Amanda Parsad is a managing director at American Institutes for Research (AIR). In this role, she provides methodological support and quality assurance across AIR’s portfolio of federal education evaluation studies. With over 25 years of experience in research and evaluation, she leads, designs, and conducts experimental, quasi experimental and descriptive studies that inform education policy. Ms. Parsad’s research focuses on evaluating education programs and policies designed to help students prepare for, transition into, succeed in, and afford college.
For the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences (IES) National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Ms. Parsad has designed studies to assess the effectiveness of programs aimed at preparing students for college, increasing access and success for students historically underrepresented in postsecondary education, and improving college affordability. Her work includes studying potential improvements to two prominent federal college access programs, Upward Bound and GEAR UP. She led the design and analysis of two randomized controlled trials within these programs to examine how program changes could increase college enrollment and persistence for students from low-income households. She also serves as the principal investigator on a set of rigorous studies examining how changes to federal student aid policy affect student enrollment and persistence in college.
Beyond her work with IES, Ms. Parsad has served as the director of analysis on several evaluations funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) where she was responsible for designing quasi-experimental studies to determine potential long-term program effects of various NSF programs. These included the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, IGERT/GK-12 Traineeship programs, International Research Fellowship Program (IRFP)/East Asia Pacific Study Institutes (EAPSI), the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (Noyce), Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM), Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE), as well as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA’s) higher education portfolio. These studies involved constructing comparison groups using propensity score matching (PSM) and bibliometric analyses.
