Kalena E. Cortes

Kalena E. Cortes is the Verlin & Howard Kruse ’52 Founders Professor at Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service. Kalena is also the inaugural Director of the Bush School's Program in Education Policy (PEP). She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). She was named Texas A&M's 2020 Presidential Impact Fellow (PIF) and 2021 Chancellor Enhancing Development and Generating Excellence in Scholarship (EDGES) Fellow. She currently serves on the Editorial Board of Economics of Education Review and as Associate Editor at Education Finance and Policy.  

Kalena completed her Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Graduate School of Education, Harvard University's Graduate School of Education, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. She was also a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. She served a three-year term (2014–17) on the Board of Directors of the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), was a Faculty Fellow (2013–16) at the Greater Texas Foundation, served six years (2017–23) on the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession (CSMGEP), and served five years (2016–21) as Associate Editor at AERA Open.

Kalena’s research focuses on education policy, particularly issues of equity and access for historically underserved students across PK–12 and postsecondary education. A growing share of her recent work examines the role of community colleges in expanding educational opportunity and economic mobility. One strand studies how geographic access to colleges shapes enrollment and degree attainment (NBER WP 33085; NBER WP 33337; and The Digest). Her work on higher education deserts shows that limited access to nearby community colleges has particularly consequential effects for historically underserved and lower-income students, who are less able to substitute toward four-year institutions. A second strand examines community college bachelor’s degrees as an emerging pathway to bachelor’s degree attainment, including their labor market value, affordability, and employer perceptions of these credentials (NBER WP 34684; NBER WP 35404; and The Digest). She is currently extending this research through a large-scale audit study across additional fields and labor markets. Across her research, Kalena uses both quantitative and qualitative methods, including randomized controlled trials and mixed methods research designs. 

Kalena's research has been funded by the Spencer Foundation, the American Educational Research Association, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the Greater Texas Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Strada Education Foundation, Ascendium Education Group, and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) North America.