Michael Kirst is Professor Emeritus of Education and Business Administration at Stanford University. He has been on the Stanford faculty since 1969. Dr. Kirst received his Ph.D. in political economy and government from Harvard. Before joining the Stanford University faculty, Dr. Kirst held several positions with the federal government, including Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Manpower, Employment and Poverty, and Director of Program Planning and Evaluation for the Bureau of Elementary and Secondary Education in the U.S. Office of Education (now the U.S. Department of Education). Kirst was recently appointed president of the California State Board of Education in 2011, a position he also held from 1977 to 1981. He is also a member of both the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education. His book From High School to College, with Andrea Venezia, was published by Jossey Bass in 2004.
Mitchell L. Stevens is Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Organizational Behavior and Sociology At Stanford. He studies the organization of US higher education, the quantification of academic performance, and alternative school forms. The author of prize-winning studies of home education and selective college admissions, he currently is writing a book about how US research universities organize research and teaching about the rest of the world. He serves as the third Director of the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research, a cooperative institution that has brought more than 500 scholars to Stanford over a quarter century and catalyzes organizational scholarship worldwide.
Rachel Baker is a doctoral student in Higher Education at Stanford. She graduated in 2004 with a B.A. in psychology and elementary education from Dartmouth College. Rachel's professional experience includes teaching elementary school in the Marshall Islands, working as a literacy specialist at a school for the Deaf and coordinating college readiness programming at The Steppingstone Foundation in Boston. Rachel's research interests include college access and completion and community college success.
Eric Bettinger is Associate Professor at the Stanford University School of Education. His research interests include economics of education; student success and completion in college; teacher characteristics and student success in college; effects of voucher programs on both academic and non-academic outcomes. Eric is also studying what factors determine student success in college. Eric's work aims to bring understanding of these cause-and-effect relationships in higher education. His most recent work focuses on the effects of FAFSA simplification on students' collegiate outcomes.
Elizabeth (Liza) Dayton is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Stanford School of Education and Center for Education Policy Analysis. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from Johns Hopkins University (2012), following a B.A. in psychology from Stanford (2003), M.A. in sociology from Stanford (2004), and M.A. in sociology from Johns Hopkins (2009). Her dissertation, supported by an American Educational Research Association grant, demonstrated that supportive family relationships statistically promote first-generation college-going, protect against downward educational mobility, and perpetuate educational success from one generation to the next. Dayton has also examined the potential for intergenerational educational mobility among the children of adults returning to community college, and how switching school and neighborhood contexts via housing and school voucher programs affects youth outcomes. She has performed extensive classroom observations with the Baltimore Education Research Consortium. Dayton’s research interests lie in three overlapping areas: intergenerational educational mobility; the value of noncognitive skills (such as attitudes and effort) for education and career; and the role of families in shaping children’s noncognitive skills and educational and occupational trajectories.
Tom Ehrlich is Visiting Professor at the Stanford University School of Education. He has previously served as president of Indiana University, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and dean of the Stanford Law School. He was also the first president of the Legal Services Corporation in Washington, DC, and the first director of the International Development Cooperation Agency, reporting to President Carter. After his tenure at Indiana University, he was a Distinguished University Scholar at California State University and taught regularly at San Francisco State University. From 2000 to 2010 he was a Senior Scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He is author, co-author, or editor of 12 books, including Reconnecting Education and Foundations: Turning Good Intentions into Educational Capital (2007), and Educating for Democracy: Preparing Undergraduates for Lives of Responsible Political Engagement (2007). He is currently working on a book about integrating liberal learning into undergraduate business education. He is a trustee of Mills College, and has been a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania and Bennett College. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and holds five honorary degrees.
Hiep Ho, Communications Specialist
Daniel Klasik is a doctoral candidate in the Education Policy program at Stanford University. He graduated from Williams College in 2003 with a BA in Psychology and Mathematics and earned a MA in Economics from Stanford in 2010. Prior to his time at Stanford, Daniel worked as both an admissions officer at Vassar College and as a Research Assistant in the Education Policy Center of the Urban Institute. At Stanford, Daniel has conducted research on how students make choices about whether and where to attend college and what policies might work to improve these choices. This work has been guided by his dissertation committee, which includes Susanna Loeb, Sean Reardon, and Eric Bettinger. In his dissertation Daniel examines how the structure and complexity of the college application process shape both students’ decisions about where to enroll in college and their persistence after matriculation.
Abby Larson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Stanford School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the New York University (2010). Larson's research focuses on complex institutions, decision-making, and living digitally. Her major current project in this area is a study of global financial markets based on data collected in and around major global investment banks in New York, London, and Frankfurt during the fall of 2008. Unlike previous research on financial crisis, the project draws on in-depth interviews and ethnographic data conducted during the height of market uncertainty. The methodology sheds light on several important paradoxes, and contributes to our contemporary understandings of work and sustainability in high innovation sectors, and the intersection of culture, organizations, globalization, and technology more broadly. Larson was previously the National Science Foundation and American Sociological Association Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been named a Fellow at the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, a German Chancellor Fellow by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Rotary International Scholar, and has worked with organizations such as the Social Science Research Council and the International Center for Transitional Justice. In keeping with a commitment to applied sociology, in 2005-2007 Larson helped to establish the Research Alliance for New York City Schools, an enterprise to facilitate empirical research on public schools. Larson has lived and conducted research in Argentina, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, and earned a B.A. with honors and an M.A. from Stanford University.
Justin Nguyen is the Project Administrator for the Ecology Project on Higher Education and supporting Mitchell Stevens. He received his B.A. in International Relations with a minor in Asian American Studies from the University of California, Davis. Prior to coming to Stanford, Justin worked for the State Assembly of the California State Legislature. He also supports the Stanford Graduate School of Education's initiative, “education's digital future.”
Kristopher Proctor was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Education at Stanford University, and is now Assistant Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Avila University. His research has explored curricular changes in U.S. higher education institutions since 1970. His current research focuses on the responsiveness of higher education institutions to environmental pressures in forming particular degree programs. Previously, he served as the Data Collection Manager for the Colleges & Universities 2000 Project at the University of California, Riverside.
Michelle Reininger is an Assistant Professor (Research) and the Executive Director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis. She returns to Stanford, where she received a Ph.D. in the economics of education and an MA in economics, from her position as an Assistant Professor of Human Development and Social Policy and Learning Sciences at Northwestern University and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. At Northwestern, Reininger studied the dynamics of teacher and principal labor markets including preparation, recruitment, and retention. She is currently involved in two longitudinal studies of the career paths of teachers and principals in the Chicago Public School System. Her work has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the American Education Research Association, and the Joyce Foundation. A former chemistry teacher, Reininger has also received an MA in education policy from the University of Virginia.
W. Richard (Dick) Scott received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago. He came to Stanford in 1960 where he is now Professor Emeritus of Sociology with courtesy appointments in the Schools of Business, Education, and Medicine. He is an organizational sociologist who has concentrated his work on the study of professional organizations (e.g., educational, engineering, research, medical). During the past two decades, he has concentrated his research on the relation between organizations and their institutional environments. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, and has served on many research and advisory boards in the Department of Health and Human Services, National Academy of Sciences, National Institute of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, and National Science Foundation. He has also served as the editor of the Annual Review of Sociology, and as President of the Sociological Research Association.
Betsy Williams, Doctoral Research Assistant