Current Position: Senior Research Scientist, Educational Policy Institute
Before TC: Dr. Harris-Van Keuren was born in Iowa and raised on a horse racing farm outside of Des Moines. After high school, she graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in English Literature with the intent to go on to law school. However, after interviewing attorneys, she discovered that most of them didn’t like their jobs very much and it wouldn’t allow her to make the kind of impact that she wanted. After a period of time “finding herself,” which included consulting with Microsoft, selling diamonds, and booking bands in Seattle during the grunge era, she moved to Vietnam where she researched education to workforce links. It was during this time that she realized that she’d rather work to improve literacy or attendance rates than increase a company’s bottom line. After returning to the United States, she was accepted into the Harvard Graduate School of Education and received a master’s degree in International Education Policy with an emphasis in statistics.
While at TC: Dr. Harris-Van Keuren wrote and published teaching notes and cases for Harvard Business School, was a teaching assistant for Professor Gita Steiner-Khamsi, published with the Inter-American Development Bank, and presented on numerous occasions at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) national conferences. Because of her work with Professor Steiner-Khamsi, Dr. Harris-Van Keuren has researched teachers’ salaries in post-Soviet states and the status of the teaching profession globally. This work has been published with USAID and a UNESCO Background Paper for the Global Monitoring Report. Due to her focus in economics, she was selected to attend the inaugural cost analysis training hosted by Henry Levin at the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Teachers College and the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education. This intensive training is designed to enable researchers and evaluators to apply cost-effectiveness and benefit-cost analysis (CEA/BCA) to policy issues.
After TC: While writing her dissertation, Dr. Harris-Van Keuren secured a Senior Research Scientist position with the Educational Policy Institute based in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Her work focuses on international education and economics issues and she conducts analyses on projects and programs to help inform policy and practice. She is currently working on multiple cost analysis evaluation projects across five different countries and a handful of domestic evaluation projects. She published a second Background Paper for UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report with Iveta Silova and assisted in co-authoring an OECD report on the status of the teaching profession with Carina Omoeva. She served as an adjunct professor for Lehigh University for several years and led master’s level students abroad to collect data in low income countries. Dr. Harris-Van Keuren was recently invited to attend the International Summit on the Teaching Profession (ISTP) 2016 in Berlin, Germany and has a few more papers and book chapters due for publication this year. Dr. Harris-Van Keuren currently lives in Colorado with her husband, two children, and a well-loved but spoiled Golden Retriever.
Advice for Students: Dr. Harris-Van Keuren’s advice to TC students is to not become generalists. Students should have a general foundation in international and comparative education but they should then acquire a strong geographical area of expertise, topical focus, and/or methodological specialty. Dr. Harris-Van Keuren also encourages students, especially doctoral students, to join a writing group. She believes that a small and dedicated group is a safe space to try new ideas and help push you toward completion.