Dr. Steven Hemelt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Hemelt is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), an Affiliated Researcher with the Education Policy Initiative (EPI) at the University of Michigan, and a Faculty Affiliate of the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC).

Hemelt’s fields of interest are the economics of education, education policy, labor economics, and program evaluation. He teaches courses on policy analysis and research design. Hemelt’s work has appeared in economics, public policy, and education journals and been funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Spencer, W.T. Grant, Walton Family, and Smith Richardson Foundations, and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Hemelt’s current research focuses on transitions from high school to college and the workforce, the role of costs in shaping students’ decisions about higher education, and differentiated school accountability. He currently leads a number of research projects that are researcher-practitioner partnerships that explore policy-relevant questions using rich administrative data. Hemelt received his B.A. and M.A. in Economics and his Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.