Measuring Education and Skill

• Author: Chandra Muller
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716214550586
• Published date: 01 January 2015
• Date: 01 January 2015
• Subject Matter: Section II: Special Topics Relevant to Building a New Infrastructure

136 ANNALS, AAPSS, 657, January 2015

DOI: 10.1177/0002716214550586

Measuring

Education and

Skill

By

CHANDRA MULLER

550586ANN The Annals of the American AcademyMeasuring Education and Skill

research-article2014

This article reviews recent developments in measuring

education and skill that need to be taken into account

in any new initiative to monitor social mobility. Over

the past half-century, patterns of educational participa-

tion and attainment have become more heterogeneous,

a trend that has been accompanied by increases in

assessment and testing practices, and the availability of

electronic data sources and other administrative

records, including official school transcripts that are

generally held indefinitely. This article describes the

most promising approaches to measuring education

and discusses some of the possible challenges for using

the information to study social mobility. Measures of

educational concepts fall along at least one of several

dimensions: credentials earned, qualities of the schools

attended, the amount and nature of curricular expo-

sure, and the development and acquisition of skills.

Selected data sources, with an emphasis on school

transcripts and administrative records, and their possi-

ble uses are described.

Keywords: education; schools; schooling; measure-

ment; higher education; K–12 education

This article reviews recent developments in

measuring education and skill that need to

be taken into account in any new initiative to

monitor social mobility. Over the past half-

century, patterns of educational attainment

have changed in ways that are important for our

understanding of the role of education both as

Chandra Muller is the Alma Cowden Madden

Centennial Professor in Sociology at the University of

Texas at Austin. She is principal investigator (in col-

laboration with co-principal investigators Sandra

Black, Eric Grodsky, and John Robert Warren) of stud-

ies currently following up the High School and Beyond

sophomore and senior cohorts. She led a study, the

Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study,

that added an education component to the National

Longitudinal Study of Adolescence (Add Health), and a

study that added a postsecondary education component

to the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997

(NLSY-97).