The Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy

Faculty

Mitchell L. Stevens

Associate Professor of Educational Sociology

Mitchell L. Stevens

Phone: 212-998-5501
Email:

Mitchell Stevens (B.A., Macalester College, 1988; M.A. 1989 and Ph.D., Sociology, Northwestern, 1996)  is an organizational sociologist with expertise in higher education, alternative schooling, and the quantification of academic accomplishment. He is the author of Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Harvard, 2007), and Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (Princeton, 2001).


Publications

  • Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Harvard University Press, 2007) (link)
  • "Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub: Empirical and Theoretical Advances in the Sociology of Higher Education" (w/ Elizabeth Armstrong and Richard Arum), Annual Review of Sociology, forthcoming. (view)
  • "Culture and Education," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, forthcoming (view)
  • "An Admissions Race That's Already Won," Chronicle of Higher Education, 11 January 2007 (link)
  • Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement (Princeton University Press, 2001) (link)
  • "The Normalisation of Home Education in Homeschooling in the USA," Evaluation and Research in Education 17 (2003):90-100. (view)
  • "Commensuration" (w/ Wendy Nelson Espeland), Encylopedia of Social Measurement 375-378, Encyclopedia of Social Measurement (San Diego: Academic Press), 2005. (view)
  • "Commensuration as a Social Process" (w/ Wendy Nelson Espeland), Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998):313-344. (view)
  • "The Organizational Vitality of Conservative Protestantism," in Michael Lounsbury and Marc Ventresca, editors, Social Structure and Organizations Revisited (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Volume 19, Newbury Park: Sage), 2002. (view)

Courses

  • E10.2132 Principles of Empirical Inquiry
  • E10.2145 Advanced Seminar in Qualitative Methods
  • E10.2180 Interviewing and Observation
  • E20.1030 Art and the City:  A Sociological Perspective
  • E20.2400 Educational Sociology
  • E20.3030 Sociological Theory

Research Interests

  • Higher Education
  • Quantification
  • Complex organizations
  • Sociology of culture
  • alternative educational forms
  • Qualitative methods