Robert M. Zemsky

Professor of Education, University of Pennsylvania.
Director, Institute for Research on Higher Education.
Chair, Higher Education Division, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania.

Robert Zemsky is the founding director of the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research on Higher Education, one of the United States' major public policy centers specializing in educational research and analysis. Trained as an historian, Professor Zemsky's early work focused on the nature of political processes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since the 1970s, his research has centered on how colleges and universities, in a world increasingly dominated by market forces, can be both mission-centered and market-smart. Much of his best known research has appeared in Policy Perspectives and in a series of pioneering articles and analyses in Change magazine.

Current Research:
Sealing the market for e-learning, Post-secondary markets and student outcomes.

Education:
BA, Whittier College; MA, Yale University; PhD, Yale University.

Professional Experience:
Chief planning officer, University of Pennsylvania; Chair and Convener, Pew Higher Education Roundtable; Senior Editor, Policy Perspectives, The Pew Higher Education Research Program.

Activities and Awards:
Named by Change magazine as one of higher education's top forty leaders for his role as an agenda-setter (1998); Honorary Degree, Towson University (1998); Woodrow Wilson Fellow; Fellow in Linguistics, Chair, Social Science Research Council's Committee on Social Science Personnel.

Selected Publications:
When Markets Matter (2001); Transition from Initial Schooling to Working Life (1999); Structure and Coherence: Measuring the Undergraduate Curriculum (1989); The Structure of College Choice (1983); Merchants, Farmers and River Gods (1973).