Ronald Ehrenberg

Ronald Ehrenberg is the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University, Director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri) and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. From 1995 to 1998 he served as Cornell’s Vice President for Academic Programs, Planning and Budgeting. A widely published labor economist, coauthor of the leading labor economics textbook and past president of the Society of Labor Economists, he currently chairs the AAUP Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession and serves on the NRC Board of Higher Education and the Workforce and the NACUBO Endowment Study Advisory Committee. In 2002 he was named a National Associate of the National Academies of Science and Engineering and Institute of Medicine, and in 2003 he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Education. Ehrenberg’s recent research has centered on the economics of higher education. His three most recent books are American University: National Treasure or Endangered Species (Cornell University Press, 1997), Tuition Rising; Why College Costs So Much (Harvard University Press, 2000) and Governing Academia (Cornell University Press, forthcoming). His long-standing research interest in issues relating to public elementary and secondary education derives from his parents, who were New York City public school teachers, and his wife, who is a school superintendent and has coauthored four papers with him. His research in this area includes studies of the compensation and mobility of school superintendents, the relationship between teachers’ contract provisions, teachers’ absenteeism, students’ absenteeism and student learning, the relationship between student learning and the match of teachers and students by race, ethnicity and gender, the determinants of school budget vote success, and a meta evaluation of studies of the relationship between class size and student learning. During the early 1990s Ehrenberg served on the Council of the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). In that role, he was instrumental in starting the ICPSR on its path to establish its International Archive of Education Data. Ehrenberg received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University.