Sutton Selected for National Academy of Education/Spencer Fellowship

April Sutton, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Critical Gender Studies program at UC San Diego, has been selected as a 2021 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. 

The fellowship, one of the most prestigious for early-career scholars in education, supports work in critical areas of research. Only 25 fellows are selected annually, and this year they were chosen from a pool of 249 applicants. Applications to this competitive fellowship are judged on the applicant’s past research record, career trajectory in education research, and the quality of the project described in the application.

April Sutton, UC San Diego

Sutton – whose whose main areas of study are education, stratification and inequality, and gender – uses quantitative research methods to investigate how communities, schools and other institutional contexts maintain or mitigate inequalities in education and work. Her research highlights the spatial dimensions of enduring gender and ethnoracial educational disparities and the academic and policy debates surrounding them.

As part of her NAEd/Spencer Fellowship, she will be working on “Who Is Left Behind and Why? Rural-Urban Inequalities in Postsecondary Enrollment by Gender and Race/Ethnicity.”

Sutton will use the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) and a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of ninth-graders to examine rural-urban differences in two- and four-year postsecondary enrollment across gender and ethnoracial groups. She will focus on how disparate educational opportunities across place --reflected in access to and participation in advanced academic courses -- contribute to stratified opportunities in higher education.

"This study’s intersectional lens," Sutton said, "will highlight the educational opportunities and outcomes of rural students of color and offer new insights on ethnoracial, gender and geographic stratification." 

Sutton has published in the American Sociological Review, Sociology of Education, Social Problems and the American Journal of Public Health, to name a few.

Learn more:
2021 NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellows
April Sutton’s UC San Diego Department of Sociology web page