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Tuition Rising

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What's Happening to Public Higher Education

Science and the University

Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future

Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities

Ronald G. Ehrenberg
Cornell University

Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics

Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow

Director - Cornell Higher Education Research Institute

Biography [PDF] - Vita [PDF]

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. From July 1, 1995 to June 30, 1998 he served as Cornell’s Vice President for Academic Programs, Planning and Budgeting.

Ehrenberg served as an elected member of the Cornell Board of Trustees from July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2010. Governor David Paterson nominated him for membership on the SUNY Board of Trustees in May 2009. His appointment was confirmed by the New York State Senate in March 2010 and he served until June 2017. He chaired the Board's Academic Affairs Committee and was a member of its Executive, Communications and External Affairs, Finance and Administration, and Research and Economic Development committees and was on the system wide provost search and compensation committees.

He received a B.A. in mathematics from Harpur College (SUNY Binghamton) in 1966, M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University in 1970, an Honorary Doctor of Science from SUNY in 2008, and an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Penn State University in 2011. A member of the Cornell faculty for 46 years, Ehrenberg has authored or co-authored over 160 papers and authored or edited 26 books.

Ehrenberg 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, Measuring Higher Education Productivity, and Research Universities committees, on the NACUBO Endowment Advisory Panel, on The College Boards Rethinking Student Aid Study Group and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Emeriti Retirement Health Solutions.

Currently, he is a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, the American Educational Research Association, and the Labor and Employment Relations Association; a member of the National Academy of Education; and a National Associate of the National Academies of Science and Engineering, and a fellow emeritus of the TIAA Institue.

The Society of Labor Economists presented him with the Jacob Mincer Award, in 2011 for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics. In 2013, the Association for the Study of Higher Education presented him with the Howard Bowen Distinguished Career Award for advancing the field through extraordinary scholarship, leadership and service. In recognition of all of his achievements and conributions to Cornell University, in 2014 Cornell honored him by creating the Ronald G. Ehrenberg Professorship in Labor Economics position at the university. In 2015, he received the Glen G. Bartle Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Binghamton University Alumni Association.In April 2018, he was named a receipt of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service. In recognition of his ongoing works of the academic professionals, to Cornell, to SUNY and to the broader community.

Coauthor of the leading textbook, Modern Labor Economics: Theory and Public Policy (13th 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 coeditor 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 coauthor of Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Ehrenberg has supervised the dissertations of 51 Ph.D. students and served on committees for countless more. In June 2017, a conference was organized by many of his former graduate students to honor him. A story about the conference along with remarks and photos from the conference dinner, and a volume that contains five of his reflective essays can be viewed at Ehrenberg Conference Webpage.

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, the University of Akron, the University of Vermont and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

Biography [PDF] - Vita [PDF]

Ronald G. Ehrenberg
Cornell University
271 Ives Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853-3901
Phone: (607) 255-3026
Fax: (607) 255-4496
rge2@cornell.edu
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