Thomas Bailey

Teachers College, Columbia University

President, Teachers College; George and Abby O'Neill Professor of Economics and Education

Thomas Bailey is the 11th President of Teachers College, Columbia University, and the George and Abby O'Neill Professor of Economics and Education. An economist, with specialties in education, labor economics, and econometrics, Dr. Bailey is widely regarded as one the nation’s leading authorities on community colleges. From 1996 to 2018, he served as the founding Director of the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College. He also served as the Director of the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment (CAPSEE), established in 2011 and the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness (CAPR), established in 2014, both funded by grants from the Institute for Education Sciences of the US Department of Education. Dr. Bailey and the CCRC won the Terry O’Banion Prize for Teaching and Learning at the annual conference for the League for Innovation in the Community College in 2013, and he was inducted as an American Educational Research Association AERA Fellow in the same year. Dr. Bailey earned his undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in labor economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His papers have appeared in a wide variety of education, policy-oriented and academic journals, and he has authored or co-authored several books on the employment and training of immigrants and the extent and effects of on-the-job training. Along with Shanna Smith Jaggars and Davis Jenkins, Dr. Bailey recently wrote Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success, which was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. Other books include Defending the Community College Equity Agenda (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), co-edited with Vanessa Morest, Working Knowledge: Work-Based Learning and Education Reform (Routledge, 2004), co-authored with Katherine Hughes and David Moore; Manufacturing Advantage (Cornell University Press, 2000), written with Eileen Appelbaum, Peter Berg, and Arne Kalleberg; and The Double Helix of Education and the Economy (IEE, 1992), co-authored with Sue Berryman.