Jordan D. Matsudaira is a professor in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at American University’s School of Public Affairs. Previously he served as deputy under secretary (2021-2024) and chief economist (2022-2024) at the U.S. Department of Education. He is also a nonresident fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, and a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, New York.
Matsudaira earned his PhD in economics and public policy from the University of Michigan. He earned a master's in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a BA from Union College. He was previously an associate professor of economics and education policy at Teachers College, Columbia University; an assistant professor of public policy and economics at Cornell University; a visiting assistant professor in the economics department at Princeton University; and a Robert Wood Johnson postdoctoral fellow in health policy research at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2013 to 2015, he served on President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers as senior, and then chief, economist. While there, he worked on labor, education, and safety net policies, including gainful employment regulations of for-profit colleges and an expansion of the federal overtime protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Matsudaira is involved with the Policy Lab, a research partnership between CCRC and the City University of New York (CUNY) to link and leverage administrative data from CUNY and other state government agencies in order to conduct high-quality research aimed at improving the academic and economic mobility outcomes of its students.
