CSMGEP Profiles: Remembering Rodney Andrews

Higher Ed for Everyone

Rodney Andrews was the first member of his family to attend college, and much of the work he did in economics was aimed at finding ways to ensure other students could have the same shot at success.

Andrews, who grew up in rural Madison, Ga., found a passion for economics as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech and went on to focus much of his research on the economics of education. When he died last year at the age of 47, he was the Endowed Fellow, Vibhooti Shukla Professor of Economics and Political Economy at the University of Texas at Dallas and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Andrews’ research dove into health policy, public finance, and labor economics, but the economics of education is where he truly made his mark. His work in that area primarily aimed to address access and outcomes in higher education, using data to find pathways to opportunity. At the time of his death, Andrews was research director of UT Dallas’ Texas Schools Project, which maintains a dataset that allows economists and others to track student outcomes as they move through the state’s K-12 education system, public universities, and then into the labor market. That kind of longitudinal data is treasured by social scientists, and Andrews was enthusiastic in sharing it far and wide.

One fellow economist who worked heavily in the dataset with Andrews was Cornell University economics professor Michael Lovenheim, who first met Andrews when both were graduate students at University of Michigan. In particular, they and their co-authors focused on how different features of higher education intersect with labor market outcomes. One paper looked at whether going to a more selective college affected earnings later in life. Another, still in the works, examines economic returns related to choices of college majors. 

Much of their work together focused on marginalized populations, “and this is something Rodney felt very strongly about,” Lovenheim says. “The evidence we have from a broad range of sources is that people from backgrounds like his face enormous challenges to success in the education system broadly, but particularly in the post-secondary system, and then the selective post-secondary system in the most pronounced manner.”

Their research aimed to understand what kind of policies and programs best support students from disadvantaged backgrounds. With some powerful insights in hand, Andrews made sure to share what they’d learned.

“He was doing a lot of the policy work on the ground in Texas,” Lovenheim says, “talking to the administrators of these programs and connecting them with state policymakers and educational leaders to understand what was happening and help disseminate our results as well to help make the impact of our work larger from a policy perspective.”

Andrews’ work influenced policy beyond Texas as well. His research with Lovenheim linking attendance at well-funded colleges and improved graduation rates and earnings was cited in the 2023 Economic Report of the President issued by the Biden administration.

Another frequent collaborator, Trevon Logan, met Andrews at an AEA Summer Mentoring Pipeline Conference in the early 2000s, and they became “fast friends,” Logan recalls.

“He was incredibly keen and had a very sharp eye, particularly for empirical techniques and causal analysis and all those things that were coming about at that time as the applied micro revolution was rolling out,” says Logan, now the ENGIE-Axium Endowed Professor of Economics at The Ohio State University. “I don't think there's anybody who had a conversation with Rodney and left that interaction not feeling impressed by his intellect, but also, more interpersonally, by his warmth, his personality, and the level on which he can engage people and certainly his sense of humor.”

With Logan, Andrews published work that spanned health economics, sports economics, and economic history. But of course his work is only part of the story.

He was also “a relentless advocate for people from minority backgrounds, from low-SES backgrounds, not just in the scholarship, but in how he interacted with the profession,” says Lovenheim. “And not only just advocating for policies and procedures and a culture that supported people from these types of backgrounds, but also for the scholars themselves.”

Greg Phelan was one such scholar. When he was a grad student at UT Arlington weighing Ph.D. programs, Andrews visited to present his latest research, and his spirit as well as his scholarship made an impression on Phelan. Andrews told Phelan, “I think you can be really successful” at UT Dallas, though Phelan took it less as a sales pitch and more as Andrews simply wanting him “to make the best choice for me.” Phelan indeed chose UT Dallas, “with the intention of working with Rodney right off the bat,” he recalls.

Phelan, now an assistant professor of economics at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, “didn’t grow up in the nicest neighborhood,” and his parents were supportive of higher education but hadn’t gone to college themselves. “I had to find my own way through a lot of that stuff, and some of it the hard way,” he says. “I had a weird path to get to a Ph.D., and I was always pretty forthright with Rodney about that sort of stuff. He knew what it felt like to go to places and not be sure or be a little bit wary because he wasn't the person that necessarily felt like he fit in.”

Amid his guidance as Phelan’s dissertation chair and in many more informal conversations about life and work, Andrews “became somewhere between an older brother and another father figure for me,” Phelan says.

His ability to guide and inspire wasn’t just limited to students.
“Rodney was probably one of the most prolific peer mentors in the profession,” Logan says. “When we talk about mentoring, we always talk about mentoring existing in sort of hierarchies. But I think some of the best mentoring that we get in our careers, particularly as economists and especially as economists in underrepresented groups, is from our peers, and Rodney was certainly my peer mentor. There wasn't an idea that I had intellectually that I did not run by him because of just the breadth and depth of his knowledge.” 
Indeed, Andrews’ willingness to spend time with his students and colleagues was just as impactful as his research.

“I heard a lot of stories from people when he passed, friends of mine in the profession who are from underrepresented groups who I didn't even know that they were friends with Rodney, and they were saying, ‘I wouldn't be an economist without him,’” Lovenheim says. “I think that he really felt passionate about using his stature in the profession and his experiences to help support other people so that they did not have to go through necessarily all of the things that he had to go through to reach the success that he had.”

But as dedicated as Andrews was to his work and to his fellow economists, his family always came first.

“Rodney was a terrific economist, but Rodney really did prioritize his family and the time with his family — he was a father of four,” Logan says. “One thing that he always said, and this is so prophetic now that he's gone, was you are not going to regret the time that you're spending with the people who are going to miss you when you're gone.”