Stephen Lawrence Morgan (born 1971) is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences and Johns Hopkins School of Education. A quantitative methodologist, he is known for his contributions to quantitative methods in sociology as applied to research on schools, particularly in models for educational attainment, improving the study of causal relationships, and his empirical research focusing on social inequality and education in the United States.
Biography
Stephen "Steve" Morgan graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from Harvard University in 1993. He then spent two years on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University earning a Masters of Philosophy in Comparative Social Research in 1995 before returning to Harvard to complete a Masters of Arts in Sociology and a Ph.D. in sociology in 2000. Morgan joined the faculty of Cornell University as an assistant professor of sociology in 2000. He rose to the associate rank in 2003 and to a full professorship in 2009. During this time, Morgan also directed the Center for the Study of Inequality and was awarded a Provost's Award for Distinguished Scholarship "for his work on class and mobility, using advanced modeling techniques." He was also awarded Cornell's 2010-2011 Robert A. & Donna B. Paul Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising for "demonstrated exceptional effectiveness as an advisor and/or mentor of undergraduates." In 2012, he was named the Jan Rock Zubrow '77 Professor in the Social Sciences and became the director of graduate studies for the field of sociology.
In June 2014, Morgan was named a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University for his accomplishments as an interdisciplinary researcher and excellence in teaching. The Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship program was established in 2013 by a gift from Michael Bloomberg. Morgan holds joint appointments in the Johns Hopkins School of Education and the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences's Department of Sociology.
He is an elected member of the Sociological Research Association (2009) and an elected fellow of the Society for Sociological Science (2014). He is also a member of the American Sociological Association and Population Association of America, and secretary of the Society for Sociological Science. In 2013, Morgan received the American Sociological Association Section on Methodology's Leo Goodman Award, which recognized Morgan for "contributions to sociological methodology or innovative uses of sociological methodology made by a scholar who is no more than fifteen years past the doctorate."
Research
Stephen Morgan is a distinguished scholar in the area of the sociology of education whose quantitatively-oriented research spans from racial differences in educational attainment to wealth and inequality in the United States. His cross-disciplinary scholarship centers on three interrelated themes: models of achievement and attainment in the sociology of education; models of labor market and wealth inequality in social stratification; and, counterfactual models of causality in quantitative methodology.
Morgan has taught graduate courses on topics such as linear methods, social inequality, and the demography of education and inequality. His undergraduate teaching has included courses on controversies about inequality and the economic sociology of earnings. At Johns Hopkins, he is teaching an undergraduate course on schooling, racial inequality, and public policy in America, and a graduate course on causal inference.
Models of achievement and attainment
Morgan's research in this area has centered on racial differences in educational achievement and attainment. His early studies addressed black-white differences in the construction of educational expectations and the formation of alternative student identities, which set the stage for a decade long effort to synthesize the differing perspectives of sociologists and economists on the mechanisms that generate differential student achievement. This work has undertaken to integrate socialization-based models in sociology and rational-choice-based models in economics.