Discovering What Problems Need Answers, and Acting on Them

Jordan Matsudaira recalls watching his mother work as a middle school teacher in Ithaca, New York, experiencing her work and hearing her talk about her days. Piquing an early curiosity in education, his interest expanded in college to improving outcomes for those in lower-income  communities and led to a lifelong focus on related issues including his service as deputy under secretary and the inaugural chief economist for the U.S. Department of Education.

Matsudaira, now a professor in the department of public administration and policy at American University, was invited to UVA Batten for a three-day residency by Sarah Turner, university professor of economics, education and public policy, a friend and former colleague. During his time here, the policy leader shared his professional expertise and insights with the Batten community on a variety of topics, including student loans. Professor Matsudaira led a class on Higher Education Policy, and met with faculty and students across Grounds, including Education Policy Works faculty and postdocs. He was also the featured speaker at this week’s Batten Hour, where he spoke about his experiences and practical suggestions in a conversation with Dean Ian Solomon.

Turner says that Matsudaira’s visit “provided students and faculty with a window on the policy-making process that you can’t get from a textbook. One of my hopes associated with having people like Professor Matsudaira is that students see some real and tractable opportunities for problem-solving and innovation in federal and state governments.”

Matsudaira’s message to the Batten Hour audience, mostly students:  Be engaged, as we can all make a difference by drawing attention to problems that stand in the way of student achievement and upward mobility and by researching and proposing potential solutions.

“In college and graduate school, I started out being interested in how the government could improve lives by fighting poverty through the welfare system,” Matsudaira said. “Later, my focus turned to how policy could directly increase individuals’ earnings prospects enough to prevent them from needing to rely on that system, delving into more robust ways to support low-income Americans and vault them up the ladder of economic mobility.”

In his first service in a presidential administration, Matsudaira was appointed as chief economist of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, working on issues related to labor, education and safety net policies, including an expansion of federal overtime protections. In this role, he worked with a multi-agency team to develop the College Scorecard, which provides public data on student outcomes across nearly all higher ed institutions in the United States. Unquestionably, this was an immense data-intensive undertaking which compiled never before available data on students who had gone to college with financial aid, looking at what majors they pursued, and their outcomes including their earnings in their jobs after college and the amount of debt they accumulated. The Department of Education was able to create the College Scorecard to inform decision-making for students, families, institutions and policy makers.

“The White House is a thrilling and incredibly interesting place to work,” shared Matsudaira. “Every day, a thousand new policy topics come across your desk to grapple with and it’s a great experience for people who want a taste of how to use analytical tools to inform policy.”

In his recent stint at the Department of Education in the Biden Administration, Matsudaira pioneered the role of chief economist in the Department—recruiting nearly a dozen academic researchers to work with the Department’s administrative data to inform policy with data and analysis. Reflecting on the massive effort, Matsudaira summarized the impact: “The hope is to avoid making policy in the dark. We’re trying to learn from what we’re doing and the things that we’ve done. And we’re using that analysis and evidence to improve the Department of Education’s ability to better serve students and borrowers.”

Speaking directly to students on how to get involved and find opportunities for national policy work, Matsudaira shared his road to the Obama administration and pointed out there are opportunities to intern with the Council of Economic Advisers and other areas within the White House by answering open call solicitations to apply.

His advice also included talking with faculty advisors who might know people who can put in a good word for students. “It is really one of the best ways to get your feet wet and be exposed to the policy world,” he added.

Matsudaira stepped down from the Biden administration just a few weeks ago and is currently a professor in the department of public administration and policy at American University. He has held previous teaching positions at Columbia, Cornell and Princeton, and he clearly enjoys both public service and the academic world. The “atypical” days he spent at the White House often included making policy recommendations on extremely tight timeframes while bringing analytics and new data to decision-making at a very high level and impacting many lives. On the other hand, he stressed that academia offers the opportunity to be equally impactful.

“There are rarely emergency deadlines that are not self-imposed when you’re working on your own research as a professor. That’s one of the things I really enjoyed about stints in government. However, as a faculty person and researcher, when you have a lot of autonomy over your own research agenda, you can keep working on an issue until you really feel like you understand every aspect of it…(discovering) new insights that can lead to action and impact in the world. That’s not the only reason to do academic research, but that is one of the reasons that drew me to it.”

Matsudaira said that both the government service and academic tracks offer students the chance to make a difference in education and other forms of policy. He closed with his message of engagement, saying it is vitally important to have conversations and to raise ideas directly to those in the policy world.

“Sometimes those things really lead to something. By pointing out problems and possible solutions, you may be closer to having an impact on these things than you ever imagined.”