Social Sciences, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Policy Studies in Education (SHIPS)

Students seeking careers as educational anthropologists should select a disciplinary orientation, and concentrate in the Anthropology of Education subconcentration.

The PhD candidate in Anthropology of Education will take courses in the Department of Anthropology in addition to educational anthropology courses offered in the Graduate School of Education, for a combined total of at least 45 units. The course units in anthropology should include work in methodology, theory and its history, sociocultural and psychocultural processes, and ethnography. At least 20 units must be at the advanced graduate level. The 45 units of anthropology can be recognized as a PhD minor in anthropology or as a master's in the Anthropology Department.

Affiliated faculty include (are not limted to): Shelley Goldman, Ari Kelman, Ramón Antonio Martínez, Jonathan Rosa, and Guadalupe Valdes.

The program in Education Data Science serves students looking to employ modern data science analyses and computational methods to solve the world’s greatest educational challenges. It offers training in data science skills anchored in educational data, applications, and concerns. Analytically, students are expected to become familiar with statistics, programming languages, computational methods (machine learning, data mining), data visualization, and specialized analytic concerns, such as relational and textual data (network science and text analysis). These skill sets enable students to perform state-of-the-art analyses salient to digital data found in most educational, organizational and web-based companies. 

Students will take coursework focused on key data science principles, topics, and applications common to the use of data science in education contexts to ensure that they attain a common cohesive base of knowledge and skills with which to pursue academic areas of interest and specialization tracks later in their course plan. Students will also complete data science specializations in their course of study. The areas of specialization are Natural Language Processing, Network Science, Experiments & Causal Methods, Measurement, and Learning Analytics.

Affiliated faculty and lecturers include (are not limited to): Eric Bettinger, Emma Brunskill, Tom Dee, Ben Domingue, Nick Haber, Prashant Loyalka, Bruce McCandliss, Daniel McFarland, John Mitchell, Roy Pea, Chris Piech, Sean Reardon, Sanne Smith

The doctoral program in Higher Education is designed for students pursuing careers as academic faculty, administrators, policy analysts, and educational researchers. Since the PhD is a scholarly degree, the core objective of our program is to prepare professionals to conduct research of exceptional quality. Our program features small courses, hands-on research training, and individualized mentoring. Students enroll full-time and typically complete the program in four to five years.

Our curriculum emphasizes the mastery of particular theoretical frameworks and research methods in the social sciences. Each doctoral student obtains a minor in a related discipline or interdisciplinary area; doctoral students often pursue master's degrees in their chosen field concurrently with their coursework for the PhD.

Our home in Stanford's Graduate School of Education enables our students to appreciate the myriad connections between higher education and K-12 schooling. Students also make good use of the wider resources available at Stanford, routinely enrolling in courses throughout the university.

Our faculty are internationally recognized scholars and university leaders. Their areas of research include: the production and formal organization of knowledge in higher education; organizational restructuring and institutional change in public colleges and universities; alternative educational forms; the quantification of academic accomplishment; policy alignment and student transitions throughout the life course; the impact of diversity on college student outcomes; socialization and student networks; and the role of liberal arts instruction and service learning in professional education.

Affiliated faculty include (are not limited to): anthony antonio, Eric Bettinger, Martin Carnoy, Tom Dee, Dan McFarland, sean reardon, and Mitchell Stevens.

Research Opportunities

Faculty projects within and beyond the Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research offer doctoral students the opportunity to conduct research and work closely with well-known scholars, as do collaborations with nearby research organizations such as the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The program in International Comparative Education (ICE) is a multidisciplinary, international, cross-cultural program of training that places educational problems into an international and comparative framework. Core courses explore how education is related to economic, political, and social development in both developed and developing countries. The program provides a strong theoretical and empirical base for studying education in a rapidly changing global context and for understanding the how and why of successful policy-making to improve educational practice in different social settings.

In both its training and research activities, ICE has developed a special concern for the study of education in less developed countries. At the same time, several faculty are engaged in research comparing educational policies and conditions in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The relationships among educational research, educational policy, and educational planning are important in the program's intellectual agenda.

The doctoral specialization in ICE is designed to relate a firm grounding in the theories and methods of a basic social or behavioral science to the analysis of education's role in the processes of economic growth, political development, and social change.

The training of ICE doctoral students is geared toward achieving substantial research competence in areas where a social science discipline and the policy problems of development education intersect. Doctoral students are therefore expected to have, or to acquire while at Stanford, substantial graduate training in a social science discipline relevant to their fields of interest at a level equivalent to the master's degree or a PhD minor in the appropriate university department.

Graduates of the PhD program in ICE typically choose research-oriented careers either within their countries' universities or with government agencies. Their expertise is sought from time to time by international and philanthropic organizations.

While there is no universal foreign language requirement for the ICE doctoral program, students must be proficient in the languages appropriate to their professional and geographical areas of interest. They are also encouraged to seek practical research training in their areas of interest.

For the PhD program requirements, please see the Doctoral Degree Handbook.

For more information about the ICE MA and Doctoral Programs, please visit: https://ed.stanford.edu/ice

Affiliated faculty include (are not limited to): Eric Bettinger, Patricia Bromley, Martin Carnoy, Prashant Loyalka, Woody Powell, Francisco Ramirez, and Christine Min Wotipka.

The Graduate School of Education has notable strength in the area of organization studies, particularly in terms of research on schools, universities, nonprofit and governmental organizations, as well as more creative associations, such as community or advocacy groups, and grass-roots associations. Students can elect to pursue a SHIPS concentration (i.e., sub-plan or emphasis) or a pre-approved Individually Designed Distributed Minor (IDDM) in Organization Studies.

The concentration in Organization Studies includes a minimum of 20 units from the courses listed in this document.

Affiliated faculty include (are not limited to): Martin Carnoy, Dan McFarland, Debra Meyerson, Woody Powell, and Mitchell Stevens

The Sociology of Education program offers students invaluable research apprenticeship opportunities that take advantage of faculty interests and expertise at Stanford. Areas of emphasis include

• analysis of interpersonal dynamics in classrooms and schools
• the sociology of development and peer cultures
• the effects of organizational characteristics of schools and universities
• transfer of knowledge and organizational learning
• stratification within education and society
• comparative macrosociology of education

Doctoral candidates in Sociology of Education ordinarily earn a master's degree in sociology and take advanced coursework in statistics. Doctoral students emerging from this specialization typically become faculty members at universities and carry on activities such as teaching sociology and education courses, training researchers, carrying out applied and basic research, and consulting.

Affiliated faculty include (are not limited to): anthony antonio, Ari Kelman, Dan McFarland, Woody Powell, Francisco Ramirez, sean reardon, Mitchell Stevens, and Christine Min Wotipka

The cross-area specialization in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) brings an interdisciplinary scholarly focus to the major factors that influence educational attainment, especially for underserved children. Students ground their RILE studies within the context of one of the three academic areas: Curriculum Studies and Teacher Education (CTE), Developmental and Psychological Sciences (DAPS), Social Sciences, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Policy Studies in Education (SHIPS). 

Learn more at Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE).