Richard Arum

Richard Arum (born 1963) is an American sociologist of education and stratification, best known for his research on student learning, school discipline, race, and inequality in K-12 and higher education. Arum has a B.A. in Political Science from Tufts University, an M.Ed. in Teaching and Curriculum from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

He is currently dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Education, as well as a senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Arum’s most notable contributions to research on higher education stem from his work on the CLA Longitudinal Study, a project he led as Education Research Program Director at the Social Science Research Council from 2005-2013. The CLA Longitudinal Study was a large-scale longitudinal study that “tracked over 2,000 young adults as they made their way through college and transitioned into the labor force and graduate school.”

 Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011) is a book based on the first two years of the study. It received national media attention for its finding that, after the first two years of college, a significant number of students demonstrated no improvement in a range of skills, including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing. A follow-up book to Academically Adrift, entitled Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates, was released in September 2014.

Arum co-authored both of these books with Josipa Roksa, associate professor of sociology and education at the University of Virginia. Arum is author of Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral Authority in American Schools (Harvard University Press, 2003), a book that examines the evolution of school discipline in the United States, and co-editor of Improving Learning Environments in Schools: Lessons from Abroad (Stanford University Press, 2012), an edited volume that examines school discipline from an international comparative perspective. 

He has also written several articles and book chapters on race and stratification in public and private schools. From 2005-2009, as Program Director of Education Research at the Social Science Research Council, he led efforts to create the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, an entity that focuses on ongoing evaluation and assessment research to support public school improvement efforts.

Since 2011, Arum has served as principal investigator of Connecting Youth, a multi-city research project on teen behaviors, attitudes, and competencies around digital media and learning. The purpose of this research is to document how a set of informal out-of-school programs and two schools (one in NYC and one in Chicago) are implementing initiatives that seek to encourage student-centered, peer-supported learning, the role of technology in learning, and how these elements shape youth trajectories.