Thomas Bailey is the president of Teachers College, Columbia University, and the George and Abby O'Neill Professor of Economics and Education at TC. He was the founding director of CCRC and is currently a senior fellow with the center. Previously, Bailey directed the IES-funded Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness (2014–2019), the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment (2011–2017), and the National Center for Postsecondary Research (2006–2012).
Bailey has been director of the Institute on Education and the Economy at Teachers College since 1992, and in 1996, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, he established the Community College Research Center. In 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appointed Bailey chair of the Committee on Measures of Student Success, which developed recommendations for community colleges to comply with completion rate disclosure requirements under the Higher Education Opportunity Act. Bailey and 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; Bailey was also inducted as an AERA Fellow in the same year. He has been a member of the National Academy of Education since 2012.
His papers have appeared in a wide variety of education, policy-oriented, and academic journals, and he has authored or coauthored several books on the employment and training of immigrants and the extent and effects of on-the-job training. With Shanna Smith Jaggars and Davis Jenkins, Bailey wrote Redesigning America’s Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success, published by Harvard University Press. Other books include Defending the Community College Equity Agenda (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), coedited with Vanessa Morest; Working Knowledge: Work-Based Learning and Education Reform (Routledge, 2004), coauthored 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), coauthored with Sue Berryman. Bailey holds a PhD from MIT with specialties in education, labor economics, and econometrics.
