Florencia Torche Seeks to Understand the Roots of Opportunity

Growing up in Chile during Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, Florencia Torche was acutely aware of the inequities in society around her. Though her family was middle-class she was confronted daily with reminders of how deeply opportunity depended on the circumstances of people’s birth. “If you were born poor, you were extremely constrained,” Torche says. This awareness led her to study sociology at the Catholic University of Chile in Santiago and later pursue a master’s and Ph.D. at Columbia.

“My scholarship is driven by an attempt to understand the factors that shape people’s opportunities to succeed and achieve what matters to them,” she explains. In her early research, she was a pioneer in studying social mobility in Latin America — particularly Chile, Mexico, and Brazil — where patterns of opportunity differed starkly from those in the U.S. and Europe. She found that mobility was lower in countries with greater inequality and shaped by the structure of educational systems. Later, she leveraged natural experiments in innovative ways to examine how social circumstances early in life — including before birth — affect an individual’s ability to achieve.

Quick Facts

Title
Professor of Public and International Affairs and Sociology 

Time at Princeton
1 year

Torche’s Research: A Sampling

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Mikel Casal

Not All Degrees are Equal

For decades, a college degree has been the “great equalizer” in American society, providing opportunity to achieve regardless of where a person comes from. As college has become more and more expensive, however, some have questioned how valuable those degrees really are. In research combining a variety of datasets, Torche found that undergraduate degrees still matter, granting “a reasonably high level of income regardless of social origins,” she says. Graduate degrees, however, offer a different story: While many from affluent backgrounds became doctors and lawyers, those from poorer backgrounds gravitate toward less lucrative careers as teachers or social workers. “In that case,” she says, “where you come from really shapes where you end up.”

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Mikel Casal

Intergenerational Impacts of Trauma

In more recent research, Torche has examined how differences in a person’s early social environment — such as exposure to an earthquake or hurricane, neighborhood violence, or armed conflict — determine their later progression in life. “I look for events in the world where the exposure is as random as possible,” she says, “so I can then claim any consequence was caused by that exposure, not the characteristics of the people.” In a range of studies, she has shown how those environmental stressors affect not only those directly exposed, but also the next generation, leading to higher risk of preterm birth and subsequent impacts on cognitive development, education, and even income later in life. “This suggests that protecting the health of pregnant mothers is particularly relevant for long-term population health,” she concludes.

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Mikel Casal

Vaccines and the Next Generation

In one particularly novel study, Torche looked at the impact of COVID-19 vaccinations on births in California. Using data from 40 million births, she found maternal COVID infection during pregnancy was a strong predictor of preterm birth, which in turn can increase risk of problems later in life including health issues. However, when Torche correlated those births with vaccination rates by ZIP codes, she found that the negative impact almost entirely disappeared in ZIP codes with high vaccination rates. “Vaccination really reduced the negative impact of having COVID on the health of the next generation,” Torche says, adding these findings offer more support for the importance of vaccination for societal health not only for the  current generation, but also for those that follow.