The Promise of Advanced High School
​Mathematics Coursework

Chandra Muller is an expert on how schools, in particular math and science preparation, shape life course outcomes. She is especially interested in how inequality—according to gender, race, social class, disability, immigration or language minority status—impact educational attainment, work, and health. She is Alma Cowden Madden Centennial Professor of Liberal Arts in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently leading a study that is re-interviewing over 25,000 late Baby Boomers who were first interviewed while in high school in 1980. The study, which is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation, focuses on how education and skills have shaped the cohort’s work lives and health over the past 30 years as they faced the communication revolution and three recessions. The goal is to determine what factors enable them to work longer.

Previously, she led the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study, the education component of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and the college transcript study for the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, 1997. She is the author of numerous articles and the book Coming of Political Age: American Schools and the Civic Development of Immigrant Youth, with Rebecca Callahan.

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