Do Institutionalized Choice Sets Funnel Undergraduate Students to Wall Street?
Abstract
This study will analyze the impact of eRecruiting on the undergraduate student population
at Duke University. Specifically, it will focus on how the eRecruiting platform alters
the academically accepted career decision-making models put forth by many experts.
Traditional models propose that in order to make a decision, one must first accumulate
full information on the available jobs in the market; however, eRecruiting undermines
the process by offering a skewed vision of the external job market. A representative
sample of 1,221 jobs listed on eRecruiting was coded by both industry and occupation.
The resulting distribution was then compared to nationally representative data and
the findings suggest that the eRecruiting site leads to an institutionalized constrained
choice set which, in turn, constrains the job search process for Duke students. These
findings present many implications for Duke and its graduating students as well as
for universities across the country.
Description
Honors Thesis - The data from this original research was featured in a New York Times
article.
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
SociologySubject
career decision-makingoccupation
eRecruiting
constrained choice
student job choices
Campus Recruiting
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5382Citation
Genkin, Ryan (2012). Do Institutionalized Choice Sets Funnel Undergraduate Students to Wall Street?. Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/5382.Collections
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