Kevin Stange is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan where he teaches graduate courses in higher education policy, economics, and quantitative methods. During the 2022-2023 academic year he was on leave serving as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education.
Professor Stange's research investigates topics in empirical labor and public economics, with a focus on education. He currently is leading projects to better understand how higher education alters students' labor market trajectories and mobility, how postsecondary investment responds to changes in skill demand, and an evaluation of the Michigan Tuition Incentive Program.
He is co-editor of
Productivity in Higher Education, which empirically tackles various aspects of measuring performance in the higher education sector. He has also recently helped lead the development of a large new dataset that will enable scholars in diverse fields to examine a multitude of questions about postsecondary education. The
College and Beyond II (CBII) Data (with P. Courant, A. Flaster, S. Jekielek, M. Levenstein, T. McKay) contains almost 50 million course records for 1 million students attending 19 universities since 2000 and is available for researchers to access via ICPSR. His prior research includes studies of college enrollment and persistence, community colleges, the importance of amenities in college choice, and the effects of different pricing structures on program/major choice and student credit load. He has also researched changes in the health care workforce and occupational licensing. His research has been published in numerous economics, education, and policy academic journals and featured in popular outlets such as Time, Wall Street Journal, Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Ed, Atlantic Monthly, and the Freakonomics blog. He has received research support from the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the WT Grant Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation.
Prior to joining the Ford School, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. He received undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Economics from MIT and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.
