Congested credentials: The material and positional economies of schooling

Sociologists have grown increasingly aware that the role of education in systems of stratification is more positional than absolute. The value of one’s level of attainment is less a simple function of the amount of schooling one has attained, and more a function of how much schooling one has relative to others in the educational queue. The idea of education as a positional good has far-reaching implications for research on such topics as job matching, educational expansion, and educational credentialism. I assess recent sociological treatments of educational positionality, and offer some directions for future research.