President Emerita, Mills College – Oakland, California; Senior Vice President for Strategic Advancement, University Now – San Francisco, California
Janet L. Holmgren is a consultant to higher education and nonprofit organizations. Her current and recent consulting work includes the Lower Cost Models for Independent Colleges Consortium, Bay Path University, the Women’s College Coalition, the East Bay Community Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Davis Education Foundation, the Peralta Community Colleges, Cooper University, UniversityNow, and the University of Advanced Technology. She speaks annually at the Education Leadership Academy of the University of California, Berkeley and is an adjunct faculty...
Senior Researcher and Visiting Scholars Coordinator
Anne J. MacLachlan is a retired senior researcher at CSHE who continues to be devoted to increasing access, persistence, and success in postsecondary education for underrepresented groups (URM) including domestic minorities, women, and those from uneducated/poor families with an emphasis on those in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Her research areas cover the spectrum of postsecondary populations including community college and transfer students, undergraduates in general, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. Among these, doctoral...
Associate Professor, Global Studies, UC Santa Barbara
Aashish Mehta is a development economist who studies globalization and structural change, and how they influence the role of education in labor markets. He also studies the political-economy of public services provision, and the role of education in social stratification. His publications cover many other aspects of development policy, and appear in a wide variety of economics and public policy journals.
Born and raised in India, he trained in economics and energy policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he completed his PhD in Agricultural and Applied Economics. Prior...
Assistant Professor - Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley
Tolani Britton uses quasi-experimental methods to explore the impact of policies on students’ transition from secondary school to higher education, as well as access and retention in higher education. Recent work explores whether the disproportionate increase in incarceration of Black males for drug possessions and manufacture increased gaps in college enrollment rates by race and gender over two time periods- after the passage of the Anti-Drug Act from 1986 - 1993 and after the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act from 1995 - 2000.
Saul Geiser is a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley and taught there before joining UC’s Office of the President in 1981. Geiser served as director of admissions research for the UC system after Californians voted to end affirmative action in 1996, and he helped redesign UC admissions policy. His work has focused on issues of equity and validity in college admissions, with the aim of identifying admissions criteria that have less adverse impact on low-income and...
Berkeley, CA - November 24, 2025 - CSHE Senior Associate Saul Geiser published an op-ed at Inside Higher Education, critiquing the use of SAT in college admissions. It was based on his recent ROPS paper titled "Why the SAT Is a Poor Fit for Public Universities."
John Aubrey Douglass is Senior Research Fellow - Public Policy and Higher Education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), and is a faculty member in the Goldman School of Public Policy, at the University of California - Berkeley. His research focuses on the forces and politics of globalization, the future of Democracy, the role of universities in economic development and socioeconomic mobility, the student experience and...
This report responds to recent announcements by Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and other institutions reinstating the SAT or ACT for admission. Widely publicized after aNew York Timesarticle and analysis by Harvard’s Opportunity Insights group, these announcement rest on two claims: that standardized tests outperform high school grades in predicting college success and that they may enhance diversity in admissions. Both claims falter...
