In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay, Jon A. Shields (Claremont McKenna, Dept. Govt.) and Corey Tazzara (Scripps Coll., Dept. Hist.) ask whether universities teach about social class. Their answer: largely no, especially compared to universities’ curricular attention to race and gender.

What are Shields and Tazzara’s findings, and how might they apply to legal education? More below the fold.

For their essay, Shields and Tazzara analyzed 85,000 undergraduate syllabi at the University of Texas at Austin between 2011 and 2025. They coded course titles for terms associated with race, class, and gender, then separately searched the syllabus database for assigned books addressing class. The authors also assessed courses oriented around social justice, and some courses fit in more than one category.

The quantitative disparity is striking: 1,602 race-themed course offerings, 794 focused on gender—and only 32 on social class over the study’s fifteen-year period. That’s slightly more than two class-oriented offerings per year for an undergraduate population of more than 40,000. For every course offering oriented towards class, the authors find 50 times as many offerings focused on race and 25 times as many offerings oriented toward gender.

This analysis is supported by Shields and Tazzara’s analysis of assigned readings. Their headline claim is that “a majority of the most commonly assigned books that are centered on America—its people, history, and politics—are about race.” But the details are, to me, more shocking. The authors find that Black sociologist William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged and When Work Disappears were not on any UT Austin undergraduate syllabi from 2021 to 2025. These works on social class are foundational, accessible, and relevant—yet absent from the visible curriculum.

What’s perhaps counterintuitive is how little changed under the authors’ metrics after the social-justice movements of 2020, including Black Lives Matter. Shields and Tazzara find that race-oriented offerings increased by approximately 15% after 2020—far less than I would’ve expected. While social-justice coded offerings almost doubled after 2020, I wanted more specification of these courses’ relationship to (and overlap with) the conventional pillars of race, class, and gender. While the authors’ analysis doesn’t capture more nuanced curricular changes along these lines, it does show an instructional infrastructure that predated the post-2020 rise in student interest in courses on race and gender and persisted through regulatory efforts by governing boards and state legislatures.

Although course titles don’t capture everything taught, they show what faculty and academic units find salient, and they serve as a primary filter when undergraduates engage each semester’s market for instruction. And the point is not merely that social class receives less overt attention at the syllabus level. The authors show that race and gender operate as recognizable curricular categories, while class plays more of a supporting role.

The next question, of course, is how law school offerings might fare under a similar analysis. Shields and Tazzara’s quantitative methodology does not translate cleanly to law schools, where smaller numbers and institutional variance impede the scale that makes the authors’ study compelling. Legal education features flatter course titles and casebooks that require insider knowledge to map onto themes of race, class, and gender. For law schools, a more useful methodology might draw on a broader range of data sources, including classroom materials and the qualitative experiences of students and faculty. Showing meaningful change over time would be a more complicated project.

But if the concern is an underemphasis on social class, an alternative approach might look to the places where distributional questions are intrinsic. One of those—perhaps the most prominent—is income tax law. In law schools, introductory income tax courses are semester-long examinations of how society distributes economic benefits and burdens. Progressive rates, the distinctions between labor and capital income, and tax expenditures necessarily expose students to legal differences organized around income and wealth, even when neither the syllabus nor the readings label these differences as class. Race and gender also are embedded within tax law, but—unlike income and wealth—they can be (and have been) minimized or omitted.

The claim isn’t that every income tax course foregrounds social class or treats the concept seriously. But an infrastructural investment in tax curriculum opens the door for conversations about class to occur. That’s one reading of Shields and Tazzara’s point: top-level metrics such as course titles and assigned readings give a sense of the overarching structure of university curriculum in terms of race, class, and gender—the three longstanding pillars of social scientific analysis. And that structure says something about the landscape of higher education.

A similar analysis can—and should—be done for curriculum at law schools, with methodologies adapted to recognize the unique doctrinal and pedagogical aspects of professional education. Law schools may teach considerably more about class than their course catalogues disclose, and students might learn about the legal machinery of economic stratification without being asked to identify it as such. The harder question is whether legal education teaches students to recognize what they are seeing.

Related TaxProf Blog coverage:

• NY Times: Congress Should Reform Endowment Tax to Incentivize More Wealthy Colleges to Expand Access to Working- and Middle-Class Students (June 28, 2026)
• Pre-Law Pathways After Students for Fair Admissions (May 2, 2026)
• Speck Reviews Hatfield’s Tax in Law Schools (Feb. 28, 2025)
• U.S. News, Department of Education, and Law Schools Take the Gloves Off in Rankings Battle (Mar. 2, 2023)
• Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across U.S. Colleges (Aug. 26, 2019)
• Law Faculty Hiring and Socioeconomic Bias (Mar. 8, 2012)
• Sander: Class in American Legal Education (Oct. 5, 2011)
• Opportunities for Low-Income Students at Top Colleges and Universities: Policy Initiatives and the Distribution of Students (Sept. 5, 2006)