Americans often believe that a college degree is the key that unlocks the door to the middle class. However, a college degree no longer ensures stable middle-class employment. To increase their chances of post-graduation employment, many students now major in "practical arts" disciplines like Business and Engineering. Graduates of practical arts fields enjoy lower unemployment rates, higher salaries, and other labor market advantages when compared to liberal arts graduates. Common explanations of these labor market advantages assume that these students, more than liberal arts students, learn valuable skills that employers need. This is a human capital theory explanation of the school-to-work transition. Scholars who assess for this mechanism connecting school and work often look for whether a graduate's employment matches their degree. However, this assumes the content of a student's education matches the actual tasks they are assigned in entry-level employment. In this dissertation, I investigate this assumption and find little evidence to support it. Based on longitudinal in-depth interviews with 91 college seniors across four majors, 85 of whom were retained for a second interview one year later, I demonstrate that practical arts alumni have access to internships that lead to greater initial economic success than the internships available to liberal arts graduates. Many undergraduates in practical arts disciplines benefit from on-campus recruitment for internships that lead to good jobs after graduation with decent pay, benefits, and opportunities for advancement. However, these jobs often entail almost exclusively mundane office work even when closely matched to their degree. Students who cannot take advantage of these "career conveyor belts," principally liberal arts majors, generally find internships with less institutional support that rarely lead to immediate jobs. When these students graduate, they sometimes find work that engages their skills but struggle with more employment insecurity and lower wages. The divergent experiences of practical and liberal arts students reveal a "paradox of marketability": liberal arts graduates' skills are useful and needed by employers but are not highly rewarded in the labor market. On the other hand, the careerism of practical arts students makes them marketable to employers even when they are not asked to demonstrate any degree-related skills. This dissertation takes a new approach to the school-to-work transition, incorporating institutionalist approaches to stratification and higher education, and labor process theory, to maps students' transitions from their college major to their internships and finally into the labor market. Results add important nuance to current theories of the school-to-work transition, specifically human capital theory and credentialism. Ultimately, I argue the economy gives college graduates a choice between stable employment and interesting jobs. The lack of access to stable employment helps explain, and contributes to, the cultural devaluation of liberal arts disciplines in the economy and wider society. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]