Richard J. Murnane

Richard J. Murnane is an economist and the Juliana W. and William Foss Thompson Professor of Education and Society in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Murnane's research examines the respects in which the growth in family income inequality in the U.S. has affected educational opportunities for children from low-income families and the effectiveness of alternative strategies for improving life chances for these children. He and Greg J. Duncan co-edited Whither Opportunity and cowrote Restoring Opportunity. One of his recent projects (with Stanford education professor and sociologist Sean Reardon) examines whether trends in the use of different types of private schools by low- and higher-income families contributed to the recent increase in income-based gaps in educational outcomes. Murnane received his PhD from Yale University.

updated 2025