Jordan Matsudaira has been appointed as Deputy Under Secretary of Education in the Biden-Harris administration and will be on leave during this appointment.

Jordan Matsudaira is nonresident senior fellow in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute and assistant professor of public policy and economics at Cornell University. His economic research focuses on the impact of labor and education policies and institutions on the economic mobility of low-income Americans. Current research projects range from examining the impact of unionization on student outcomes in charter schools, estimating the returns to federal Pell grant spending, and assessing the long-run impacts of safety net programs on children’s outcomes. He is also studying how to best measure the outputs of institutions of higher education and the impact of providing prospective students institution performance information on college choice.

From 2013 to 2015, Matsudaira served on President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers as senior and then chief economist. Matsudaira worked on labor and education policies, including the Gainful Employment regulations and an expansion of the federal overtime protections in the Fair Labor Standards Act, and led the technical development of the College Scorecard.

Matsudaira holds a PhD in economics and public policy from the University of Michigan. From 2005 to 2007, he was a Robert Wood Johnson postdoctoral fellow in health policy research at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a visiting assistant professor in the economics department at Princeton University in 2010.