Cristina Viviana Groeger is a historian of work, education, and migration in the United States and Associate Professor of History at Lake Forest College.
I am interested in how labor markets are constructed and how they in turn structure social inequality. My first book, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston, explores the shift to school-based job training in the early twentieth century and how this shift turned education into a new basis for reproducing economic inequality. My second project, Latina Migrants and the Remaking of Chicagoland Manufacturing, explores a story left out of deindustrialization narratives: the making of a new contingent, undocumented, Latinx, and feminized manufacturing workforce in late twentieth-century Chicago.
Contact me at: groeger@lakeforest.edu
The Education Trap
Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston
Harvard University Press, 2021
Winner of the IPUMS USA 2021 Research Award and co-winner of the Harvard University Press Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize for best first book
Why―contrary to much expert and popular opinion―more education may not be the answer to skyrocketing inequality.
For generations, Americans have looked to education as the solution to economic disadvantage. Yet, although more people are earning degrees, the gap between rich and poor is widening. Cristina Groeger delves into the history of this seeming contradiction, explaining how education came to be seen as a panacea even as it paved the way for deepening inequality.
