Student Aid Reform

Ronald G. Ehrenberg is the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow. He also is Director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute and is an elected member of the Cornell Board of Trustees (effective July 1, 2006). In May 2009, Governor Paterson nominated him for membership on the SUNY Board of Trustees.

From July 1, 1995 to June 30, 1998 he served as Cornell's Vice President for Academic Programs, Planning and Budgeting. In this role, he supervised the office of Institutional Planning and Research, the office of Statutory College Affairs, the office of Space Planning & Utilization, and the office of Academic Programs and Special Projects. He integrated academic planning across the colleges in Ithaca (with an emphasis on strengthening Cornell's social sciences) and between the Ithaca and Medical College campuses. He participated as one of four administrators in the central review of tenure and promotion decisions, one of four members of the Executive Budget Group which formulated budget policies, and as one of six members of the Capital Funding & Priorities Committee which approved all capital projects.

He also supervised a number of academic units, including the Cornell-in-Washington Program, the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, the Cornell Plantations (capital projects), the Cornell University Press, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and Cornell's Air Force, Army, and Navy ROTC units. He assisted the Provost in discussions with Academic Deans and the University Faculty Committee, and for the Provost served on the Library Board and chaired the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research Board. He worked with the Academic Affairs and Campus Life, the Building and Properties, the Executive, and the Land Grant and Statutory College Affairs committees of the Cornell Board of Trustees, as well as with various Trustee subcommittees and task forces. Finally, he chaired Cornell's NCAA certification review.

Ehrenberg received a B.A. in mathematics from Harpur College (SUNY Binghamton) in 1966, an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University in 1970, and an Honorary Doctor of Science from SUNY in 2008. A member of the Cornell faculty for 33 years, he has authored or co-authored more than 120 papers and authored or edited 21 books. He was the founding editor of Research in Labor Economics, and served a ten-year term as co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources. He has served, or is serving, on several editorial boards and as a consultant to numerous governmental agencies and commissions and university and private research corporations.

He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow at IZA (Berlin), was a member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association, chaired the AAUP Committees on Retirement and the Economic Status of the Profession, and is Past President of the Society of Labor Economists. He also chaired the National Research Council's Board of Higher Education and served on its committee on Gender Differences in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty, the NACUBO Endowment Advisory Panel and The College Board’s Rethinking Student study group. He currently is a member of the Association of Governing Boards (AGB) Research Advisory Committee and is a member of the Board of Trustees of Emeriti Retirement Health Solutions.

Ehrenberg is a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance (Unemployment Insurance section), a National Associate of the National Academies of Science and Engineering and Institute of Medicine, and a member of the National Academy of Education, a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, a fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute, and a fellow of the American Education Research Association.

A noted labor economist and co-author of the leading textbook, Modern Labor Economics: Theory and Public Policy (10th ed.), his recent research has focused on higher education issues. He is the editor of American University: National Treasure or Endangered Species (Cornell University Press, 1997) and the author of Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much (Harvard University Press, 2002). He is the editor of Governing Academia (Cornell University Press, 2004), and What’s Happening to Public Higher Education? (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and co-editor of Science and the University (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007) and Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future (Cornell University Press, 2008). Ehrenberg is a co-author of Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities (Princeton University Press, forthcoming).

Ehrenberg has supervised the dissertations of 41 Ph.D. students and served on committees for countless more. He is also passionate about undergraduate education, involves undergraduate students in his research, and has co-authored papers with a number of these undergraduates. In 2003, ILR-Cornell awarded him the General Mills Foundation Award for Exemplary Undergraduate Teaching. In 2005, he was named a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, the highest award for undergraduate teaching that exists at Cornell.

Finally, Ehrenberg has served as a consultant to faculty and administrative groups and trustees at a number of colleges and universities on issues relating to tuition and financial aid policies, faculty compensation policies, faculty retirement policies, and other budgetary and planning issues. Among the institutions he has worked with are Brandeis University, Oberlin College, Northeastern University, The University of North Carolina, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt University, the U.S. Naval Academy, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Smith College, the Suffolk University Law School, Albany University (SUNY), George Washington University, and the University of Akron.