GW and American University launched an academic research center Oct. 8 that will connect policymakers with research about postsecondary education equity.

The Postsecondary Equity & Economics Research Center will pursue research that can inform Congressional educational policies to improve graduation rates and relieve student debt burdens for students by focusing on closing the performance gaps for disadvantaged students and promoting equity in higher education, according to a University release. The center will provide reports to legislators on topics like student loans, performance management and graduate education, with the goal of creating policies that can grant better access to higher education for minority and low-income students.

“The goal was to really connect researchers with policymakers in the higher education space,” Stephanie Riegg Cellini, the co-director of PEER and a professor of public policy and economics, said.

Cellini said the PEER center will study how to best design student loan repayment programs and how to best hold colleges accountable for students’ outcomes like retention, graduation rates, salaries after graduation and student debt burdens by making performance data more transparent. 

The center is a continuation of the PEER project that American University launched in 2021, which studies the how historically Black colleges and universities can improve graduation and employment rates of Black students and ways to measure “outcomes” for students, according to the center’s website. The website also states that the center will build on this research to inform federal policies on student loan repayment programs and to design training programs for low-income students on how to succeed in the job market after college. 

“We know there’s a lot of great research being done by academics around the country, and we wanted to get that research in the hands of policymakers in a way that was digestible for them,” Cellini said. 

As of 2019, only 40 percent of Black college students graduate, as opposed to 64 percent of white students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Additionally, student debt tends to disproportionately affect minority students, with 57 percent of Black borrowers and 47 percent of Hispanic borrowers claiming they have trouble managing their debt financially compared to 36 percent of white borrowers, according to Inside Higher Ed. 

“How do students do in these different programs?” Cellini said. “And can we really measure those effects, and how do we measure it well? And to do it well, we need really good data, and we need to be really careful about how we measure it, so we want to control for things like students’ background characteristics.”

Cellini said she and Jordan Matsudaira, the co-director of the center and professor of public affairs at American University, will connect with external researchers, obtain shorter, more digestible policy briefs and connect research to policy. GW and American University researchers within the center will also conduct internal research on how to improve student retention and employment rates after graduation of disadvantaged students. 

“So we are going to have kind of data capabilities and research assistance, and, eventually, we hope to have postdoctoral scholars and others that we hire to kind of build out this center with folks that are doing essentially quantitative research on higher education topics,” Cellini said.

Cellini said she will be training new researchers in the center who are interested in the environment of research for policy issues and higher education, and she said training will include one-on-one mentoring of graduate students in public policy and economics and writing literature reviews, data cleaning and coding and have the opportunity to co-author reports and briefs or present at conferences. 

“We know the public is questioning the value of a college education, and so I think it’s more important than ever to really understand what we mean by that and be able to measure it in ways that make sense and that can really help students and policymakers understand which colleges are working for which students,” Cellini said.

The PEER Center will fund a fellowship for advanced doctoral students to spend time working in the Office of the Chief Economist in the U.S. Department of Education. The first PEER fellow is Kathryn Blanchard, a doctoral candidate in the economics department, who also worked with Cellini on the project in 2021.

The research team receives funding from philanthropy and nonprofit organizations, including Arnold Ventures, the Joyce Foundation, Lumina Foundation, Strada Education Foundation and American University to perform short- and long-term projects that directly respond to the needs of the policy community. 

“I think this research can inform policy but also hopefully could be accessible even to people thinking about investing in higher education, like students themselves could use research from the center to look at what things might be changing in the future or what kind of program they should think about investing in for themselves,” Blanchard said.

Cellini said the research advisory council of the center will include scholars in the field of higher education economics and policy that the co-directors will ideally have a meeting with each year and call on scholars for advice on current research topics and help guide the research agenda.

Dominique Baker, a researcher in the advisory council for the PEER center and associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware said the center is aiming to frame their research in a way that is easy for lawmakers to interpret by making them short and clear in their recommendations. 

“As people are putting together policy briefs, white papers, right, they can circulate it among advisors to see, does this language make sense, or are there things that we need to hit that we are not hitting?” Baker said. 

Baker said all colleges and universities have some interaction with all levels of government and the PEER center will be important to help create a space where people “deep” in the data and research can have conversations about the practical realities of how policy works and is passed. 

Baker said trust is a unifying concern in education, in which there needs to be thought about the purpose of education and who is responsible for paying for it. 

“So I think that higher education can be an incredible force for good for an entire society. But I think that when we really sort of slim down to only thinking about the individual returns to graduates of college and universities, we can lose sight of that,” Baker said.