EAST LANSING, Mich. – Michigan State University soon will become a much-needed training ground for researchers who use methods from economics to address critical policy issues in education.
Doctoral students now can apply for a new interdisciplinary program focused on the best approaches to answer questions such as how teacher quality is linked to student achievement and whether loan policies influence college completion rates.
Faculty in the College of Education and the Department of Economics received a five-year, $5 million grant from the federal Institute of Education Sciences to support the initiative. The funding will provide up to 25 selected students with $30,000 plus tuition and health care for each year they participate.
The program begins in the 2009 fall semester. Applications are due July 10.
“The quantitative approaches that economists have developed to explore a wide range of problems are now being applied to education more and more,” said project co-director Robert Floden, a University Distinguished Professor in the College of Education. “The problem is there is a national shortage of people who are well trained to use these methods.”
MSU will be unique among institutions preparing researchers to study economics of education because of the cross-departmental focus. The project will draw on faculty with related expertise from at least six doctoral programs: Economics; Educational Policy; K-12 Educational Administration; Labor and Industrial Relations; Measurement and Quantitative Methods; and Teacher Education.
Co-director Jeffrey Wooldridge, a University Distinguished Professor of economics, said the Department of Economics faculty members involved in the program all have experience in education research. They use longitudinal statistical data – that is, data following the same set of students, teachers or schools over time – to analyze the effects of school funding, class size, teachers’ educational training and other factors on student performance.
Wooldridge said the economists’ expertise in longitudinal data analysis will be a good match with the MSU education researchers’ expertise in designing school-based experiments and measuring educational outcomes.
“It’s clearly a two-way exchange here,” he said. “We should be able to attract higher quality students.”
In addition to coursework required for their doctoral program, students in the specialization will take new courses in economics of education, work with core faculty on related research projects, complete an apprenticeship with an outside organization and attend an ongoing research seminar.
Participants will be recruited in their first or second year of doctoral study, with a national search beginning this fall for students applying for the program in its second year.
“These students will have a strong understanding of education issues related to policy decisions and very strong training in quantitative research,” Floden said. “There is a need to improve these methods so the educational community can get better estimates of the associations between policy variables and student outcomes.”
Floden and Wooldridge lead a steering committee that will oversee the program, including Dale Belman, professor of labor and industrial relations; Stacy Dickert-Conlin, associate professor of economics; Barbara Schneider, John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of education; and Ron Zimmer, associate professor of K-12 educational administration.
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