Economics Professor Earns Prestige

Professor of Economics Caroline M. Hoxby ’88 stood in the spotlight this year for her criticism of University President Lawrence H. Summers, but she has also garnered attention for her unique background and a recent influential paper.

Hoxby is one of only four black females with tenure in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and the only woman ever to receive tenure within the Department of Economics. Last April, she was also named one of six new Harvard College professors, the most distinguished title a professor can attain at the College.

Much of Hoxby’s major work has taken place in the area of school choice.

She wrote a paper­—“Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers?”—published in the American Economic Review in 2000 that found that more school choice in the elementary grades is linked with higher student achievement.

The paper came under fire this year when Jesse Rothstein, assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton, published a March 2005 paper calling the data sets Hoxby used suspect.

Hoxby declined to comment on the controversy.

Last year, Hoxby co-authored a paper titled, “A Revealed Preference Ranking of American Colleges and Universities,” which has become the most downloaded paper in the history of economics, according to Hoxby. She says students and their parents have downloaded the report as an alternative to traditional rankings such as those in U.S. News & World Report.

“That’s really been a very interesting project,” she says. “It’s a very fun paper.”

The authors of the paper criticize popular college rankings for putting too much weight on the matriculation rate and the admission rate, which colleges can manipulate. Their own system is an extension of models used in chess and tennis tournaments, combining data about where students choose to matriculate given the colleges to which they are accepted. The rankings placed Harvard first, followed by Yale, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology, MIT, Princeton, and Brown.

Columbia Professor Jonah Rockoff, whose Ph.D. dissertation Hoxby advised, says that students who worked with Hoxby would refer to her as “wonder woman.”

He recounts a time when he sent Hoxby a paper to review. He says he received an edited version of the paper the following morning, and noticed that her extensive annotation of the document had begun at around 4:15 a.m.

“She’s extremely nice to people who I think she’s well-acquainted with, but she can be really harsh when she realizes something is wrong,” Rockoff says.

Something seemed wrong to Hoxby earlier this year after Summers’ remarks about women in science. She declined comment on her relationship with Summers in an interview last week, but she criticized him during a faculty meeting on Feb. 22 for “break[ing] ties by the hundreds” in the “great shimmering web” of good relationships between members of the Harvard community.

She cautiously lauds the recommendations of the task forces on women and science.

“I think they reflect a lot of collective wisdom,” she says. “They’re going to be difficult to implement.”

The Crimson reported in February that Hoxby is one of at least two senior faculty members who have considered leaving Harvard to take job offers at other schools.

But Hoxby says that the decision to leave is “not really up to me. It’s up to the administration.”

She also told The Crimson in February that Summers’ comments on women in science are not directly influencing her deliberation.

“That would be like saying one day’s remarks have influenced a major career decision,” Hoxby said.

Another colleague, Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn, praises the way Hoxby delivered her remarks at the February 22 faculty meeting.

“I found Caroline Hoxby’s comments at the second of that three meeting series extremely intelligent, quite direct, and having an honesty which is often rare among faculty members particularly in the face of the fact that she is a senior member of the department,” Mendelsohn says. “I found the manner in which she presented her views very well developed.”

—William C. Marra contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer William L. Jusino can be reached at jusino@fas.harvard.edu.