Park studied under the philosophers John Dewey (Dewey, John) (at the University of Michigan), William James, (James, William) and Josiah Royce (Royce, Josiah) (the latter two at Harvard University) and the sociologist Georg Simmel (Simmel, Georg) (in Germany). All his graduate work was done after 11 years of experience as a newspaper reporter in various large cities, where his interest in social problems was stimulated. Park earned his A.B. at the University of Michigan (1887), his A.M. at Harvard (1899), and his Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg (1904). He taught at Harvard (1904–05), the University of Chicago (1914–33), and Fisk University (1936–43).

In 1906 Park wrote two magazine articles about the oppression of the Congolese by Belgian colonial administrators. Turning to the study of the black population in his own country, he became secretary to Booker T. Washington (Washington, Booker T) and is said to have written most of Washington's The Man Farthest Down (1912). Park believed that a caste system produced by sharp ethnic differences tends, because of the division of labour (labour, division of) between the castes, to change into a structure of economic classes.

With Ernest W. Burgess (Burgess, Ernest Watson), Park wrote a standard text, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921). In The Immigrant Press and Its Control (1922), Park argued that foreign-language newspapers would, in the long run, promote assimilation of immigrants. Three volumes of his Collected Papers, edited by Everett C. Hughes and others, were published between 1950 and 1955. The second volume deals with the city and with human ecology, which was the title of a course taught by Park at the University of Chicago in 1926.