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Steven G. Brint (born 1951) is an American sociologist known for his historical and comparative analyses of schooling; for his studies of professions, professionalism, and “the new class”; and for his contributions to sociological theory. In recent years, he has been engaged in efforts to reform U.S. higher education.[1]
He has held teaching and research positions at Boston College, New York University, Yale University, and is currently Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside.[2]
He is the author of over 100 peer-reviewed articles and books, with over 13,500 citations.[3] His work has been published in many of the top journals in the American Journal of Sociology,[4] Sociological Theory,[5] and Sociology of Education.[6] Brint is married to historian Michele Renee Salzman.
Brint was born in Albuquerque, NM in a secular Jewish family. His father was an early computer systems analyst at Sandia Laboratories and his mother acted in local theatre. Brint received his B.A. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973 and his M.A. and Ph.D., both in sociology, from Harvard University.[7] As an undergraduate, he worked at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, where he remains an associated faculty member today.[8] While at Harvard, he wrote a dissertation on "new-class" theory under the supervision of Daniel Bell and James A. Davis.[9] Also, while at Harvard, Brint worked with Jerome Karabel at the Huron Institute studying higher education.
Brint’s first studies of higher education, begun while he was still in graduate school, concerned the origins and transformation of U.S. community colleges. In The Diverted Dream (1989) Brint and his co-author Jerome Karabel established that neither business elites nor student consumers drove the development of community colleges. Instead, the pioneers took their cues from four-year college presidents who were interested in preserving their own institutions for the strongest students at a time when demand for educational credentials was increasing. Brint and Karabel argued that this community college vanguard developed distinctive managerial interests that led it to abandon their original intention to offer two-year colleges as a stepping-stone to four-year colleges. These early leaders were not content to remain in the bottom status rung of academically oriented post-secondary institutions and desired instead to become the leading provider of “semi-professional” training. They perfected testing and advising techniques for channeling students who were interested in transfer into occupational programs. Business and government support was late to develop and came only in the 1960s and 1970s after the colleges were well established. Brint and Karabel subsequently generalized their findings on the community college case as a theory of institutional origins and transformations focusing on factors such as gaps in the organizational ecology, organizational assets, and strategies that institutional leaders develop for purposes of status gain.
Brint’s comparative-historical study of schooling, Schools and Societies followed in 1998. The book provides an overview of school structures throughout the world and engages critical questions of schooling’s role as a source of cultural transmission, social selection, and socialization. The book has been expanded and updated twice, most recently in 2016.
Supported by the National Science Foundation and two philanthropies in the early 2000s, Brint and his research team created two large historical databases on American higher education, the Institutional Data Archive and the College Catalog Study. From these databases, Brint and his co-authors published a series of papers on the changing structures of U.S. four-year colleges and universities, exploring such topics as the reference sets of university presidents, the rise of the practical arts, the growth of interdisciplinary programs, the rise and fall of academic fields, and models of general education. A second set of papers, organized with colleagues at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, explored student culture, focusing on changes in college students’ study time, disciplinary differences in cultures of engagement, students’ extra-curricular involvements, and the population of disengaged students.
This work culminated in Two Cheers for Higher Education (2018), a sweeping overview and critique of American colleges and universities during the period 1980-2015. The book provides a skeptical treatment of the “knowledge-economy” idea, an analysis of the increasingly permeable boundaries between universities and corporations, an analysis of the research prowess of the leading institutions and scientific disciplines, an assessment of the limited role of universities in promoting social mobility, a chapter on status-seeking among college students, and a consideration of the major threats to the continued growth and influence of higher education that emerged during the period. According to Brint, these threats included poorly controlled costs, administrative bloat, the growth of part-time instructors, the rise of online media, and the influence of power-centered epistemologies in the humanities and social sciences.
Brint’s interest in the culture and politics of professionals also developed during his graduate school years. In the mid and late 1970s, writers such as John and Barbara Ehrenreich, Alvin Gouldner, Irving Kristol, and Everett Carll Ladd, Jr. argued that a class located between capital and labor was emerging in post-industrial societies. This “new class” was thought to be notably more liberal and left in orientation than businesspeople and consequently a competitor for power and influence in society. Different theorists drew the boundaries around the “new class” differently. Brint was the first to examine and assess the several competing formulations of “new class” theory using survey data. He concluded that the only version of the theory that identified a group with distinctive political and cultural views could not be considered a socio-economic class. Rather, it was a set of liberal-minded professions concerned with social relations and cultural production. Conversely, those formulations that could be considered to draw acceptable boundaries around a socio-economic class did not identify a group that exhibited distinctively liberal or left political orientations. Instead, liberal and left tendencies within the professional stratum, to the extent they existed, could be attributed to the temporal effects of a more politically liberal cohort of young professionals, the expansion of higher education, and more localized liberal politics among social-cultural specialists and those working outside of the for-profit sector.
