Christina Ciocca Eller

On Leave for the 2021-2022 Academic Year

Research Interests: Social inequality / stratification, Organizations, Education, Race/Ethnicity, Culture, Urban Sociology, Mixed Methods Research.

Christina Ciocca Eller is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies (effective July 2019). She received her Ph.D. in 2019 from Columbia University as well as graduate degrees in Women’s Studies and Management Research from the University of Oxford through the Timothy S. Healy Scholarship. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she served as Chief Speechwriter and Communications Director for the president of Georgetown University.

Ciocca Eller's research draws on quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the role of organizations in shaping the opportunities and outcomes available to individuals. Her primary case, reflected in her dissertation research, is the U.S. higher education sector. This dissertation work, “Organization Effects on Bachelor’s Degree Completion for the New Majority,” brings together key ideas from the stratification and organizations literatures to study the interactions between students and colleges. Specifically, she uses longitudinal data from both administrative records and a yearlong interview study of students attending a large, urban, public university system in the U.S. to quantify "college effects," or the independent impact of colleges on student outcomes, as well as the individual and organizational forces that explain those effects. She has also analyzed the black/white gap in BA completion and the relationship between course-taking and labor market outcomes, and has studied school-to-work transitions in comparative international contexts. Her work is published in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review.