Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald Gordon Ehrenberg is an American economist. He has primarily worked in the field of labor economics including the economics of higher education. Currently, he is Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University. He is also the founder-director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI).

Ehrenberg received a B.A. in mathematics from Harpur College (now Binghamton University) in 1966, an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University in 1970. After teaching at Loyola University and University of Massachusetts Amherst, he moved to Ithaca in 1975 and spent rest of his professional career at Cornell University.

At Cornell, Ehrenberg is a faculty member in the department of labor economics in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and in the department of economics in the College of Arts and Sciences. He also served as the university's Vice President for Academic Programs, Planning and Budgeting (1995–1998) and an elected member of the Cornell Board of Trustees (2006–10). In 2005, he was named a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, the highest award for undergraduate teaching that exists at Cornell.

Ehrenberg's academic contributions have been primarily in the field of labor economics including the economics of higher education. He has authored or edited (sometimes with coauthors) over 30 books and book-length reports. He has published over 160 articles in professional journals including the American Economic Review, Economics of Education Review, Industrial and Labor Relations, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Economics Perspectives, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Urban Economics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Research in Labor Economics, and Review of Economics and Statistics.

He has supervised the dissertations of over 45 Ph.D. students and served on the committees of numerous other students.

Ehrenberg has served on numerous editorial boards and has been a consultant to many governmental agencies and commissions and university and private research corporations. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY).

Labor Economics

Ehrenberg was the founding editor of "Research in Labor Economics" and served as a co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Past President of the Society of Labor Economists. He is a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, of the Labor and Employment Relations Association, and a National Associate of the National Academies of Science and Engineering.

He coauthored with Robert S. Smith a leading textbook, Modern Labor Economics: Theory and Public Policy (2015, 12th edition).

Economics of Higher Education

Ehrenberg's more recent research has focused on higher education issues. In 1998, Ehrenberg founded Cornell Higher Education Research Institute (CHERI) to provide a vehicle for interdisciplinary research on higher education.

CHERI's current research interests include "the implications of the growing dispersion of wealth across academic institutions, the growing costs and importance of science to universities, the financial challenges facing public higher education, the changing nature of the faculty, governance in academic institutions, improving PhD programs in the humanities and associated social sciences, improving persistence rates in STEM Field majors, and reducing inequality in access to higher education."

Ehrenberg is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the TIAA-CREF Institute, and a member of the National Academy of Education.

Ehrenberg has received numerous academic honors and professional distinctions. He received an Honorary Doctor of Science from Binghamton University State University of New York in 2008. He was a commencement speaker at Pennsylvania State University's 2011 Commencement during which he received an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the university. Binghamton University Alumni Association gave him Glenn G. Bartle Distinguished Alumnus/a Award in 2015.

He was awarded Society of Labor Economists' 2011 Jacob Mincer Lifetime Achievement Awardand the Association for the Study of Higher Education's 2013 Howard Bowen Distinguished Career Award.

In recognition of his achievements and contributions, Cornell University honored him in 2014 by creating the Ronald G. Ehrenberg Professorship in Labor Economics position at the university.

• R. G. Ehrenberg (editor), American University: National Treasure or Endangered Species, Cornell University Press, 1997.
• R. G. Ehrenberg, Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much, Harvard University Press, 2002.
• R. G. Ehrenberg (editor), Governing Academia, Cornell University Press, 2004.
• R. G. Ehrenberg, What’s Happening to Public Higher Education? Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
• P. E. Stephan and R. G. Ehrenberg (editors), Science and the University, University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
• R. G. Ehrenberg, Doctoral Education and the Faculty of the Future, Cornell University Press, 2008.
• R. G. Ehrenberg, H. Zuckerman, J. A. Groen, and S. M. Brucker, Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities, Princeton University Press, 2010.