Brint’s interest in the institutions and politics of professionals continued in subsequent years and led to his second book, In an Age of Experts (1994), which included a history of the institutions of professionalism, an analysis of the role of professionals in the political economy, and a breakdown of the centers of liberalism and conservatism within the professional stratum. In the book, Brint distinguished between two conceptions of professionalism, "social trustee professionalism" and "expert professionalism," and showed how these distinctive occupational understandings influenced the politics of professionals. In related work, Brint subsequently wrote about the dilemmas of professional responsibility in an age of large organizations and provided a critical examination of theories of the “knowledge economy.” He also analyzed ideas about the nature of professionalism using survey data. This study documented the distinctive location of “social-trustee professionalism” in the helping professions and of “expert professionalism” in the managerial and technical professions.
In the early 2020s, with two colleagues, he revisited the “new class” theory and found an increasingly liberal and left profile relative to blue-collar workers. He and his co-authors attributed trends toward liberal and left politics among professionals to the combined effects of higher education, decreased religiosity, and anti-authoritarianism. They contrasted these trends to the increasingly conservative attitudes found among blue-collar workers where lower levels of education, stronger ties to organized religion, and authoritarian attitudes were more common.
Brint has made several contributions to sociological theory that are unrelated to his work on educational institutions and new class theory.
In a study of Harrison White’s structural sociology, he established that purely structural theories of social networks could only rarely generate robust explanations of outcomes in the absence of information about the cultural interests and understandings of participants in the networks.
In “Gemeinschaft Revisited” (2002), Brint offered a new theory of community, arguing that physical proximity was unnecessary for community formation and distinguishing between several distinct types of community formations, including not interest-based communities, activity-based communities, virtual communities, and imagined communities. He distinguished structural differences in these community types and showed how these structural differences generated weaker or stronger normative control, weaker or stronger feelings of identity, and variable levels of durability. The paper critiqued both social capital theory and the communitarian movement in favor of the less demanding and more fleeting forms of community characteristic of modern social relations.
In “High-Leverage Sociological Concepts and the Progress of Theory” (2025), Brint provided a content analysis of 445 articles in the two leading American theory journals. He showed that few articles in these journals were oriented toward generalized explanation, a principal objective of all sciences. Acknowledging the importance of pluralism in sociological theorizing, Brint argued that a higher proportion of theorists’ energy should go into a search for generalizable concepts and conditioning principles. He identified 12 high-leverage sociological concepts that were frequently employed in sociology to explain outcomes across multiple settings, in multiple subfields, and across multiple levels of analysis. The concepts primarily important as generators of social relations included social activation skill, social network ties, interaction ritual chains, organizational growth and density, and collaborative and autocatalytic sources of new social forms. The concepts primarily important as constraints to social relations included reference groups, power-dependence relations, social closure mechanisms, labeling/othering, and institutionalized categories. Two of the concepts combined generative and constraining features in almost equal measure: the four forms of capital (economic, social, cultural, and symbolic) and population pressures. Brint emphasized that in employing these high-leverage concepts, sociologists should be attentive to the most important variables that condition their explanatory power. In the paper, he provided examples of how these concepts and conditioning principles have been effectively employed by sociologists.
Following the racial-justice protests in 2020 and the right-wing reaction to them, Brint became increasingly concerned about threats to the knowledge-seeking mission of U.S. higher education institutions. In his view, the threats emanated both from social-justice progressivism on the left and governmental legal restrictions on the right. These concerns led him to publish a series of articles critiquing the culture of conformity on college campuses and the tendency in conservative states to restrict free inquiry. His articles also focused on the plans of the incoming Trump Administration.
In speeches during the period, Brint advocated a campaign to publicize the economic and societal benefits of higher education together with a program to reform weaknesses in the sector’s organization. He pointed to the costs associated with the increasing state and federal regulatory burden and those associated with the growth of administration. He argued against the further expansion of student affairs staff who he described as too often channeling student energies away from study. He also advocated addressing problems of ideological bias, not through legal means, but through orientation programs and administrative communications aimed at shoring up the fundamental mission of universities as instruments of the discovery and dissemination knowledge.
During this period, Brint was involved with several organizations on the front lines of university reform, including the Academic Freedom Alliance, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Heterodox Academy, and the University of California Initiative for Free Inquiry, which he helped to organize and lead.
