About the Authors

Aprile D. Benner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. in Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests center on the development of low-income and race/ethnic minority youth, investigating how social contexts influence school transitions, experiences of marginalization, and developmental outcomes during adolescence. As a developmental psychologist, the core of her research program is a fundamental developmental question – what are the continuities and changes in the social, emotional, and cognitive growth and maturation of young people? – and she works to answer this question with an awareness of how such developmental patterns are embedded in groups, contexts, and social structures.

Sarah K. Bruch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses broadly on social stratification and public policy. In particular, she focuses on integrating theoretical insights from relational and social theorists into the empirical study of inequalities. She brings this approach to the study of social policy, education, race, politics, and citizenship.

Soo-yong Byun is Associate Professor of Educational Theory and Policy in the Department of Education Policy State at the Pennsylvania State University. His research investigates variation in mechanisms and processes of social stratification across different countries and geographic contexts using large-scale national and international data. His work also focuses on the rigorous assessment and evaluation of educational policies and school interventions especially relating to unique populations and contexts.

Robert Crosnoe is the C.B. Smith, Sr. Centennial Chair #4 at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is the Chair of the Department of Sociology, a member of the Population Research Center, and has a courtesy appointment in the Department of Psychology. His main fields are human development and sociology of education. His research focuses on social-psychological approaches to education and how they can illuminate socioeconomic and immigration-related inequalities in the United States. His current work focuses on the social experiences, mental health, and health behavior of adolescents and young adults from a variety of family backgrounds, the early education and development of children from Mexican immigrant families, and the ways that parents from different socioeconomic strata manage their children’s educational careers.

Pamela Davis-Kean is Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where her research focuses on the various pathways that the socioeconomic status (SES) of parents relates to the cognitive/achievement outcomes of their children. Her primary focus is on parental educational attainment and how it can influence the development of the home environment throughout childhood, adolescence, and the transition to adulthood. Dr. Davis-Kean is also a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research where she directs the Population, Neurodevelopment, and Genetics (PNG) program. This collaboration examines the complex transactions of brain, biology, and behavior as children and families develop across time. She is interested in how both the micro (brain and biology) and macro (family and socioeconomic conditions) aspects of development relate to cognitive changes in children across the lifespan.

Douglas B. Downey is motivated by the classic stratification question, “Who gets what and why?” In addition to researching the way family structure conditions children’s school performance, he has studied race and gender dynamics in the stratification system. His current interests center around the role that schools play in shaping inequality. With Joseph Merry and Joseph Workman, he is assessing whether schools’ compensatory role changed between 1998 and 2010. And with Paul von Hippel and Joseph Workman, he is testing whether schools exacerbate or reduce socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and gender-based gaps in social and behavioral skills.

Susan A. Dumais is Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehman College, City University of New York, and The Graduate Center. She is involved in multiple projects addressing education, inequality, and culture. Her current work examines trends in college access for first-generation college-goers, factors leading to persistence and graduation among first-generation students, and later life outcomes for first-generation college graduates. A second project focuses on how social class is associated with involvement in the arts, and whether and how involvement in the arts results in the reproduction of social class inequality or the upward mobility of individuals from less privileged backgrounds.

Adam Gamoran is President of the William T. Grant Foundation, a charitable organization that supports social science research on ways to reduce inequality and use evidence from research to improve outcomes for young people ages 5–25. His own research has focused on educational inequality and school reform.

Jeffrey Grigg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. His research interests include student mobility and transitions, student engagement, and intergenerational inequality.

Paul Hanselman is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Irvine Network on Interventions in Development at the University of California, Irvine. His research addresses how educational inequalities develop in school and the related impacts of specific policies and interventions, with a particular focus on organizational processes and school social environments.

Grace Kao is Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from The University of Chicago, and her A.B. in Sociology and Oriental Languages (Chinese Literature) from the University of California, Berkeley. She was the Past Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on race, ethnic, and immigrant differences in educational outcomes and interracial relationships among adolescents and young adults.

Laura Nichols is Associate Professor of Sociology at Santa Clara University in California, USA. Her latest research focuses on the institutional responses of colleges and the experiences of undocumented students as well as first generation college students. As an applied sociologist she also works with undergraduate students and conducts research with local communities using participatory action research techniques.

Hyunjoon Park is the Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Park is interested in educational stratification and family in cross-national comparative perspective, focusing on East Asia, particularly Korea and Japan. He has investigated how school and family effects on children’s educational outcomes vary according to institutional arrangements of educational systems, public policy, and demographic changes. He published a single-authored book, Re-Evaluating Education in Japan and Korea: De-mystifying Stereotypes (Routledge, 2013).

Suet-ling Pong was Professor of Education and Demography and had a courtesy appointment in Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research on sociology of education centers on the relationship between family structure and children’s education, parental practices and involvement, and the education of immigrants’ children. She passed away on 12 May, 2015.

Yuping Zhang received her Ph.D. in sociology at University of Pennsylvania in 2007 and has been teaching sociology at Lehigh University. Her research interests include educational stratification in rural China and gender disparities in labor market.