Professional Biography
Daniel Sparks is a postdoctoral research fellow at Penn GSE and holds a Ph.D. in Economics & Education from Columbia University. He uses causal inference to explore issues in education with a focus on higher education policy, community colleges, teacher labor markets, and education privatization. His research and writing, which includes academic papers, policy briefs, opinion articles, and book reviews, has been published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Teachers College Record, and the Urban Institute's Learning Curve series, among other journals and publications. He is currently a research affiliate with the Community College Research Center (CCRC), the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education (NCSPE), and the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE).
Dr. Sparks’s primary research interests center on policies to promote college access and success, particularly for historically marginalized student groups. Some of his prior work has looked at the effects of reducing lifetime Pell eligibility on college students’ academic and labor market outcomes as well as evaluating statewide policies geared toward increasing high school students’ access to guidance counselors. As part of his postdoctoral fellowship, he is currently using administrative data to evaluate Virginia’s Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead program, which operates as a college promise program for community college students who pursue programs in high-demand fields as deemed by the state.
