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Education
Ph.D. University of California Santa Barbara, 1994
Biography
Dr. Scott L. Thomas comes to CGU from the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia where he has been associate professor of Higher Education and Adjunct Associate Professor of Sociology. Prior to the University of Georgia, Thomas was on the faculties at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and University of Arizona. At the University of Hawaii, Thomas served as the director of the Hawaii Educational Policy Center.
His research focuses on issues of access and stratification in higher education. Past work in this area has centered on variance in economic outcomes and indebtedness related to college quality and choice of major. Examples of publications resulting from this work can be found in journals such as the Economics of Education Review and Research in Higher Education. His research on these topics has been funded by the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation’s American Education Research Association and Association for Institutional Research grants programs.
Thomas’s current focus on college access issues has shifted to the K-12 achievement gap and college affordability. Of especial interest are within-school processes that sort students into widely varying college opportunity sets. Relevant published work in this area can be found in Sociology of Education, Research in Higher Education, and various chapters in the highly regarded Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research. A strand of this research (in collaboration with Laura Perna at the University of Pennsylvania) has been funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, who supported a two-year, 5 state, mixed methods examination of the impacts of state, federal, and local policies on variance in student aspirations, preparation, and college going. Related to this research is a separate line of work, supported by the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative (also with Perna), surveying theoretical and methodological approaches to student success outcomes such as access and persistence. Results of this work appear in a range of refereed journals and the ASHE Higher Education Report Series (Jossey-Bass).
Substantive work outside of the area of college access and stratification includes a line of work (with Sheila Slaughter a the University of Georgia) examining the potential for conflict of interest in the biomedical sciences at major American research universities. This work, currently being funded by the National Institutes of Health, maps the evolution of linkages between universities and corporations having a direct financial interest in the intellectual property generated on these campuses. It also documents the evolution of institutional policies designed to address these potential conflicts.
In addition to his interests in these substantive areas, Thomas has devoted a considerable amount of effort to research on methodological issues. As much of his substantive work concerns the structural influences on individual behavior and opportunity, the development and explication of statistical methods capable of modeling such phenomena have also attracted his interest. His work in this area has resulted in a book, An Introduction to Multilevel Modeling (with Ron Heck, published by Taylor & Francis/Routledge) and related articles in a number of refereed journals. His writing on methodological topics ranges from linear modeling, sampling theory, and social network analysis. This work can be found in journal articles and book chapters in a wide variety of areas. A regular reviewer for several discipline specific journals, Thomas currently serves on the editorial board of the journal Research in Higher Education, the annual Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, the Reading on Equal Education advisory panel, and has served as guest editor for the American Education Research Journal. He is a co-editor of the International Higher Education series (published by Taylor & Franics/Routledge).
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