Pamela R. Bennett earned her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Before that, she earned her bachelor's and master's degrees at Louisiana State University. During her doctoral program at Michigan, she joined the Population Studies Center where she concentrated her studies in social stratification, specifically racial and ethnic inequality, and population studies. Her research focuses on two areas: (1) trends in and the consequences of racial residential segregation and (2) racial and ethnic inequalities in education. Both of these interests are reflected in her dissertation Multiple Locations of Disadvantage: Race, Racial Residential Separation and Educational Achievement.

Before joining the department as Assistant Professor, Bennett was a Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, a position she held jointly at the department and the Center for Social Organizations of Schools. While at CSOS she, along with several of her colleagues, began one of her current research project, Parenting and Schooling in Diverse Families. With this project, they seek to contribute to the literature on the role of parenting practices in children's educational achievement. Specifically, Bennett and her colleagues seek to explain why parenting strategies, as they relate to children's achievement, vary by race, class, and immigration status. Their efforts center on investigating structural barriers to the human, cultural, and social capital that facilitate the implementation of educationally-effective parenting strategies. They hypothesize that race and class groups are differentially affected by such barriers to capital, as are groups who have families that have immigrated to this country compared to the native born.