About

Richard Arum is an expert on the legal and institutional environments of schools, social stratification, and digital education. His work focuses on student work habits, teaching and curriculum, and the development of critical thinking skills. He is affiliated with the Connected Learning Lab and has contributed to projects such as the Orange County Educational Advancement Network (OCEAN), Studies In The News, Connecting Youth Project, and Growing Up Digital.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Political Science
• Medical education
• Internal medicine
• Pedagogy
• Chemistry
• Psychiatry
• Engineering
• Mechanical engineering
• Environmental health
• Developmental psychology
• Clinical psychology
• Social psychology
• Demographic economics
• Economics
• Linguistics
• Virology
• Mathematics education

Selected publications

• The Liberal Arts Advantage

  2026-01-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Degrees of Risk: Navigating Insecurity and Inequality in Public Higher Education Degrees of Risk: Navigating Insecurity and Inequality in Public Higher Education, by SilverBlake R.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. 232 pp. $27.50 paper. ISBN: 9780226834764.

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2026-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• ChatGPT Early Adoption in Higher Education: Variation in Student Usage, Instructional Support, and Educational Equity

  AERA Open · 2025-04-20 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study examines the early adoption of ChatGPT in late 2022 and early 2023 by identifying variation in student awareness, academic use, and perceived instructional support for the technology at a diverse U.S. public research university. Specifically, we investigate (a) how individual awareness and academic use of ChatGPT vary by student characteristics and field of study, (b) how instructor encouragement or discouragement varies across courses and student demographics, and (c) how academic use patterns differ between science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM fields. Data from 938 undergraduates, merged with administrative records, revealed disparities in ChatGPT awareness and use, with underrepresented minority, first-generation, and international students less likely to know about or use the tool academically. Course-level analysis highlighted that instructor encouragement is more prevalent in STEM fields and upper-division courses but decreases in classes with higher underrepresented minority representation. Open-ended responses showed distinct patterns of ChatGPT use, with STEM students favoring conceptual assistance and coding and non-STEM students engaging in writing and instructor-assigned activities. These findings underscore early inequities in access and use of emerging educational technologies and call for institutional strategies to promote equitable awareness and skill development aligned with academic and professional goals.

  PublisherDOI

• Same Major, Different Peers: Gender Sorting Across and Within Majors

  AERA Open · 2025-07-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Prior studies have found persistent gender segregation across majors in higher education. We build on this literature by documenting segregation within majors through examining student experiences at a student-by-course level. We measure the variation in the proportion of students’ classmates who are their same gender and explore which levels of sorting explain this variation. We observed that considerable variation persists within majors: 61% of the variation in the proportion of same-gender peers arises from within-major variation for female students, and 48% for male students. We also find that sorting by gender is more prevalent for certain groups of students. Our study offers a guide for measuring this phenomenon in various campus contexts, examining how curricular choice can affect student sorting within majors. This study suggests that previous work examining sorting only at the major level misses some important opportunities for understanding the mechanisms through which gender segregation occurs in higher education.

  PublisherDOI

• 'How Did We Miss It?': Examining the Infrastructural Work of Practitioners Supporting Housing Insecure and Foster Youth Students

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-10-16 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Youth experiencing housing insecurity or living in foster care have complex social, emotional, and material needs. While policies and structures exist to support these youth, intra- and interorganizational challenges pose barriers to effective collaboration. In contrast to prior work that focuses on the collaborative practices of individual stakeholders, this study draws on the insights of practitioners in different roles and organizations within the same county. Through 12 in-depth interviews with practitioners working across the system, we identify the key activities and infrastructural work performed by practitioners to support housing insecure and foster youth in light of social, technical, and institutional constraints. Based on our findings, we shed light on stigma management at an organizational level and the role of human infrastructure in responding to time-sensitive needs in highly institutionalized contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• How expectations, feedback, and course materials relate to intellectual humility in higher education: towards a framework for intellectual humility cultivation

  Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education · 2025-10-25 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Gender-segregated trajectories to a university major and career-related motivation

  Learning and Individual Differences · 2025-12-07

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Student and teacher intellectual humility at a diverse research university: the role of academic, demographic, and behavioral metrics

  Studies in Higher Education · 2025-03-04 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Levels and facets of university students' stress during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Longitudinal evidence from the first two academic years in Germany and the U.S.

  Social and Personality Psychology Compass · 2024-02-26 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Following its outbreak, the COVID‐19 pandemic had strong negative effects on university students' stress and mental health worldwide. Using two longitudinal datasets from Germany ( N = 504) and the U.S. ( N = 893), we investigated how students' stress developed over the first two academic years during the pandemic. In both studies, we found elevated levels of students' stress at the beginning of the pandemic. In Germany, we found a significant intraindividual decrease in students' general stress experiences even before universities had returned to in‐person classes. When examining specific stress facets in the U.S., we found that students' academic stress increased during the first pandemic year with remote teaching and decreased significantly after the university resumed normal operations, that is, in‐person classes and on‐campus residence. Students' practical stress decreased towards all later time points compared to the onset of the pandemic, whereas health stress continuously increased until the university resumed normal operations. We report differences by students' demographic backgrounds (gender, college generation status, childcare status, ethnicity, academic year) and discuss our findings against the background of the course of the pandemic in the particular context in which both studies were conducted.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The power of the accused: rights mobilization and gender inequality in school workplaces

  Law & Society Review · 2024-09-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Law and society scholars have long studied rights mobilization and gender inequality from the vantage point of complainants in private workplaces. This article pursues a new direction in this line of inquiry to explore, for the first time, mobilization from the vantage points of complainants and those accused of violating the rights of others in public-school workplaces in the United States. We conceptualize rights mobilization as legal, quasilegal, and/or extralegal processes. Based on a national random survey of teachers and administrators, and in-depth interviews with educators in California, New York, and North Carolina, we find an integral relationship between gender inequality and experiencing rights violations, choices about rights mobilization, and obstacles to formal mobilization. Compared to complainants, those accused of rights violations – especially male administrators – are more likely to use quasilegal and legal mobilization to defend themselves or to engage in anticipatory mobilization . Actors in less powerful status positions (teachers) most often pursue extralegal mobilization to complain about rights violations during which they engage in rights muting as a means of self-protection; when in more powerful status positions, actors use rights muting as a means of self-protection and to suppress the rights claims of others. This paper concludes with implications for future research on rights mobilization in school workplaces amidst changing political and demographic conditions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• C.-C. Yi

  20 shared

• Josipa Roksa

  University of Virginia

  20 shared

• Marcus England

  Delaware State University

  9 shared

• Calvin Morrill

  9 shared

• LaDawn Haglund

  9 shared

• Torin Monahan

  9 shared

• K. Reed Clark

  Delaware State University

  9 shared

• Laura R. Peck

  Musicians Emergency Fund

  9 shared