Speaker Biographies
Sandy Baum is a professor of economics at Skidmore College and a senior policy analyst at the College Board. Ms. Baum has written extensively on issues relating to college access, college pricing, student aid policy, student debt, affordability, and other aspects of higher education finance. Ms. Baum is coauthor of Trends in Student Aid, Trends in College Pricing, and Education Pays: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society for the College Board. Her other recent work includes studies of setting benchmarks for manageable student debt levels and of tuition discounting in public and private colleges and universities. Ms. Baum is cochair of the Rethinking Student Aid study group, a foundation-funded effort under the auspices of the College Board to develop long-term proposals for reforming the student aid system.
Donald E. Frey is a professor of economics at Wake Forest University and was chairman of the economics department from 1985 to 1989. His dissertation was on teacher-union wage effects in public schools during the era of rapid public-sector unionization of the 1960s. His published research for almost two decades was mostly on various aspects of the economics of education, including a 1983 book, Tuition Tax Credits for Private Education: An Economic Analysis (Iowa State University Press). The 2002 article “University Endowment Returns Are Underspent” represented a return to the field after a decade. Mr. Frey has taught a variety of economics courses, most recently including macroeconomic theory, urban economics, public finance, and a seminar with a historical perspective on morals and markets.
Terry W. Hartle is senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education (ACE). For more than a decade, Mr. Hartle has directed ACE’s comprehensive effort to engage federal policymakers on a broad range of issues, including student aid, scientific research, government regulation, and tax policy. This work not only involves representation before Congress, administrative agencies, and the federal courts, it increasingly includes work on state and local issues of national impact. Since it is considered ACE’s historic role to coordinate the government relations efforts of some sixty associations in the Washington-based higher education community, Mr. Hartle is widely considered American higher education’s chief lobbyist. Prior to joining ACE in 1993, he served for six years as education staff director for the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Prior to 1987, Mr. Hartle was director of social policy studies and a resident fellow at AEI and a research scientist at the Educational Testing Service. Mr. Hartle is quoted widely in both national and international media on higher education issues; has authored or coauthored numerous articles, books, and national studies; and contributes regular book reviews to The Christian Science Monitor.
Charles Miller was chairman of the secretary of education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education in 2005–2006. He is the former chairman of the University of Texas System Board of Regents. During his tenure as chairman, Mr. Miller took the lead in developing better higher education accountability systems matched with deregulation and institutional autonomy. He also fostered strategies to significantly increase research funding, enrollment, patient care, private contributions, and tuition revenues, all while increasing financial aid. Mr. Miller served as chairman of the Texas Education Policy Center, which designed Texas’s public school accountability system. He also served as chairman of the education committee of the Governor’s Business Council during George W. Bush’s governorship and was a member of the Bush-Cheney transition team. Mr. Miller is chairman emeritus of the board of directors of the Greater Houston Partnership. He has been active in civic, business, and educational organizations.
Lynne Munson is an author and adjunct research fellow at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. She is also executive director of a new nonprofit research and advocacy organization that will launch publicly in February 2008 and president of Six Consulting, Inc., an education consulting firm. Ms. Munson served as deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from 2001 to 2005, overseeing all agency operations. During her tenure, NEH awarded over 3,600 grants totaling more than $442 million. Prior to serving at NEH, she was a fellow at AEI from 1993 to 2001. In September 2007, Ms. Munson testified before the Senate Finance Committee on the issue of college and university endowment spending, a topic she has written on for Inside Higher Education and USA Today. She is at work on Scrooge U, a book looking at how and why schools are hoarding endowment monies rather than using them to make college more accessible. In 1998 and 1999, Ms. Munson testified before the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York and the Mayor’s Advisory Task Force on CUNY Reform regarding remediation programs. She was a founding board member of the National Alumni Forum, and in 2000, she published Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance (Ivan R. Dee), a book examining trends in the visual arts, including how art history is taught in universities today. Ms. Munson has written on education and cultural issues for numerous national publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and The Public Interest. She has appeared in a wide range of national media outlets, including CNN, FoxNews, CNBC, and NPR. She speaks to scholarly and public audiences nationwide.
Richard Vedder is a visiting scholar at AEI, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and a distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University. Mr. Vedder is the author of eight books and monographs and over two hundred scholarly papers on a variety of topics in economic history, labor economics, and budget policy. His books include Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America, with Lowell Gallaway (New York University Press, 1997); and Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much (AEI Press, 2004). His newest book, coauthored with Wendell Cox, is The Wal-Mart Revolution: How Big-Box Stores Benefit Consumers, Workers, and the Economy (AEI Press, 2006). In 2005–2006, he served on Secretary Margaret Spellings’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education.
Dean Zerbe has been senior counsel and tax counsel to the Senate Committee on Finance since 2001. Mr. Zerbe was previously an attorney at Lionel Sawyer & Collins, counsel for the Senate Committee on Small Business, and a senior policy adviser for the National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service. Mr. Zerbe also served as a legislative aide to Senator Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and held positions at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Defense Department, and the House of Representatives.
Todd J. Zywicki is a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law; editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review; and a senior fellow at the James Buchanan Center, Program on Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. From 2003 to 2004, Mr. Zywicki served as the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. He teaches in the areas of bankruptcy, contracts, commercial law, business associations, law and economics, and public choice and the law. He has also taught as a visiting fellow at Vanderbilt University Law School, Georgetown Law Center, Boston College Law School, and Mississippi College School of Law. Mr. Zywicki is a fellow at the International Centre for Economic Research in Turin, Italy. He was a member of the Department of Justice study group on “Identifying Fraud, Abuse and Errors in the United States Bankruptcy System.” He is the author of the forthcoming books Bankruptcy and Personal Responsibility: Bankruptcy Law and Policy in the Twenty-First Century (Yale University Press) and Public Choice Concepts and Applications in Law, with Maxwell Stearns (West Publishing). Mr. Zywicki clerked for Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and worked as an associate at Alston & Bird in Atlanta, Georgia, where he practiced bankruptcy and commercial law.
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