This year's MITER Lecture will be presented by Dr. Larry V. Hedges, the Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Professor of Educational and Social Policy at Northwestern University. Biogrphical information for Dr. Hedges is available at: http://www.ipr.northwestern.
Abstract: Fellowships and prizes are ubiquitous in the academic world, and are generally believed to have strong effects on individuals who receive them and even on their colleagues who do not. Many organizations offer pre- and postdoctoral fellowships with the stated objective of improving the academic careers of those who receive them. Yet the actual empirical evidence on the effects of fellowships is surprisingly meager. I will report empirical studies of the impact on academic career success of two fellowship programs in education research: The Spencer Foundation’s predoctoral fellowship program and the National Academy of Education’s postdoctoral fellowship program (also funded by the Spencer Foundation). The studies use a regression discontinuity approach to quantify the causal effects of fellowship programs on important indicators of career success.