George Spencer is an assistant professor of education at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. He holds a doctorate and a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University.
Professor Spencer’s research broadly regards two related areas of inquiry: understanding students' educational pathways from high school through college and evaluating the effectiveness of policy levers intended to improve college readiness, access, and completion. His work in these areas has been published in the American Educational Research Journal, AERA Open, Research in Higher Education, Journal of Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, and Teachers College Record. Some of his past and ongoing projects have been supported by funding from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the TIAA Institute, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Prior to joining NYU-Steinhardt, Professor Spencer was an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, and he was a Dean’s Faculty Fellow at Steinhardt through NYU’s Postdoctoral and Transition Program for Academic Diversity. Before earning his doctorate in 2017, he worked with high school students as a director with the “I Have a Dream” Foundation in San Francisco, and as a research associate at the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE). George was a 2015 – 2016 AERA Dissertation Fellow, and he received the Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grant for Emerging Scholars in 2021.