Jane L. Furey

I am a sociologist working at the intersection of education, stratification, and social demography. I apply quantitative methods, including demographic, computational, and experimental techniques, to investigate how education attained at different stages in the life course reduces, expands, or maintains inequalities across various domains. My research has been supported by the NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and has been published in the American Sociological Review, Research on Social Stratification and Mobility, and AERA Open, among other outlets.

My dissertation focuses on whether education attained in mid-life – which I refer to as educational upgrading — reduces, expands, or maintains inequality. Upgrading can reduce inequality if it provides opportunities for individuals to “catch up” after facing earlier disadvantages; it can expand inequality if it enables already advantaged individuals to pull further ahead. Across three empirical papers, I highlight the conditions under which upgrading can be equalizing or stratifying. My dissertation research has received awards from the American Sociological Association sections on Aging and the Life Course, Population, and Race, Gender and Class. In addition to my dissertation, my research agenda also includes several collaborative and independent projects that examine education policy, racial inequality, and social mobility in the United States.