Elizabeth Burland
Assistant Research Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Public Policy
Elizabeth Burland is interested in educational decision-making, higher education inequality, and financial aid policy. As a mixed methods scholar, her research uses qualitative, experimental, and quasi-experimental methods to make sense of educational stratification.
Academic Background
Elizabeth Burland earned her Ph.D. in Public Policy and Sociology from the University of Michigan. She is currently an Assistant Research Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Public Policy, and a research affiliate with the University of Michigan’s Education Policy Initiative and PIRL. Elizabeth’s expertise is in combining experimental and quasi-experimental research with systematically collected qualitative interviews to best understand educational decision making, conduct comprehensive policy evaluation, and center both causal inference and student voices in policymaking.
Elizabeth’s dissertation investigated contextual factors related to stratification in educational decision making, including the ways students’ families, their local context, and their policy and institutional contexts shape the choices they make about postsecondary education. Specifically, her work examines the distinct roles that siblings play in shaping the postsecondary decisions of students from families with low incomes and first-generation college students and the spillover effects of college access policies on students’ siblings. In related work, Elizabeth studies the design of financial aid policies to shape the postsecondary choices of students from families with low incomes.
Her research that has been published in the American Economic Review: Insights explores the mechanisms behind the design of effective financial aid policies, aiming to understand the elements necessary to remove barrier students face to enrolling in selective institutions. Building on her experimental work, Elizabeth’s qualitative work aims to understand the process by which students make postsecondary choices, including the factors that matter most in their decision-making, to understand how policy can better support student decisions. Her work has been funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences.