Prior to joining the Columbia faculty,DiPrete served on the faculties of the University of Chicago,Duke University,and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Currently,DiPrete serves as Giddings Professor of Sociology,co-director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research Policy,co-director of the Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality at Columbia University,and a member of the faculty of the Columbia Population Research Center.
DiPrete’s research interests encompass social stratification and mobility,education,economic sociology,family,demography,and quantitative methodology.[1] His research has focused on applying quantitative methods to the study of social and gender inequality in education and in the workforce. His ongoing projects include the study of gender differences in educational performance,educational attainment,and fields of study. Additionally,he has studied the connection between education and the labor market contributing to earnings inequality. However,he has also done extensive work in the field of unequal compensation of corporate executives,including developing the leapfrog theory.[2] His works have introduced several widely-known theories of sociology. He has been one of the most influential figures in the modern generation of sociologists for his works in educational inequality and CEO compensation.
Biography
Early Life and Education
Born in Providence,Rhode Island,DiPrete earned his B.S. in Humanities and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972) before completing his Ph.D. in Sociology at Columbia University (1978). His interdisciplinary training included a master’s degree in mathematical statistics.
Academic Career
DiPrete has held faculty positions at:
University of Chicago (1979–1988)
Duke University (1988–2005)
University of Wisconsin–Madison (2010–2011)
Columbia University (2004–present)
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2022) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2015),his research integrates advanced quantitative methods with studies of educational systems,labor markets,and intergenerational mobility. He has held visiting positions at institutions including the Max Planck Institute and the Russell Sage Foundation.
Ideas
Job Attainment
DiPrete researched the impact of equal employment opportunity (EEO) initiatives in the early 1970s. More specifically,he investigated the impact this had on the upward mobility of lower-level employees. Previously,professionalization acted as a status divider. It increased the status gap between upper- and lower-level jobs by creating distinct administrative and professional career lines that couldn’t be attained by those working in lower-level jobs. For professional jobs,Diprete recognized that candidates needed to have a college education. The professional and non-professional career lines in the federal government were made distinct formally with the Classification Act of 1923. While administrative jobs don’t require the same level of education as professional jobs do,the lines to attain them were manipulated. The United States Civil Service Commission included four career lines in the general administrative and clerical occupational group in 1941,where many administrative roles were. By 1957,three out of these 64 career lines were exclusively administrative,and by 1983,it went up to eleven.
EEO programs attempted to reverse this separation. Diprete’s findings found that in 1973,about 10,000 federal employees were benefiting from EEO programs.[3] Consequently,lower-level employees accomplished significant status promotion. A greater proportion of upper-level entry positions were filled by lower-level employees who had been promoted. While certain professional roles required a college education for proper training,the grades of upper- and lower-level positions overlapped in the middle levels of white-collar jobs. Therefore,the lower-level employees could get promoted through additional training on the job. About 90% of these lower level employees were women,and about half were minorities. Therefore,these initiatives mainly benefited them. Still,Diprete’s findings showed that female and minority lower-level employees were not more likely to get a promotion compared to male and white colleagues.[4]
Gender and Educational Achievement
DiPrete’s research explores the role of gender in shaping student experience within the educational system as well as the role of school environments in shaping gender disparities in academic achievement. His work challenged the idea that innate differences between boys and girls account for the underperformance of male students in academic settings relative to female students.[5] While some scholars argued that schools foster a demasculinized learning environment,DiPrete’s theory suggested that masculinity is shaped by learning environments,ultimately influencing how male students perceive academic engagement. In contrast,his theory suggested that peer culture for female students is less likely to stigmatize academic engagement as “un-feminine.”[6]
DiPrete also investigated the role of social and behavioral skills in academic performance. His research found that male students receive roughly the same academic benefits from these skills as female students. However,his research found that female students enter school with stronger social and behavioral skills.[7] These skills are positively correlated with reading and math performance. Furthermore,DiPrete found that additional factors such as socioeconomic status and the presence of a biological father in the household are associated with stronger social and behavioral skills.[8]
Female Advantage in Higher Education
Diprete further investigated the gender gap in educational achievement in the context of higher education. He defined a clear historical shift,finding that while 65% of bachelor’s degrees were awarded to men in 1960,58% of bachelor’s degrees were awarded to women by 2004. Diprete identified many social developments that explain the shift in gender expectations. As traditional gender roles have declined over time,women feel more incentivized to pursue higher education. Women are more likely to enroll in college and stay,whereas men are more likely to drop out.
