UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz Graduate School of Education concludes this year’s “Policy Goes to School” lecture series on Wednesday, June 6 from 12 pm - 1 pm in room 1207 Education Building. Rachel Baker, Assistant Professor of Education Policy, UC Irvine, will give the lecture “Understanding and Affecting College Students’ Path to Success.” The talk is free and open to the public. The lecture series is hosted by Michael Gottfried and the Department of Education.
In this presentation Baker will describe in broad strokes the complicated organizational structures present in American broad-access colleges. She will then discuss one state-wide intervention that aimed to address one specific form of complexity and the effects of this policy on student efficiency and outcomes.
Rachel Baker earned her Ph.D. in Education Policy and the Economics of Education at Stanford University. Rachel studies inequalities in access to and success in higher education using behavioral economic models of decision making and quasi-experimental and experimental methods. She has studied transfer patterns and policies, agent based simulations of race- and ses-based affirmative action policies, students’ knowledge of labor market outcomes, and descriptive and experimental work on persistence in online classes.