About me

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I study the relationships between higher education and social stratification. How do educational institutions perpetuate or interrupt patterns of inequality? How are educational advantages and disadvantages consolidated across generations?  How do higher educational institutions shape social status?

While these are large and cumbersome sociological questions, I have been able to make a few unique empirical and methodological contributions to date. First, I collaborated with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to data-enter and code a variable that the survey had collected since 1975, but had never processed or released. I went to the PSID basement at the University of Michigan, opened dusty boxes, handled yellowing paper surveys, and entered in the names of institutions that respondents had attended. I did this for some 16,000 cases. Now, any social science researcher can use the data I coded by merging them with forty-two years of longitudinal, nationally representative PSID data. Rather than investigating questions solely about level of education, my variable allows individuals access to the name of the institution attended, so a much more granular analysis can be done on geography and institutional characteristics.

To date, I have made two empirical contributions using these new data. First, in an article in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (an international sociological journal, impact factor: 1.63), I argue that the type of college a parent attended is a predictor in the type of college their child attended. While income, wealth and level of parent education had been linked to child college attendance, my work is the first to show that when controlling for these other variables, parent college selectivity was associated with child college selectivity.

Second, in an article (soon to be) under review in Research in Sociology of Education, I demonstrate that college campuses stratify society not only by influencing labor market outcomes, but marriage market outcomes as well. While prior research has demonstrated that individuals tend to partner with others with similar level of education, it was not known whether this pattern was driven by individuals meeting on campuses (same-college partnering) or later on (between college partnering). My work is the first of show that about 30% of college graduates who marry, do so with someone who attended the exact same college. This work is of special interest to demographers and has earned me an invitation to speak at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty in the spring 2017 semester.