On May 16, the Regents of the University of Michigan approved promotions for Kevin Stange and Christina Weiland. Stange was promoted to professor of public policy, with tenure, and professor of education. Weiland was promoted to professor of education, with tenure, and professor of public policy.
“Kevin Stange and Chris Weiland are invaluable members of the Ford School community,” said Celeste Watkins-Hayes, the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of the Ford School of Public Policy. “Kevin’s influential research deepens our understanding of the economics of higher education. Chris’s research and policy engagement shape equitable early childhood opportunities across the U.S. They are very much deserving of these promotions.”
Kevin Stange is a leading scholar in the economics of education. His groundbreaking research examines the dynamics of higher education and the labor market. His work has been published in the American Economic Journal, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Public Economics and has been widely cited in the media. He also co-edited a book, Productivity in Higher Education (2020, University of Chicago Press), which empirically tackles various aspects of measuring performance in the higher education sector. In 2023, he served a one-year appointment as academic-in-residence working in the U.S. Department of Education (ED) as a senior advisor to Under Secretary James Kvaal. He also serves as a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Stange is a highly regarded mentor with an exceptional teaching record. Since joining the University of Michigan in 2010, Stange has taught six different graduate-level courses including in higher education policy, microeconomics, statistics, and program evaluation. He has also served on 27 completed doctoral committees for students in public policy, economics, and higher education.
Stange co-directs the University of Michigan’s Education Policy Initiative and directs the Michigan Education Data Center, a research practice partnership with the State of Michigan. In recent years he led a redesign of the MPP economics course, chaired the Ford School Resilient Teaching Task Force, and served on the Provost’s Institutional Learning Analytics (UMILA) Committee.
Christina Weiland is a leading scholar of early childhood education and education policy. Her scholarship serves to inform researchers, educators, and policymakers about how to best scale equitable and effective early childhood education programs and, how to better study these programs in rigorous and comprehensive ways. Weiland applies robust quantitative and qualitative methods in her work and is engaged in long-standing research collaborations with practitioners, most notably in the Boston Public Schools Department of Early Childhood. She has also consulted for Governor Whitmer’s Universal Pre-kindergarten expansion, served as a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee on preschool curriculum, and prepared policy briefings for the U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee and the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pension. Weiland’s research has been published in AERA Open, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Child Development, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and the Journal of Research in Educational Effectiveness, among others.
At the university, Weiland is a dedicated teacher and mentor. She co-directs the Ford School’s Education Policy Initiative and directs U-M’s Causal Inference in Education Policy Research doctoral fellowship program. She teaches and develops courses at the master’s and doctoral levels focused on education policy, education policy research, and on children’s well-being.
