Thomas Espenshade

Thomas J. Espenshade is Senior Scholar, Lecturer with rank of Professor, Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, Office of Population Research at Princeton University. His past research has concentrated on social demography, with an emphasis on population economics, mathematical demography, family and household demography, contemporary U.S. immigration, and diversity in higher education. His book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life (co-authored with Alexandria Walton Radford and published by Princeton University Press in 2009), received the Bourdieu Award in 2011 from the American Sociological Association for the best book in the sociology of education. His current research is focused on the achievement gap and the roles of family circumstances and parenting behaviors as they relate to school readiness. Espenshade received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton in 1972 and joined the Princeton faculty in 1988. In between, he held positions at the University of California-Berkeley, Bowdoin College, Florida State University, The Urban Institute, and Brown University.