Megan Austin

Megan Austin is director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at AIR and an AIR principal researcher. Dr. Austin conducts rigorous, large-scale research and evaluation studies that examine the effects of education policies and programs. Her work focuses on participation in and outcomes of middle and high school coursetaking opportunities, including advanced coursetaking opportunities, dual enrollment, and career and technical education (CTE); college and career readiness; and educational choice.

Dr. Austin has led research using longitudinal data in partnership with state education agencies across the U.S., including in Washington, Minnesota, Indiana, Texas, and Georgia. Her research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences (IES), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the ECMC Foundation, the American Educational Research Association, and the AIR Opportunity Fund. She recently concluded an IES grant examining automatic enrollment policies and automatic notification strategies for increasing participation in advanced high school courses and is now leading and supporting partnerships with multiple states to implement strategies based on evidence generated by the study. 

Dr. Austin also is examining the effects of Minnesota’s direct admissions program in partnership with the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, and she is PI of an IES-funded systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of nudge interventions on college access and success. She has provided content and methodological leadership for several other IES-funded grants related to college readiness and success, including quantitative lead of a study using RCT and regression discontinuity methods to examine the effects of corequisite remediation in Texas community colleges, and content expert for a meta-analysis of the effects of college financial aid programs on students’ access and completion.

Dr. Austin previously led statewide longitudinal research studies for the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southeast and REL Midwest at AIR, examining implementation and effects of district and school flexibility under Georgia’s Charter Systems Act; characteristics of and outcomes for CTE concentrators in Indiana and Minnesota; and connections between high school type and postsecondary outcomes in Indiana. She has contributed to several large-scale evaluations for IES’s National Center for Educational Evaluation and Regional Assistance, including evaluations of supports for students with disabilities preparing to complete high school; state and district implementation of CTE programs under Perkins V; and multi-tiered systems of support in early-grades reading.  For the past two years, she has led the annual research training institute for the IES-funded CTE Research Network 2.0, teaching advanced causal methods to early career researchers.

Dr. Austin is a co-founder of MetaReviewer, a collaboration-focused software program for conducting evidence syntheses. She also is a What Works Clearinghouse Certified Reviewer in Group Design Standards (Version 5.0) and Regression Discontinuity Design (Version 4.0). Her research has been published in the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, AERA Open, Review of Educational Research, Education Finance and Policy, Sociology of Education, and several edited volumes, including the Handbook of the Sociology of Education in the 21st Century, Handbook of Research on School Choice, and School Choice at the Crossroads.