CSHE recently welcomed two new visiting doctoral students: Margaret Constance de Leon (University of Toronto) and Guo Yadi (Huazhong University of Science and Technology).
Margaret Constance de Leon is a PhD Research Fellow at the University of Toronto specializing in Comparative International Higher Education and Policy. Her research interests include college affordability, economics of education, and financial aid policy in the United States and Canada. Currently, Margaret is a Fulbright Scholar affiliated with the Pathways Network at Stanford University, a Visiting Doctoral Scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Junior Fellow at Massey College. Her Fulbright-funded project, A Comparative Study of Working Learners, is a longitudinal cohort study examining the experiences and perspectives of employed students in higher education institutions across the US and Canada.
Margaret's longitudinal cohort study work has been awarded with the Fulbright Research Award, the George Flower Award for Advanced Studies in Education, and the AERA Award for Best Paper in Measurement and Research Methodologies. Margaret has presented her research at prominent international conferences, including the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE), where she has won awards and has served as session chair and discussant, committee member, and peer-reviewer. She has presented her findings on financial aid policies and governance structures at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) and Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education (CSSHE) conferences, where she has contributed to discussions on access, equity, and policy reform in higher education.
Margaret has previously worked in policy research advocating for access to postsecondary education at the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, the University of Toronto Students' Union, and at the Diversity Institute at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is also the Founder & Executive Director of the Persistence Project, a youth-driven policy research group focused on topics related to postsecondary access, persistence, and success.
Guo Yadi is a PhD student at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include comparative studies of higher education, student learning and development, honors education, innovative talents cultivation, and institutional research. She has participated in multiple research projects, including ‘Investigation and Analysis of Undergraduate Learning Experience & Teaching Experience in Different Types of Chinese Universities’, and ‘Research on the New Paradigm of University Evaluation Based on the Construction of Institutional Intelligence System’. In these projects, she has been responsible for data collection and processing, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods for comprehensive analysis, and contributing to the research reports and academic papers. She took part in various academic conferences actively and was invited to present her research, such as the 46th Annual EAIR Forum 2024 and the 2023 Annual Conference of the Institutional Research Branch of China Association of Higher Education.
Her doctoral dissertation focus on undergraduate learning experience in American research universities, especially in honors program.