Dirk Witteveen joined the Department of Sociology in 2020. He uses quantitative/computational methods to answer questions about economic inequalities in the United States and Europe, labour market policies, racial and ethnic inequities, class and social mobility, higher education, mental health, and incarceration. Dirk obtained his PhD from the City University of New York. From 2018 to 2021 he was a Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at Nuffield College.
Dirk’s current research projects examine how pathways in undergraduate programmes, such as field of study, loan-taking, and tuition fees, affect post-college inequalities in graduate school attainment, access to employment, and occupational matching. This research line is informed by theories on welfare states, higher education systems, meritocracy, and political economy. In addition, his research on social mobility and stratification explores social closure mechanisms of workplaces and occupations, and their consequences for economic inequalities within career trajectories. Dirk’s research has been published in Social Forces, Sociology of Education, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Science Research, and Research in Social Stratification and Mobility.
