Amid the unprecedented disruption of COVID-19, the 2019-2020 academic year has come to a close for most college and university students in the United States. Yet many are asking: now what? Higher education leaders are offering some answers, speaking to immediate concerns like whether teaching and learning will take place on colleges campuses come the fall, how financial arrangements will be handled, and what scaled-up virtual learning might look like.

But other, longer-term issues remain, perhaps with even more consequential implications for the U.S. higher education sector. One of the most pressing, argues Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies, Christina Ciocca Eller, is how to understand and address longstanding inequalities between students from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, especially in light of COVID-19.... Read more about Considering the Impacts of COVID-19 on Higher Education Inequality in the United States

For many decades now social scientists have shown how, in so many ways, one's ethnoracial background is associated with a whole host of important outcomes from educational attainment to labor market outcomes to health.  Many studies also provide compelling evidence of ethnoracial disparities in the criminal justice system – the probability of being arrested, incarcerated, and even the length of criminal sentences.  ... Read more about More Than Just Race: Skin Tone and the Criminal Justice System

The dramatic transformation of family patterns in advanced capitalist societies has received much attention in both academia and the popular press. News coverage of family change in East Asia, especially, is fueling alarm and anxiety with frequent stories about how low-fertility rates are contributing to rapidly aging populations, an unsustainable trend given the fragility of pension programs specifically, and welfare systems generally.... Read more about The Rise of Non-Normative Households in South Korea

Although traditionally known as “the world’s factory,” China’s economy has changed immensely in recent years. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the number of jobs in the manufacturing sector has been declining since 2012, whereas jobs in the service sector have been increasing. As the country’s economy and primary industries have changed, so too have its labor conflicts. Ya-Wen Lei, Assistant Professor of Sociology, investigates the labor organizing of drivers for China’s fast-growing food-delivery platforms.... Read more about Labor Contention in China’s Changing Economy

... Read more about The Production of Wealth Gaps between Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics

Michèle Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies, Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies, served as the 108th president of the American Sociological Association in 2016-17. Her term took an unexpected turn with the election of Donald Trump in November 2016: it befell on her to take a leadership role in defending the professional interests of sociologists and the conditions for academic freedom.... Read more about Lamont Presidential Lecture out in American Sociological Review

Mary Brinton has been studying gender inequality for a long time, motivated in particular by the high level of gender inequality in Japan and other East Asian societies. Her current project considers gender inequality in light of what many social demographers consider a crisis of the family as an institution—namely, the emergence of historically low birth rates throughout the postindustrial world.... Read more about Gender Inequality, Employment, and Family in Postindustrial Societies