Higher Education Programs

Alexis Redding is a developmental psychologist whose work focuses on how to best support young adults during the college years and in the transition to the workforce. This work combines the intellectual traditions of psychology, education, and ethnography, allowing her to capture the nuances of young adult development in a range of contexts. Redding and her colleague, Nancy Hill, recently released a book on development during the college years and the search for purpose and profession. In The End of Adolescence: The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood (Harvard University Press), they use a lost archive of college student interviews from the 1970s to examine patterns of development across generations and to show the continuity of challenges faced by young people during the transitional period of time between adolescence and adulthood. This work has also been featured in The Atlantic.

Drew Allen is a senior lecturer on education and associate provost for institutional research in the Provost's Office at Harvard University. Prior to joining Harvard, Allen served as associate vice president of institutional data analytics at Georgetown University where he led the Office of Assessment and Decision Support. He also taught and conducted research in higher education policy at NYU Steinhardt in his seven years as a fellow. Prior to his work at Georgetown and NYU, Allen was the executive director of the Initiative for Data-Driven Social Science at Princeton University where he helped to launch a consulting group for internal analytics, IDEAS for Higher Ed. In a previous role at the City University of New York (CUNY), Allen established an office devoted to integrated research, access to education, program evaluation, and academic support.

James Honan's teaching and research interests include financial management of nonprofit organizations, organizational performance measurement and management, and higher-education administration. At Harvard, he is educational co-chair of the Institute for Educational Management (IEM) and is a faculty member in a number of executive education programs for educational leaders and nonprofit administrators. Honan has served as a consultant on strategic planning, resource allocation, and performance measurement and management to numerous colleges, universities, schools, and nonprofit organizations, both nationally and internationally. Previously, he served as institutional research coordinator in the Office of Budgets at Harvard and as a project analyst in the Harvard University Financial Aid Office. He has also been a research assistant at the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) Clearinghouse on Higher Education in Washington, D.C., and has served as executive assistant to the president of Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.