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Hunter Wade York

About Me

I am a fifth-year PhD student at Princeton University in the Department of Sociology and the Office of Population Research, and my research interests revolve around social stratification, work, and organizations. I will be on the academic job market in fall of 2025. Prior to Princeton, I received an MPH in Global Health from the University of Washington and an AB in Human Evolutionary Biology and Music from Harvard. Though my academic trajectory has taken many turns, I like to think that is part of my chops as a sociologist.

Published Works

    York, H., Song, X., & Xie, Y. (2025, January). Gradationalism Revisited: Intergenerational Occupational Mobility Along Axes of Occupational Characteristics. American Journal of Sociology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/733122

Works in Progress

  • Climbing the Ladder or Falling Behind? Gender and Race Diversity in Work Teams and Its Influence on Career Trajectories in the Federal Workforce: In the second chapter of my dissertation, I use a novel dataset of federal worker human resource records combined with information on team composition to determine the effect of the demographics of one's peers on promotion outcomes.
  • Occupational Aspirations, Expectations, and Achievement Through Childhood and Early Adulthood: In my final chapter, I look at how individual's occupational and educational aspirations change throughout childhood and early adulthood, which then get mapped onto realized adult occupational attainment. In doing so, I theorize how children adjust expectations and aspirations in accordance with realized outcomes.
  • Degrees of Inequality: Horizontal Stratification by Educational Institutions and Fields of Study in the 21st Century: This paper examines how horizontal stratification, differences in earnings by institution, field of study, and their intersections (“credentials”), has evolved among U.S. bachelor’s degree recipients since 2001. Using linked data on graduates’ credentials, earnings, and industry destinations, I show that field of study explains more earnings variation than institutional affiliation, and its import is growing. This is driven largely by stable linkages between fields and high-wage industries, coupled with industry-level wage stratification. The findings suggest that as labor market rewards concentrate in specific sectors, credential-based pathways increasingly structure early-career inequality.