In The Education Trap, Groeger explores how the modern American education system and corporate economy mutually constituted one another from 1880 through the Great Depression. Using Boston as a case study, she analyzes how schooling expanded and became the primary pathway to work across the employment structure in this period, replacing a wide array of pathways and informal training, including apprenticeships, kinship, and ethnic networks. This transformation took place within, and became part of, political and economic struggles for power in the workplace. Groeger traces these contests and their different outcomes within the fields of low-wage work, trades and craftwork, “pink collar” jobs in stores and offices, the legal and education professions, and corporate management.

Whereas human-capital theory and popular narratives about this change equate more education with greater skills, opportunity, and equality, Groeger shows how employers and elites used education to assert control or status within changing workplaces...

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