On Jan. 14, outgoing President Joseph Biden bestowed the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) to approximately 400 scientists and engineers. PECASE is the highest accolade granted by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.
Assistant Professor of Economics and holder of the Gunnar Myrdal Professorship Elizabeth Setren is one such recipient of this honor.
“I had been getting a series of emails … [and] someone was emailing me … from the U.S. Department of Education,” Setren said. “I was … very humbled and honored [to receive the PECASE].”
“I knew I was nominated and [was] obviously very, very honored and humbled [to receive the PECASE].”
Setren’s PECASE reception represents the culmination of her persistent determination and commitment to conducting research with broad sociopolitical implications. Setren concentrates on education and labor economics and their accompanying effects on social inequality. Her work is featured in nationally-syndicated publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe.
Setren was motivated to spearhead her research from her formative experiences growing up in Baltimore, Md.
“When I got to college, I started thinking about … how school district lines are drawn,” Setren said. “I became very interested [in the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity] in undergrad as a way to think about the potential policy solutions to the extreme racial segregation and socioeconomic segregation in schools I saw at a young age.”
Setren applied the skills and lessons she learned during her undergraduate career at Brandeis University and Ph.D. in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She gravitated towards studying school desegregation in Boston, which was historically facilitated by the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity.
She elaborated on METCO and her analytical approach to examining its efficacy in desegregation policy.
“METCO started in 1966 in reaction to the Boston School Committee not taking action to integrate the Boston schools,” Setren said. “It was an effort to promote voluntary integration. So, school districts in the surrounding suburbs of Boston … [now up to] 37 districts, opted-in to accept students [of color] from the city of Boston.”
Though METCO was created as a temporary solution to fully integrate Boston, the program still exists due to the ongoing problem of segregation in the city.
Setren evaluated METCO’s efficacy through a programmatic study operationalizing quantitative analysis to determine its impact on schoolchildren involved in the program. In her research, Setren found that MECTO students’ test scores were “‘dramatically higher’ than their peers who stayed in Boston” and that METCO students are “17 percentage points more likely to aspire to go to a four-year college.”
She is still studying the program and yielding important results.
“I am still very actively studying the METCO school integration program,” Setren said. “I have done work on the impact on participants … and then also the impact on suburban students who have more diversity in their school system as a result of the METCO program. Then I work following them up when they are older … that involves asking, do their social lives look different? Are they more likely to marry someone of a different background? ... Are they more likely to be civically active?”
Setren further analyzes the impact of charter schools. She wrote and published two papers concentrating on the impacts of charter schools. She discussed the catalyst for her focus on charter schools.
“I did a lot of work on charter schools in my dissertation and then early in my time at Tufts,” Setren said. “A comment I heard again and again was [that] charter effectiveness is driven by not serving certain types of students … and the key demographics they talked about were special-needs students, special education and also English learners.”
Setren’s work combines systemic quantitative rigor with an ethical commitment to help inform sensible policymaking that helps marginalized communities. She teaches an array of economics courses that fuse technical and social concepts.
Setren described the various techniques and practices she instilled upon her students in those economics courses.
“In both of those classes, we learn methodology,” Setren said. “In econometrics it’s much more technical. We are doing… the statistical analysis behind modern economic research, and in my seminar we are reading recent papers and research on topics related to inequality and related to social public policy issues. In each of those [classes], the goal I have for students is to learn how to evaluate on your own whether evidence is credible.”
Setren further outlines how instruction in economics provides a strong foundation for her students to explore multidimensional and intersectional constructs.
“It seems like basic stuff,” she said. “But honing the skillset of how [to] evaluate … whether information is valid and what it might apply to and how I can use evidence in … everyday life [is] more important now than ever [in order to] be a savvy consumer of media, evidence and arguments. I think economics has a great toolkit for that.”
As issues of social stratification, economic inequality and educational access magnify, Setren wants to remain on the frontlines of those issues, parsing through their ramifications on local communities and informing policymakers on their dynamics. For undergraduate students intrigued by professional opportunities addressing these issues, it can be daunting to establish meaningful connections and maintain a consistent work ethic.
Setren outlined her own experience in academia. She went through various concentrations, from microbiology to astrophysics, before eventually settling on economics. Her mentors were able to guide her through this uncertainty, as she would like to do for her students.
“I am so grateful to [the] many mentors that helped me make it this far in academia,” she said. “One key [lesson], in addition to my mentors, was reaching out to alumni [and] ... any connections I could find to talk about their career… I think that’s a great thing to do while you are exploring.”
