Aleksei Opacic

(Sociology)
Ph.D. Date: May 2027 (Expected)
Dissertation Title: College-to-Work(place) Linkages and the Returns to Education
Dissertation Committee: Xiang Zhou (Chair), Christina Ciocca Eller, Christopher Winship, and Nathan Wilmers (MIT Sloan)
Research Interests: Economic Sociology, Economic and educational Inequality, Organizations, Quantitative and Computational Methods
Aleksei Opacic's website: https://alekseiopacic.github.io/

My research examines how organizations distribute opportunity across schooling and work and the implications for social stratification. My projects have studied: how colleges channel students into firms and jobs; how mismatch between skills and workplace tasks generates earnings inequality; how employers evaluate and recruit talent; and how alternative college admissions policies would affect mobility. To make these processes visible, I build novel administrative data linkages (often through collaborations with state agencies and firms), construct my own sources of textual data, and use a range of computational tools, including natural language processing and machine learning. I have also developed causal inference methods to isolate the role of organizations in the stratification process and workplace inequality more broadly.