas. In 2024, she became a contributing writer for Forbes.com.