Dr. Steven Alvarado is a CDE Visiting Scholar and will be joining us February 10th – 14th.
Residential income segregation has grown steadily in the United States over the past several decades. Meanwhile, as the economic returns to a college degree have grown, so have enrollments in postsecondary education. How are these two secular trends related and what does it mean for inequality? This paper examines three recent cohorts of students in the U.S. to investigate whether neighborhoods have become more salient for college outcomes. I theorize that as well-off families compete for access to neighborhoods ripe with educationally-rich opportunities for their children, the effect of neighborhood context on college outcomes will similarly grow across cohorts.
Dr. Steven Alvarado is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research and teaching centers on how neighborhood disadvantage impinges on well-being across the life course, racial and ethnic inequality in education, the multigenerational structure of inequality, and policies that can potentially alleviate inequality. Using quantitative methods and federally restricted longitudinal data sets, Steven accounts for how inequality manifests through the unequal distribution of resources across racial and ethnic groups in schools and neighborhoods. His published work can be found in peer-reviewed journals such as Social Forces, Social Science Research, Health and Place, Socius, Research in Higher Education, Race and Social Problems, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Prior to Notre Dame, Steven was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Cornell University.