Superficially Coupled Systems: The Organizational Production of Inequality in Higher Education

Speaker: Christina Ciocca Eller, Harvard University

The rise of accountability standards has pressed higher education organizations to produce and publish data on student outcomes at higher rates than ever before. However, it remains unclear whether the existing accountability standards governing American higher education are aligned with the goal of assessing organizational impacts on student performance. Extending scholarship in the new institutionalist tradition, I hypothesize that higher education organizations today exist as, “superficially coupled systems,” where colleges closely oversee their "technical outputs" in the form of data production and reporting, but where these technical outputs in fact provide limited insight into the direct role of colleges and universities in producing them. I first test the validity of existing data reporting standards in the United States as a tool for assessing organizational performance using administrative data from a large, urban, public university system in the United States, together with fixed effects regression and entropy balancing techniques. I then investigate heterogeneity of effects by student race and family income and conclude by detailing the theoretical basis for superficially coupled systems. My results provide evidence for the disjuncture between standard accountability metrics and the assessment of organizational performance, suggesting that inequality in college effectiveness exists both between colleges and within colleges. The results additionally indicate that institutionalized norms surrounding accountability have backfired, enabling higher education organizations, and other bureaucratic organizations like them, to maintain legitimacy without identifying and addressing inequality.

Christina Ciocca Eller is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard University. Her research draws on quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the role of organizations in shaping the opportunities and outcomes available to individuals. Her primary case, reflected in her dissertation research, is the U.S. higher education sector. This dissertation work, “Organization Effects on Bachelor’s Degree Completion for the New Majority,” brought together key ideas from the stratification and organizations literatures to study the interactions between students and colleges. Specifically, Ciocca Eller uses longitudinal data from both administrative records and a yearlong interview study of students attending a large, urban, public university system in the U.S. to quantify "college effects," or the independent impact of colleges on student outcomes, as well as the individual and organizational forces that explain those effects. She also has analyzed the black/white gap in BA completion and the relationship between course-taking and labor market outcomes, and has studied school-to-work transitions in comparative international contexts. Her work is published in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review and has been supported by the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education Sciences, and the National Science Foundation.