Celeste Carruthers is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics with a joint appointment in the Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER). Her research expertise in the economics of education policy has led to a number of recent, noteworthy achievements.
Carruthers spent the last six months of 2015 as an invited scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Education Policy Analysis. Upon returning to Knoxville she was invited to the White House to discuss nationwide free community college with a variety of policy-makers. Finally, she contributed to a debate in the New York Times on the subject, “Should College Be Free.” The research that got her to the White House and the New York Times uses data generated by the Knox Achieves and Tennessee Promise programs, and concludes that the promise of free community college is effective at attracting more students into college, especially when it is combined with one-to-one mentoring.
Carruthers has seven articles either published or accepted for publication in peer-reviewed academic journals, including prestigious economics outlets like the Journal of Labor Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics. She has written numerous research reports for CBER, and is an affiliated researcher in the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), and is a faculty advisor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Strategic Data Project.