Berkeley’s Sociology Department is known around the world for its excellence in research and teaching. Our faculty advance cutting edge research and teach in most sociological specialities. Our PhDs are leaders in universities and research centers across the US and in many other countries. And our BAs populate the ranks of innumerable professions, bringing with them the skills and special perspective of Berkeley sociology.
We are proud to make these contributions from the world’s leading public university. At Berkeley, we combine intellectual rigor with a commitment to public service through our research, teaching, and service on campus and beyond.
For the past six decades, Berkeley’s Sociology Department has consistently been ranked among the world’s top sociology departments. Our graduate program is ranked #1 in the latest U.S. News and World Report, and our undergrad degree is currently the best in the US according to College Factual and features on Grad Reports’ Best College List 2020.
Prof. Einstein served graduate students as a model of prudence in remaining unfashionably true to the grand…
Making Hispanics
How Activists, Bureaucrats & Media Constructed a New American
Departmental Colloquium Series
Jennie Brand, "Uncovering College Effect Heterogeneity"
Monday, September 9th, 2024 at 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building & Via Zoom
Followed by a Reception at 3:30pm in Demography Room 310
Abstract:
Individuals do not respond uniformly to treatments, such as events or interventions. Sociologists routinely partition samples into subgroups to explore how the effects of treatments vary by selected covariates, such as race and gender, based on theoretical priors. Emerging machine learning methods based on decision trees allow researchers to explore sources of variation that they may not have previously considered. In this talk, Brand describes a range of approaches to study effect heterogeneity, including tree-based machine learning. Assessing a central topic in social inequality, college effects on socioeconomic outcomes, she compares what we learn from covariate and propensity-score-based partitioning approaches to recursive partitioning based on causal trees.