GSE Colloquium Series in Education Data Science: Aleksei Opacic
From Flagship to Firm: Gatekeeping, Employer Sorting, and the Returns to College
Explaining variation in the economic returns to attending different colleges is essential for understanding the institutional mechanisms through which education reproduces inequality - and for identifying the features of colleges that generate value. Yet while firms increasingly shape graduates' labor market earnings, the vast literature on the value-added of college has largely overlooked the role of employers.
In this talk, I present findings from a paper that examines how college-to-workplace pipelines shape the economic returns to higher education. To assess this mechanism, I assemble a novel US employer-employee dataset merged with postsecondary and high school academic transcripts and textual catalog records. Leveraging a double-machine-learning approach, I show that firm placement explains much of the variation in earnings premiums between colleges: absent firm sorting, the range of counterfactual earnings differences across colleges would fall by 56%, and half of the earnings advantage of attending the state flagship arises from access to higher-paying employers. These sorting effects extend broadly across the distribution of high-wage firms, rather than being confined to a handful of elite employers. Crucially, sorting effects do not simply reflect skill-based advantages conferred by colleges, implying that college quality derives as much from institutional linkages to the labor market as from human capital development. I conclude by discussing how policies aimed at broadening recruitment pipelines, rather than solely improving instructional inputs, are essential to reducing inequalities in the economic returns to higher education.
Aleksei Opacic is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Harvard University. Across substantive and methodological research agendas, Aleksei combines survey data, administrative records, and textual sources with computational techniques to uncover the mechanisms underpinning the payoff to college. His methodological work develops new causal inference approaches to estimating educational effects on both individual outcomes and group inequalities. Substantively, his research examines education-to-work transitions, revealing how skills and credentials are translated into economic returns through employer sorting and skill-job alignment. In ongoing projects, Aleksei collaborates with state education agencies and technology firms to build new data infrastructures that connect educational and employment records, illuminating how hiring, skill assessment, and job matching processes jointly shape inequality in students' transitions from school to work.
Aleksei received an AM in Statistics from Harvard, an MSc in Sociology from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Social and Political Science from the University of Cambridge. His work has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and has been supported by grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Kennedy Memorial Trust, and the EdRedesign Lab.
