The Career Path Dependency Index (CPDI)

Educational pathways differ in how strongly they constrain, channel, or preserve later occupational opportunities. This working paper introduces the Career Path Dependency Index (CPDI), a structural framework for comparing educational pathways according to the degree to which they pre-structure later occupational destinations and candidate pools. CPDI is designed for use within candidate-pool and endpoint-indeterminacy analysis. Before an occupational or institutional endpoint is interpreted, the educational pathway that generated its candidate pool should be assessed in terms of structural path dependence. The framework contains five dimensions: occupational specificity at entry; credential closure; occupational concentration after completion; switching cost; endpoint-relative downstream transition complexity. The paper distinguishes between CPDI ex ante, based on structural pathway characteristics assessed before examining the endpoint, and CPDI full, which additionally incorporates independently observed education-to-occupation concentration. This distinction is intended to reduce circularity and to separate structural classification from empirical validation. The paper provides scoring rules, interpretive categories, methodological guardrails, illustrative pathway classifications, falsification conditions, robustness checks, and a research-design template. It also discusses possible validation using occupational matching, education-to-work linkage, propagation gaps, and occupational entropy. CPDI is not a measure of prestige, educational difficulty, merit, earnings, quality, fairness, or individual ability. It is not a deterministic model of careers. It is a transparent diagnostic framework for assessing how strongly educational pathways constrain or preserve later occupational possibilities. This working paper forms part of the Institutional Selection Framework research programme. Within that programme, Endpoint Indeterminacy defines the inferential problem, the Candidate Pool Proposition identifies the primary diagnostic unit, CPDI measures pathway constraint, and cohort-propagation analysis examines how earlier candidate pools may appear in later institutional outcomes.