Principal Investigators
Celeste Carruthers
Celeste Carruthers is William F. Fox Distinguished Professor of Labor Economics in the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee with a joint appointment in the Department of Economics and the Boyd Center for Business and Economic Research.
Her research centers on education policy with crossovers into public economics, labor economics, and economic history. Recent and ongoing projects examine the effect of financial aid on college choices, career and technical education, and the consequences of segregated schools in the early 20th-century United States. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in public expenditure analysis, causal inference, and econometrics.
Carruthers is editor-in-chief of Economics of Education Review, a former member of the Association for Education Finance and Policy Board of Directors, a member of the CTE Research Network at the American Institutes for Research, a member of the CTE Research Exchange (CTEx), an affiliated researcher with the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), and she has served as a faculty adviser to several fellows in the Harvard Graduate School of Education Strategic Data Project.
Carolyn J. Heinrich
Carolyn J. Heinrich is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy, Education, Economics and Health Policy in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at the Peabody College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, and a University Distinguished Professor of Leadership, Policy and Organizations and Political Science.
Heinrich’s research focuses on education, workforce development, social welfare policy, program evaluation, public management, and performance management. She works directly with federal, state and local governments in her research to improve policy design and program effectiveness, and also collaborates with nongovernmental organizations (such as the World Bank, UNICEF and others) to improve the impacts of economic and social investments in middle-income and developing countries.
She received the David N. Kershaw Award for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy analysis and management in 2004 and was elected to the National Academy of Public Administration in 2011.
Adela Soliz
Adela Soliz is an assistant professor of higher education and public policy in the Department of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.
Soliz’s research focuses on policies affecting student success at public community colleges. Her research uses large state administrative or national datasets and econometric methods to estimate causal effects of policies and program participation on community college students’ outcomes. More specifically, she is interested in issues related to college affordability, the development of vocational education at community colleges, and transfer and articulation between two and four-year institutions.
Her research has been published journals such as Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and Education Finance and Policy. She receives funding for her research from the Lumina Foundation and the American Educational Research Association.