Mitchell L. Stevens

About

Mitchell L. Stevens is an organizational sociologist with longstanding interests in educational sequences, lifelong learning, alternative educational forms, and the formal organization of knowledge. At Stanford University, he convenes the Pathways Network and the Futures Project on Education and the Learning Society. He holds the position of Professor at the Graduate School of Education and is also a courtesy Professor of Sociology. His research interests include alternative schooling, educational policy, higher education, leadership and organization, and lifelong learning. Stevens has contributed to discussions on reconfiguring education to support lifelong learning, addressing the need for new models of learning and work, and exploring the changing relationship between universities and society.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Economics
• Machine Learning
• Law
• Social Science
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores: Evidence from 60,000 undergraduate applications

  Science Advances · 2021 · 71 citations

  There is substantial evidence of the relationship between household income and achievement on the standardized tests often required for college admissions, yet little comparable inquiry considers the essays typically required of applicants to selective U.S. colleges and universities. We used a corpus of 240,000 admission essays submitted by 60,000 applicants to the University of California in November 2016 to measure relationships between the content of admission essays, self-reported household…

  PublisherDOI

• Studying Undergraduate Course Consideration at Scale

  AERA Open · 2021 · 37 citations

  Elective curriculums require undergraduates to choose from a large roster of courses for enrollment each term. It has proven difficult to characterize this fateful choice process because it remains largely unobserved. Using digital trace data to observe this process at scale at a private research university, together with qualitative student interviews, we provide a novel empirical study of course consideration as an important component of course selection. Clickstream logs from a course explora…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• AI and Holistic Review

  2020 · 32 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  College admissions in the United States is carried out by a humancentered method of evaluation known as holistic review, which typically involves reading original narrative essays submitted by each applicant. The legitimacy and fairness of holistic review, which gives human readers significant discretion over determining each applicant's fitness for admission, has been repeatedly challenged in courtrooms and the public sphere. Using a unique corpus of 283,676 application essays submitted to a la…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From pipelines to pathways in the study of academic progress

  Science · 2023-04-27 · 27 citations

  articleSenior author

  Students and administrators can benefit from new analytics.

  PublisherDOI

• Should I Start at MATH 101? Content Repetition as an Academic Strategy in Elective Curriculums

  Sociology of Education · 2022-02-16 · 22 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  How do undergraduates make their first course decisions, and are these decisions fateful? Drawing on serial interviews (N = 200) of 53 students at an admissions-selective university, we show that incoming students with disparate precollege experiences differ in their orientations toward and strategies for considering first college math courses. Content repeaters opt for courses that repeat material covered in prior coursework, whereas novices opt for courses covering material new to them. Conten…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Andreas Paepcke

  Stanford University

  13 shared

• Cynthia Miller‐Idriss

  American University

  12 shared

• Sonia Giebel

  WZB Berlin Social Science Center

  11 shared

• Ben Gebre-Medhin

  Mount Holyoke College

  9 shared

• Benjamin W. Domingue

  8 shared

• AJ Alvero

  8 shared

• Seteney Shami

  The Arab Council for the Social Sciences

  8 shared

• Anthony Lising Antonio

  8 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Education

  Stanford University

• M.A., Political Science

  Stanford University

• M.A., MA/MBA

  Stanford University

• M.S., Education Data Science

  Stanford University

• M.S., Educational Policy

  Stanford University

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Susanna Loebh-62
• Alfredo J. Artilesh-41
• Denise Popeh-8