Susan Burkhauser
Susan Burkhauser is a researcher at AIR whose research focuses on college and career readiness and postsecondary education. At AIR, Dr. Burkhauser serves as the research liaison for the Midwest Career Readiness Research Alliance as part of the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Midwest. In this capacity, she partners with state-level and district-level leadership in Minnesota to increase the region’s capacity to access, conduct, and interpret career readiness research, as well as use this research in state-level and local-level decision-making. She also supports quantitative and qualitative efforts for several Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded projects focused on improving equity and access in higher education.
Before joining AIR, Dr. Burkhauser was the associate director of Institutional Research at Loyola Marymount University, where she provided leadership and support in the use of data for decision making and planning. Her research at LMU included an in-depth focus on student retention through year three. She has also served as an assistant policy analyst at the RAND Corporation. At RAND, she participated in numerous education-related research studies, including examinations of U.S. Air Force Academy admission criteria, the New Leaders principal training program, dual language immersion in Portland Public Schools, and U.S. Military policy on education credentials.
Dr. Burkhauser has presented research at national conferences held by organizations such as the Association for Institutional Research, the American Educational Research Association, and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. Her work has been published in leading journals, including American Educational Research Journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and American Journal of Public Health.