This,in turn,has shifted parental investment patterns in favor of daughters. The growing vulnerability of boys to their family situation is explored by Diprete’s research. His data shows that males benefit when they have a father with some education at home but the benefit is no longer present when their father only completed high school or is not present. In recent years,boys who come from less-educated families or absent fathers have become disproportionately disadvantaged. Meanwhile,women who come from the same background exceed men in college completion.[9]
Diprete further explored the more evident disparities among African Americans in a later study. While women earned 58% of bachelor’s degrees in the US,the disparity is greater among African Americans where 67% of bachelor’s degree holders were women. Unlike white women,black women surpassed black men in enrollment at historically black colleges as early as 1954. These larger gaps are in part due to the rising incarceration rates of black males,making this demographic the most disadvantaged out of the four groups.[10]
Diprete found that this gender imbalance has caused college administrators to be concerned about campus diversity. In response to the arising changes,there were considerations of affirmative action measures for male applicants in 2004.[9]
Social Mobility and Intergenerational Transfers
DiPrete conceptualized "mobility regimes" as national configurations of educational systems,labor markets,and welfare policies that collectively determine intergenerational status transmission. This framework explains why countries with similar economic development exhibit divergent mobility rates. His two-generation reinforcement model demonstrated that both parents' socioeconomic characteristics interact to influence children's outcomes through combined resource pools and gender-specific transmission pathways.
His work highlights how public insurance mitigates socioeconomic risks (e.g.,unemployment) in intragenerational mobility,with Sweden’s welfare policies reducing career volatility compared to the U.S. private insurance via parental wealth also substitutes for weak public systems,perpetuating inequality.[11][12]
Empirical Findings: Comparative analysis across Western nations revealed that absolute mobility (children surpassing parental income) declined with rising inequality,while relative mobility remained stable due to offsetting educational access improvements and "glass floor" protections for affluent youth. DiPrete's wealth transmission studies showed U.S. families primarily perpetuate advantage through housing investments and college funding,contrasting with Germany's skill-certification systems and Sweden's welfare-state moderating effects[13]. Educational institutions emerged as critical mediators in his work. Early academic tracking systems were found to amplify origin-based inequality,while college admission processes (particularly U.S.-style legacy preferences) create non-meritocratic mobility barriers.[14]
Methodological Innovations: DiPrete pioneered techniques for harmonizing cross-national mobility data through the Luxembourg Income Study and German Socio-Economic Panel. His dynamic mobility models separate structural economic changes from pure circulation effects,enabling precise cohort-specific mobility estimates. Sibling correlation analyses quantified family influence variance across institutional contexts,showing stronger familial effects in less regulated labor markets.
Policy Impact: DiPrete's research informed policy debates by identifying effective interventions:
Universal pre-K programs with quality standardization
Need-based college funding over merit scholarships
Career pathway programs bridging education-work transitions
His current work examines COVID-19's multi-generational mobility impacts,AI-driven labor market disruptions,and climate migration effects on spatial opportunity structures. This synthesis integrates DiPrete's theoretical frameworks,empirical discoveries,and policy insights while maintaining Wikipedia's encyclopedic prose style.[15]
Comparative Stratification Systems
More of DiPrete’s work focuses on comparative analyses of different countries’stratification,occupational,and welfare systems. DiPrete’s research on occupational and educational linkages in Germany,France,and the United States found that both European countries had stronger linkages across different educational levels than the United States. The educational level and subject of study was a better predictor of occupation in Germany than any other country in the study,and was mainly determined by the country's educational system. In France and Germany,high schools are strongly separated and defined by field of study,and thus are better predictors of job outcomes. However,DiPrete and his collaborators argued that the United States’more flexible educational system can provide more job opportunities to workers,as they are less dependent on and restricted by their education.[16]
DiPrete also researched how labor market and family composition influences household income in the US and Germany. German households are more resistant to depressions in both labor and family structure,partially because union dissolution and loss of employment are less frequent in Germany than the United States. Additionally,the German welfare system offers more protection to residents in the event of these depressions than does the American welfare system. The research also outlined a classification system for various trigger events—like loss of job availability which can cause change in household income—for various societies. The United States,they identified,has a higher rate of “positive”trigger events which cause it to be a more mobile society than Germany. Conversely,the US also has a high rate of “negative”trigger events,meaning increased possibility for downwards mobility. Germany,however,is more protected from both negative and positive triggers.[17]
Cumulative Advantage and The Matthew Effect
DiPrete has extensively studied cumulative advantage and its impact on career trajectories,especially regarding the idea of the Matthew Effect. The Matthew Effect is the idea that early recognition leads to disproportionate reward in the future as early advantages lead to accumulation of future opportunities. Meanwhile,others have much smaller abilities to attain advantageous opportunities since they were not initially recognized,making it harder for them to catch up.[18] This applies to science as more recognized scientists get a disproportionate amount of credit for their work while lesser known scientists get little credit for their comparable contributions. Scientists of greater repute gain more peer recognition for their work,while the contribution of other less famous scientists may have their work minimized or withheld from recognition. This leads to established scientists gaining more reputability while unknown scientists struggle to gain accolades for their work and build their reputation and distinction. This can lead to cases like misallocation of credit or at the extreme,the removal of credit of the lesser known scientist.
