Education and Society

Education and Society

Schools and colleges are transforming the lives of individual learners and their families. They play a core role in society. At the same time, they are continuously transformed by politics, markets, and scientific, technological, and cultural change. Sociologists of education and higher education at Harvard are engaged in basic and applied research, both contemporary and historical, and focusing on the United States as well as on cross-national and cross-cultural analyses. The broad array of research in this cluster applies core sociological concepts, such as equity and (in)equality; race and ethnicity; social networks; immigration; stratification; organizations; culture; social mobility; socialization and others to the study of education.

The research cluster has links to the Graduate School of Education (GSE), the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Education, the Secondary Field in Education Studies and the Mahindra Seminar on Universities: Past, Present and Future.

Affiliated Graduate Students

News related to Education and Society

Christina Ciocca Eller

Faculty Spotlight: Considering the Impacts of COVID-19 on Higher Education Inequality in the United States

June 1, 2020

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.

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