Higher Education Policy

Janet Holmgren, Ph.D.

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...

George Blumenthal

Former Director, Center for Studies in Higher Education and Chancellor Emeritus, UC Santa Cruz

George R. Blumenthal served as Director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education from 2019 until 2023. He continues his involvement with CSHE as Affiliated Faculty and as a member of the ELA Advisory Board.

Blumenthal was UC Santa Cruz's 10th chancellor. He joined the campus in 1972 as a faculty member in astronomy and astrophysics and was named chancellor on September 19, 2007, after serving as acting chancellor for 14 months.

The Blumenthal era has been marked by a commitment to ensuring that the doors of opportunity at UC Santa Cruz are open to all:

The number...

Ami Zusman

Former Coordinator of Graduate Education Planning & Analysis, University of California system, UCOP

Ami Zusman previously served as Coordinator of Graduate Education Planning and Analysis for the University of California system, where she directed graduate and professional education planning and policy, as well as student outcomes assessment. She developed long-range graduate enrollment plans for the UC system, created instruments to measure and compare graduate student success, and was the lead UC liaison for the National Research Council’s assessment of doctoral programs, among other activities. Ami also authored or was principal staff for University-wide reports on interdisciplinary...

Robert Shireman

Senior Fellow, The Century Foundation

Since his first education policy job in 1989, Shireman has played key roles in a wide variety of higher education finance, access, quality, and governance issues. He shepherded the evolution of the nation’s income-based student loan repayment system from its initial adoption in 1992 to its expansion and improvement by President Barack Obama. He organized the federal response to emerging signs of predatory for-profit career training in 2009, leading to a widely discussed set of regulatory reforms and enforcement actions. Shireman’s analysis of local needs in California prompted changes in...

Karin Fischer

Research Associate

Karin Fischer is a journalist who focuses on higher education. Her primary area of focus is international education, including American colleges' activities overseas, study abroad, the globalization of the college experience, and international-student recruitment. Her work with the Center for Studies in Higher Education will focus on the international student experience, including issues of acculturation, social satisfaction, and academic performance. She is the author of a weekly newsletter, ...

James A. Hyatt, M.B.A.

Senior Research Associate, Vice Chancellor for Budget & Finance and CFO Emeritus, Former Associate Director, Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley

James A. Hyatt is a Senior Research Associate and Principal Investigator at the Center for Studies in Higher Education. He has extensive experience both as a senior level executive at a number of the nation’s major research universities, including UC Berkeley, the University of Maryland, College Park, University of Arizona, and Virginia Tech, and as a principal investigator on externally funded research projects in the areas of higher education financial management, financial reporting, pension reform and campus safety and security. From 2008-2010 Mr. Hyatt served as the President of the...

Saul Geiser

Senior Associate

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...

Krista M. Soria

Institutional Research, Assessment, and Policy Analysis and Office for Student Affairs, University of Idaho

Dr. Krista M. Soria (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Leadership and Counseling at the University of Idaho. She is a critical quantitative researcher seeking to investigate the most equitable and inclusive programmatic practices and institutional conditions to prepare students to engage in the complexities of social change. She examines how higher education institutions can create a more supportive campus climate for students from diverse backgrounds, whether programs are equitably accessible and beneficial to all students, and how we can create structural conditions to support...

Steven G. Brint

SERU Principal Researcher; Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, University of California, Riverside
Sociology and Public Policy, University of California, Riverside

Steven Brint is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside, Director of the Colleges & Universities 2000 Project, and a Principal Researcher in the SERU Consortium.

Brint is an organizational sociologist whose research focuses on topics in the sociology of higher education, the sociology of professions, and middle-class politics. His studies of higher education have been funded for two decades by the National Science Foundation and two philanthropies. He is the author of four books: The Diverted Dream (with Jerome Karabel) (...

David Bodovski

Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Yale University Tobin Center

David Bodovski is a Pre-Doctoral Research Fellow working under Dr. Zachary Bleemer in the Yale School of Management. He holds a B.S. in mathematics and economics and an M.A. in economics from Penn State University. His current research includes studying the relative roles of signaling and human capital on the returns to college degrees, the effects of education on political socialization, and the impacts of unionization at universities on enrollment and student outcomes.