Dear RSF:

Please join us next Wednesday at 11 for Guest Speaker Susan Dynarski’s talk, “The Power of Certainty:Experimental Evidence on the Effective Design of Free Tuition Programs”.

Dynarski is the Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She recently relocated from the University of Michigan, where she held appointments in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, School of Education, Department of Economics and Institute for Social Research. At Michigan, she was co-director of the Education Policy Initiative and the Michigan Education Data Center and a University Professor of Diversity and Social Transformation. Dynarski’s research focuses on understanding and reducing inequality in education. She uses large-scale datasets and quantitative methods of causal inference to understand the effects of charter schools, financial aid, postsecondary schooling, class size, and high school reforms on academic achievement and educational attainment.

Dynarski holds both an AB in social studies and a MS in Public Policy from Harvard University, and a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a faculty research associate at NBER, and was selected as a Carnegie Fellow in 2020. The Association for Public Policy and Management awarded her the Spencer Foundation Award for excellence in research in 2017. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators awarded her the Robert P. Huff Golden Quill Award for excellence in research on student aid. The Chronicle of Higher Education named her a “Top Ten Influencer” in 2015. She writes frequently for the New York Times.