The journal Sociology of Education has published a major article, “The Graduate School Pipeline and First-Generation/Working-Class Inequalities,” produced by the American Sociological Association Taskforce on First-Generation and Working-Class Persons in Sociology.  That task force includes current and former WCSA members Allison Hurst, Deborah Warnock, Elizabeth Lee, Colby King, and Robert Francis. 

Based in wide-ranging survey data and qualitative feedback from over 450 sociology graduate students, the study reveals “an important connection between private undergraduate institutional enrollment and higher-status graduate program attendance—a pattern that undercuts social-class mobility in graduate training and creates notable precarities in debt, advising, and sense of belonging for first-generation and working-class graduate students.” Allison Hurst, a past WCSA president, is one of the article’s principal authors. 

The article is available for all to read at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00380407231215051.