This cluster consists of two major research areas: stratification and education. Stratification has inspired the theoretical imagination and empirical contributions from all founding fathers of sociology because it cuts across diverse issues and subfields, such as education, the labour market, health, migration, deviance, gender and family. Education is also an area of enduring interest, not only as a crucial mechanism of stratification and mobility but also as one of the most pervasive formal organizations and a central institution in the construction of modern nationalism and identity formation. A major research theme of this cluster examines recent research frontiers in the interplay between education and stratification, including (1) the classic concern with the inequality of educational opportunities (cross-national trends and the roles of competition, exclusion, and state policy in China), (2) the education gap for children of migrants (how educational decisions are made for children of migrants, their educational achievement as well as the interaction of parental migration status and social environment in determining their educational outcomes), (3) the longstanding gender gap in STEM (the worldwide under-representation of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematical college majors), and (4) the resurgent interest in the theoretical and methodological implications of education as a positional good. Outputs under this theme include recent papers published in American Sociological Review and Sociology of Education. Another major research theme focuses on the social mechanisms that generate the unequal distribution of health and morbidity, both physical and psychological. Current projects engage multiple research frontiers, including those in (1) the literature on relative social standing as a determinant of health, (2) the influential literature on the role of non-cognitive skills, (3) the surging literature on the sociology and economics of happiness, and (4) the health status of migrant labor in China.