Paths to Work: The Rise of Credentials in American Society, 1890-1940

Cristina Groeger

Her dissertation, “Paths to Work: The Rise of Credentials in American Society, 1880-1940,” looks at the restructuring of paths to work through new forms of education and training for men and women in Boston, as a way of exploring the structure of opportunity in the United States. It maps the landscape of formal education in the late 19th century, and how these institutions related to the local job market in different occupations, from day laborers to the professions. It then follows the rapid expansion of secondary and higher education over the next decades; a political process through which public schools, private universities, educational reformers, professional associations, trade unions, parents, and students sought to shape the relationship between education and work.

About Cristina Groeger

Cristina Groeger is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Harvard University, interested in the urban, political, and social history of the United States. After graduating from Harvard College in 2008 with a degree in Social Studies, she spent one year in Berlin, Germany at the European College of Liberal Arts, after which she taught European and U.S. History at Moravian Academy in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She then received an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge, where she wrote a thesis on the workers’ educational movement in early 20th-century United Kingdom and United States.