About

Visualizing Transformation showcases the visual and organizational approaches I use as a researcher, educator, and author to communicate key messages about the ongoing transformation of higher education to various audiences. Rooted in my own first-gen, working-class heritage, my work aims to bring attention to the structural nature of these international policy challenges and help institutions around the globe better educate marginalized students.

I am an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University in the School of Education as well as a Research Fellow with the Center for Skills, Knowledge and Organizational Performance (SKOPE) at the University of Oxford. My research is positioned at the intersection of public policy and organizational theory and examines how economic policies have incentivized colleges and universities with limited resources to pursue margins in new markets at the expense of their educational missions. The direct social impact of my work ranges from the development of new measures to assess student mental health to disentangling the complexity of accountability policies to raising awareness of racial inequalities across learning platforms. My work has been supported by competitive grants from the National Science Foundation, British Academy, Buckner W. Clay Endowment, and ACUHO-I and has been published in a variety of academic outlets, including Scientometrics, American Journal of Education, Journal of American College Health, and Journal of College Student Development. 

I am dedicated to equipping educational leaders with tools to improve society. In my graduate courses I offer personalized learning opportunities with a Socratic teaching style and small-group collaborations to foster supportive learning environments. My approach centers diversity, equity, and inclusion through innovative teaching approaches (such as my YouTube Letters & End-of-term Epilogues) to encourage student learning and persistence. Whether online or in-person, my classroom has a unique language of its own where “everyone talks every day” and participants discover the career-altering principles of “Harvarding,” “poker nights,” and “second circle exchanges.”

My book Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission Driven to Margin Obsessed goes inside tuition-driven colleges and universities to show how the competition for students led to an unsustainable building boom – and what colleges did to pay for it. Forced to innovate, schools adopted enrollment strategies that led them to view the marginalized students they were supposed to be helping as “dollars.” Through over 150 candid interviews with university leaders, the book offers a timely and fascinating behind-the–scenes look at the financial challenges facing higher education and what the future holds for colleges and universities.