My empirical work focuses on education to investigate equalizing and reproductive social forces and their relationship to racial inequality. I am especially curious about how culture, social psychology, and emotion relate to inequality.
In one line of research, I use qualitative and quantitative methods to study what happens after historically marginalized students leave college, with or without a degree. I focus in particular on the hundreds of thousands of historically marginalized youth who start but do not complete college, yet are under-studied in stratification research. I examine both 1) the ideological resources Pell-eligible young adults draw upon to make sense of lived experiences of precarity after exiting higher education, as well as how these ideologies shape mobility processes and pathways, and 2) the financial consequences of attending but not completing higher education, including the role of educational debt.
A second line of research on schools as organizations, a collaboration with Yale SOM faculty, is on-going. Please contact me to learn more.
Articles
Payne, Sarah. 2023. “Equalization or Reproduction? ‘Some College’ and the Social Function of Higher Education.” Sociology of Education 96(2):104-128 https://doi.org/10.1177/00380407221134809.
ABSTRACT: What are the economic consequences of college non-completion? Given escalating student debt, is ‘some college’ still worth it? This paper applies Augmented Inverse Probability Weighting to the NLSY97 to estimate the causal effect of college non-completion on income and financial hardship. Although non-completion yields higher income than never attending college, it also increases financial hardship among more-disadvantaged groups through the mechanism of student debt. However, non-completers of most groups would have had greater income and experienced less financial hardship had they graduated. Such contradictions complicate equalization and reproduction theories of higher education, because higher education appears to have both equalizing (in the case of completion) and reproductive (in the case of non-completion) effects. I argue this ambiguity is substantively meaningful, suggesting future research should examine whether the production of ambiguity constitutes a key social function of higher education.
Payne, Sarah. “Mobility Ideologies: College Outcomes, Meaning, and Social Motility among Low-Income Black Youth.”
Payne, Sarah and coauthors. “Transformations in Socializing Organizations." (Working title.)
Payne, Sarah. “The Affect System.”
Book
Payne, Sarah. American Dreaming: Mobility and Ideology after College. (Working title.) Book proposal under review.
Publications & Working Papers
Drawing on my applied work in college access and college persistence, my dissertation uses in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork to investigate the ideological resources that first-generation, Pell-eligible, young Black adults in New Orleans, LA, draw upon to understand the precarity they experience after college.
Despite similar backgrounds and precarious presents, my participants make sense of their experiences in three starkly different ways.
Gardeners believe their selves are wounded or flawed and must heal or grow in order to achieve mobility. They view society’s opportunity structure as relatively open, and value other people as aides toward internal development. Climbers believe the self is capable and whole, a vehicle made to navigate opportunity’s possibilities and barriers. They focus on engaging their social networks to help them take the right external risks. And seekers believe the self is whole, but trapped in a relatively closed opportunity structure. They orient action and relationships around personal liberation.
I term these worldviews about the self, social action, and social context mobility ideologies, explore their social origins, and show how they interact with social means (like social and cultural capital) and ends (like goals) to shape unequal mobility pathways.
My dissertation abstract is available here. I am developing this project into a book manuscript.
Mobility Ideologies
In this project, I apply tools of causal inference to a nationally-representative data set (the NLSY97) to study how starting but not completing a post-secondary degree — what social science surveys often call ‘some college’ — reproduces inequality.
Much research on educational attainment has focused on the consequences of earning post-secondary credentials. By contrast, I focus on the large proportion of undergraduates (in the U.S., just under 50%) who begin higher education but do not graduate, exploring the relationship between ‘some college’ and race, class, and gender inequality.
I show, for instance, that the financial consequences of ‘some college’ vary considerably by socioeconomic status, and that while more-disadvantaged groups earn more income on average, they also experience more financial hardship following ‘some college’ as a result of educational debt.
The U.S. case of ‘some college’ demonstrates higher education’s simultaneous equalizing and reproductive effects, and I call for theory and policy to grapple with this.
‘Some College’ & Social Reproduction
In a large-scale collaborative project, my coauthors and I draw on in-depth interviews with public school educators across the U.S. This project is on-going. Please contact me for more information.
Schools as Organizations
Affect & Emotion
How do emotion and affect relate to race and racial inequality? I engage this question in three ways.
First, I explore how mobility ideologies produce feelings of satisfaction in historically marginalized individuals and groups under neoliberalism.
Second, I am developing a study of the racial history of student debt in the United States, including its racialized moral and affective economies (e.g., surrounding shame, dignity, and worthiness).
Third, an exploratory theoretical project asks: what is the relationship between culture and affect? Sociologists tend to think about affects as epiphenomenal of other social forces or domains (namely, culture and political economy). In contrast, cultural scholar Sara Ahmed posits that affects circulate, “sticking to” and constituting both objects and subjects, and forming affective economies. What if social scientists (and society) instead constituted affect, long subordinated through racialization and feminization, as a foundational social object or system, as we constitute polity, economy, and culture? Is there an empirical basis for an “affect system”?