Research Expertise and Interest
higher education finance, higher education policy
Research Description
Jennifer A. Delaney is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Delaney’s research investigates higher education finance questions with public policy importance. She uses advanced statistical techniques on large scale datasets with an emphasis on quasi-experimental designs. Her scholarship has fallen into two broad categories: higher education finance and higher education policy, admissions, and public support. Intertwining these two areas of scholarship, her work addresses public policy in higher education across institutional, state, federal, and international levels of analysis. She has made both empirical and theoretical contributions to the field. Her scholarship has provided evidence of effective (and ineffective) public policies. She has also developed conceptual models that scholars, policymakers, and institutional leaders use to think about the ways in which higher education is funded. Additionally, she has investigated the meaning of these investments as they relate to broader social aims of education within democratic systems of governance.
Prior to joining UC Berkeley, Dr. Delaney was a tenured Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was also the Director of the Forum on the Future of Public Education and Director of the Higher Education Program. At the University of Illinois, she was also an affiliate and collaborating scholar with the Institute of Government and Public Affairs and the Center for Social and Behavioral Science. She served in recurring half year appointments as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago from 2015 and 2021. In addition, she was an Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 2007 to 2009.
Dr. Delaney was also a member of the Illinois Board of Higher Education serving as the gubernatorially appointed public university faculty representative on the board between 2019 and 2023. Previously, she worked for the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, and served as a consultant for the Commission on the Future of Higher Education.
Her latest book is Volatility in State Spending for Higher Education. This edited volume focuses on how much volatility there is in the fiscal relationship between states and institutions of higher education, and addresses some of the consequences of this uncertainty. Her first book, The External Social Benefits of Higher Education, co-edited with Walter W. McMahon, explored the underlying rationales for public support of higher education. This work argues that by providing careful documentation of the social benefits of higher education, a strong case can be made for governmental support of the sector.
She currently serves on editorial boards with the following journals: Journal of Education Finance, Journal of Student Financial Aid, Research in Higher Education, and the Review of Higher Education. Between 2017 and 2019, she was an associate editor of Educational Researcher, an AERA journal.