Scott Thomas

 Professor and Associate Dean

Education

Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara, 1994

Biography

Scott L. Thomas is a professor and the associate dean in the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Barbara and has held faculty positions at the University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education, the University of Arizona’s Center for the Study of Higher Education, and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mânoa (where he served as the founding director of the Hawaiʻi Educational Policy Center). Thomas teaches courses in the areas of higher education policy, the sociology of higher education, and research methods. He advises doctoral students and serves as a co-director of CGU’s Howard R. Bowen Institute for Policy Studies in Higher Education.

His research focuses on issues of student success and stratification of opportunity in higher education. Thomas’ earlier work in this area has centered on understanding variance in economic outcomes and indebtedness related to college and field choice. 

His current work is focused on defining and understanding the impacts and costs of academic pathways to and through the undergraduate years. This work incorporates the effects of students’ high school experiences, their transitions to college, and coursetaking patterns within and across postsecondary institutions. A central feature of this work involves the financial costing of these pathways and their impact on degree attainment.
This work builds on his earlier research, which focused on within-school processes that sort students into widely varying college opportunity sets. Relevant published work in this area can be found in journals such as Sociology of Education, Research in Higher Education, the Review of Higher Education, and various chapters in the highly regarded Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research.
Complementing my interests in these substantive areas is a related line of work on methodological issues. Examples of this work can be found in a series of books addressing topics in multilevel modeling (see An Introduction to Multilevel Modeling, Multilevel and Longitudinal Modeling with IBM SPSS, and Multilevel Modeling of Categorical Outcomes using IBM SPSS). His writing on methodological topics ranges from linear modeling to sampling theory, to social network analysis. This work can be found in journal articles and book chapters in a wide variety of areas.

Thomas is the editor in chief at the Journal of Higher Education, one of the premier journals in the field of higher education and he co-edits (with David Palfreyman and Ted Tapper of Oxford University) the book series International Studies in Higher Education (published by Taylor & Francis).

Curriculum Vitae
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