PhD, 2017 Jason C. Lee is a policy researcher at RAND. He has 15 years of experience working in education, including time spent as a program evaluator for the state of Tennessee, as well as a researcher for both the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) and the American Institutes for Research. Before starting his work with SHEEO, he served as the Lottery Scholarship & Financial Aid Research Director at the Tennessee Higher Education Commission in Nashville. He also worked as a resident director at the University of Pittsburgh and as a high school English teacher in both Pennsylvania and Nevada. He has experience leading and conducting mixed methods evaluations of education programs and policies, especially those related to postsecondary finance where he predominantly uses administrative date and quasi-experimental research designs to bring evidence to bear on policy decisions. His work has been published in a number of peer-reviewed outlets, including the Journal of Human Resources, Educational Evaluation & Policy Analysis, and The Journal of Higher Education, and he has managed projects funded by Arnold Ventures, The Joyce Foundation, the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, and the Institute of Education Sciences. Lee earned a Bachelor of Science in secondary education from Slippery Rock University and a Master of Arts in student affairs in higher education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. During his time at IUP, Lee worked in a variety of student service areas including: career services, academic advising and support, financial aid, and residence life. His current research interests include college student financial literacy, higher education finance, and the tripartite factors that affect postsecondary access and persistence: financial circumstances, academic preparation, and social-cultural influences. In line with these interests, Lee and his master’s thesis adviser, Dr. John Mueller, co-authored a manuscript entitled Student Loan Debt Literacy: A Comparison of First-generation and Continuing-generation College Students, which will be published by the Journal of College Student Development in 2014. He is the 2016 recipient of the Zell and Shirley Miller Fellowship.
