Jordan Matsudaira is a Professor at the School of Public Affairs at American University. He is also a Nonresident Fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC and a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago and Philadelphia. His research focuses on using government administrative data to understand the causal impact of education and labor market policies and institutions on the economic outcomes of low-income Americans.
Matsudaira served as Deputy Under Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education in the Biden Administration. While serving in that role he created the office and served as the first ever Chief Economist of the Department. He and his team brought economic analysis and quick-turn data analyses to help design higher education regulations and executive actions related to loan repayment, higher education accountability, data disaggregation, and student debt relief.
From 2013 to 2015, he served on President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers as Chief Economist. While there, he worked on labor, education, and safety net policies, including gainful employment regulations of for-profit colleges and an expansion of the federal overtime protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act. He also led a multiagency team in developing the College Scorecard, a data tool providing college-specific information on student outcomes (an article about my involvement is here).
Matsudaira earned his PhD in Economics and Public Policy from the University of Michigan. He earned a master's in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a BA from Union College. He was previously a Robert Wood Johnson postdoctoral fellow in health policy research at the University of California, Berkeley.