Cecilia Rouse Photo: Jon Roemer
President Barack Obama has selected Princeton's Cecilia Rouse, a well-known scholar of the economics of education, for his Council of Economic Advisers.
Rouse is a professor in the Department of Economics and in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She also is director of the University's Industrial Relations Section and Education Research Section.
She was confirmed March 10 by the U.S. Senate and joins Christina Romer of the University of California-Berkeley and Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago on the three-member council, which provides the president with analysis and advice on a wide range of domestic and international economic policy issues.
"This appointment confirms our enthusiasm about having Ceci as a faculty member," said David Dobkin, Princeton's dean of the faculty. "We expect her experiences to have a positive effect on her teaching and research when she returns from this government service."
Rouse, the Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, joined the Princeton faculty in 1992 after earning her Ph.D. from Harvard University. That same year, she joined the Industrial Relations Section, which functions as a research bureau, a reference library and the sponsor of research seminars. In 2002, she started the Education Research Section, an interdisciplinary unit within the Industrial Relations Section and the Wilson School that promotes the use of research in education decision-making.
Rouse is the author of several prominent papers on topics including the economic benefit of community college attendance; the outcomes of "blind" auditions for symphony orchestra members; the consequences of Milwaukee's experiment in private school vouchers on student achievement; the effect of student loan debt on career choices of college graduates; and the conditions in which computer-assisted instruction improves students' performance in mathematics classes. She is an editor of The Future of Children, a policy journal published by the Wilson School and the Brookings Institution.
The University will grant Rouse a two-year leave for government service to serve in this role. She joins a list of several faculty members who have served on the council during their tenure at Princeton, including: Burton Malkiel, the Chemical Bank Chairman's Professor of Economics; the late Stephen Goldfeld, the Harold Helm '20 Professor of Economics and Banking; the late David Bradford, professor of economics and public affairs; Alan Blinder, the Gordon S. Rentschler Memorial Professor of Economics and Public Affairs; Harvey Rosen, the John L. Weinberg Professor of Economics and Business Policy; and Ben Bernanke, formerly the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs.
