Date of Award

2025

Degree Type

Restricted to Claremont Colleges Dissertation

Degree Name

Education, PhD

Program

School of Educational Studies

Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair

Guan Saw

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

Gwen Garrison

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

Bruce Matsui

Terms of Use & License Information

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Rights Information

© 2025 Lindsey T Kunisaki

Keywords

arts education, creative careers, creative industries, creative workforce, inequality, longitudinal studies

Subject Categories

Education

Abstract

Pathways into creative careers—i.e., in the arts, culture, entertainment, and related fields—are fraught with inequalities, starting in early life. This dissertation uses restricted-use data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002) to investigate cumulative inequalities in creative arts opportunities to learn (CA-OTL) and creative educational and career outcomes. Examining disparities by gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (SES) from adolescence to early adulthood, this dissertation draws from interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives of cumulative inequality theory, fundamental cause theory, and opportunity-to-learn in a novel conceptual framework. In three interrelated studies, this dissertation follows a nationally representative cohort of tenth graders into early adulthood, examining cumulative inequalities in (1) longitudinal creative career aspirations and attainment, (2) high school CA-OTL and postsecondary creative studies, and (3) postsecondary CA-OTL and creative educational and career outcomes. These studies utilize a novel definition for creative career pathways, accounting for the broad range of educational and occupational pathways pursued and held by creative career seekers. Here, creative career pathways are defined as educational or occupational trajectories devoted to the creation, dissemination, or preservation of cultural products, as well as creative arts-based care. This definition contributes a comprehensive yet domain-specific conceptualization of creative careers otherwise missing from existing occupational classification systems. Throughout this dissertation, this definition was operationalized to classify postsecondary creative courses, creative majors, and creative occupations. Across the studies, analytic samples varied in each study to include high schoolers and subsamples of college-goers and creative majors. Analyses included block-entry hierarchical linear probability models, ordinary least squares regressions, and moderation analyses for subgroup variation. Results showed that inequalities in CA-OTL accumulate over time and explain some disparities in creative career pursuits. Gender, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic gaps in creative educational and career outcomes were explained by some CA-OTL, with school-based indicators being especially strongly associated with most outcomes. In the larger samples of high schoolers and college-goers, associations between CA-OTL and some outcomes varied by demographic subgroup. Compared with boys and White students, girls and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) respectively saw stronger positive associations between high school CA-OTL and postsecondary creative studies but weaker associations between postsecondary CA-OTL and degree completion. Socioeconomically, positive associations between CA-OTL and respective outcomes were generally stronger for the high SES group than their middle and lower SES counterparts, but a few exceptions suggest that some CA-OTL may disrupt socioeconomic inequities in creative career outcomes. For creative majors, postsecondary creative credit-earning, internships, and faculty research opportunities were all more strongly associated with creative outcomes than they were for non-creative majors. Further, among the small subsample of creative majors, creative arts credit-earning (in high school and postsecondary studies) and internships were found to be positively associated with creative educational and career outcomes. This dissertation offers novel conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions to the literature. Results from these three studies both support and extend the theoretical framework, offering novel interdisciplinary perspectives on cumulative inequalities in creative career pathways. Extending cumulative inequality theory into this domain, empirical evidence across all three studies shows compositional changes in the cohort of creative career seekers, with White and high SES students accounting for increasingly large shares of the studies’ samples as the cohort advances from adolescence to adulthood. Methodologically, this dissertation operationalizes its novel definition for postsecondary courses, creative majors, and creative careers across three national coding frames: College Course Map (CCM), Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), and the Occupational Information Network (O*NET). This dissertation’s limitations also suggest directions for future research, particularly in seeking larger samples, domain-specific measures, and expanded lifespan perspectives. Recommendations for policy and practice call for expansion of inclusive CA-OTL. Viewing early CA-OTL as part of the lifelong creative career pathway, policymakers might seek to close gaps in arts availability by bolstering school-level resources for creative arts education and equitably attending to the entire pathway from P-20 to the creative workforce. Recommendations for practice include reducing barriers to participation in CA-OTL by creating more inclusive classroom conditions, postsecondary admissions practices, and pedagogies to build on creative career seekers’ strengths. While CA-OTL offer promising potential to disrupt and reduce inequalities, a cautionary eye toward the emergence of new mechanisms of inequality invites further inquiry and collaboration in sustaining inclusive access and equitable support across creative career pathways.

ISBN

9798290970752

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