Rezwanul Karim
Contact Information
2023 Cohort
Areas of Expertise
- Status
- Education
- Labor Markets
- Gender, Race & Class
- Quantitative Methods
Education
- M.A. in Sociology, The Ohio State University (2024)
- B.A. in Sociology, Brooklyn College (2022)
Current research investigates how college major selection contributes to stratified outcomes in income, occupational attainment, and class positioning. Using quantitative methods, this work models the long-term implications of field of study on individuals' trajectories through higher education and the labor market. Additional areas of focus include the racial and gender composition of majors, the evolving cultural meanings ascribed to different fields, and the formation and persistence of status hierarchies and prestige differentials within and across academic disciplines.
It took nearly two years of pursuing computer science during my undergraduate studies for solely economic returns to realize that my true passions lay in sociology. The cultural pressures to pursue practical majors with guaranteed financial returns dominate today's conversations, which led me to reflect more deeply on the consequences of such choices on broader patterns of inequality. This sparked a lasting interest in how educational decisions shape long-term social, economic, and occupational outcomes, which guided my research to examine how different fields of study lead to divergent pathways in income and class positioning. I am now particularly interested in how these outcomes vary across lines of race and gender, specifically in how certain majors come to be culturally constructed as more prestigious, valued, or held at a higher level of intellectual merit than others. These questions have led me to engage with cultural theories of inequality, drawing from status generalization theory and affect control theory to examine the social consequences of such status hierarchies in recent research. Although I predominantly use quantitative methods to examine patterns in large-scale survey data, my work is guided by a belief that inequality often takes symbolic and interpersonal forms that numbers alone can’t fully capture. And so, understanding how the boundaries of status and opportunity are drawn through something as familiar as college major selection is complex—but that complexity is exactly what makes it worth chasing.