Along similar lines,DiPrete has also done research in cumulative advantage and its effect on inequality,especially in career development. Cumulative advantage is the idea that gaining minor initial advantages,like recognition,can lead to accruement and amplification of advantages over time,leading to disparities in professional success.[19] As an example that DiPrete uses,cumulative advantage in the science field refers to the advantage of accruing exceptional performance early in a scientist’s career and how that would lead to continued recognition and high performance as they would receive more publicization,resources,and reputability for future research. DiPrete emphasizes that cumulative advantage leads to inequality in advantage since the initial advantage would lead to resources being disproportionately allocated to those with recognition already,cutting off others from those advantages and leading them to have less opportunities to build up their advantages. It becomes especially important to understand these in the workforce as his research shows that initial advantages can lead to differing career paths,abilities to grow careers,and inequalities in the workforce. This,in turn,perpetuates low social mobility and inequality.
Leapfrog Theory
DiPrete discusses the concept of leapfrogging,which describes how a sharp jump in CEO compensation sharply increases the overall distribution of executive pay over time. More specifically,he uses this theory to experience the general increase of executive pay in the 1990s. DiPrete argues that CEOs regard other executives as peers,which helps determine their own compensation as it relates to rent. Further,CEOs with higher compensations are more likely to be regarded and selected by other CEOs as peers,since their higher salary affords them status and suggests they have influence when they might not. Leapfrogging describes the phenomenon of a small number of CEOs receiving sharp wage increases,which,in turn,increases the compensation of other executives. This ripple effect of other executives’salary increases ultimately increases the overall pay of the market,creating a new benchmark for which executives are to be compensated. DiPrete describes these subsequent rises as essential to ensure that CEOs are competitively compensated amongst their peers,and to prevent them from leaving to another corporation in which they can receive more pay.
DiPrete and his collaborators used data from ExecuComp data to demonstrate how average CEO salary has dramatically increased over time,as well as how CEOs experience much more mobility than the average worker. He was able to conclude that contrary to some scholars’belief that executive compensation was reflective of market performance,CEOs' pay was often driven by companies electing to pay their executives almost in the 50th to 75th percentile of salaries for their position. Further,DiPrete disagrees with observations that the sharp rise in executive salary is due to individual companies having weak governance,instead offering that the governance failure at one company can set a precedent among competitors where an overpaid CEO is viewed as the standard.[20] Leapfrogging also has the potential for exponential increase in executive compensation,as firms seek to pay their executive above average salary. DiPrete’s theory has been supported by observations of economists Michael Jensen and Kevin M. Murphy,who observed that companies don’t increase CEO pay because of market performance,but rather social and political influences.
Honors &Awards
In 2008,DiPrete,along with Claudia Buchmann,received the James Coleman Award for Best Article in the field of Sociology of Education for their work and research on the growing female advantage in college education. For his book The Rise of Women:The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools,Diprete was recognized with the Outstanding Book Award in the Inequality,Poverty,and Mobility section of the American Sociological Association. DiPrete was also named Robert M. Hauser Distinguished Scholar by the Inequality,Poverty,and Mobility section of the American Sociological Association in 2017.
References
↑ "DiPrete, Thomas". INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH ON POVERTY. 2018-05-02. Retrieved 2025-02-23.
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