Rate My Professor Vikki Boliver

Professor Vikki Boliver is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Durham University, where she joined in September 2011. She holds a BA in Sociology from Leicester University, an MPhil from Cambridge University, and a DPhil from Oxford University. Prior to her appointment at Durham, she served as a Departmental Lecturer in Sociology at Oxford University, a Nuffield Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University, a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford University, and a Sociology Lecturer at Bath Spa University. At Durham, she is Programme Director for the MA in Social Research Methods and co-convenor of the university-wide First Generation Scholars Network. She co-teaches the second-year undergraduate module Sociology of Education and the masters-level module Education and Social Inequality.

Professor Boliver’s research focuses on social inequalities of access to the most prestigious universities, with particular expertise in the use of contextual data on the socioeconomic circumstances of prospective students to inform more equitable admissions decisions. Her research interests include educational inequalities, especially social class and ethnic inequalities of access to higher status universities; social stratification and mobility, including patterns and processes across multiple generations; quantitative research methods; and applied and policy-relevant research. She is a member of the Higher Education and Social Inequality research group, the Durham University Evidence Centre for Education, and the Centre for Global Higher Education. She serves on the editorial boards of Higher Education Policy, the British Journal of Sociology of Education, and the BSA Sociology journal. Her work has contributed to understandings of fair access, contextualised admissions, and social mobility in higher education.