[6] That year, Western then became a student in the doctoral program in sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY, with the intention of both working with sociologist Iván Szelényi and fulfilling a long-held dream of living in New York City.
[7] Szelenyi left the Graduate Center in 1988, and Western followed him to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he subsequently received his master's and Ph.D. degrees in sociology from in 1990 and 1993, respectively.
He taught at Harvard University from 2007 to 2018, where he was a professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the director of the Kennedy School's Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy.
[9] In Punishment and Inequality in America, originally published in 2006, he concludes that "mass imprisonment has erased many of the 'gains to African American citizenship hard won by the civil rights movement.
[23][24] In 2005, while on the faculty of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, Western received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his project, "The Growth and Consequences of American Inequality.