Rooney Columbus is the founder and principal of E&E Analytics, a consultancy focused on education and workforce research and policy. He uses large administrative datasets and quasi-experimental methods to study how postsecondary education and training shape students’ academic and labor market outcomes. His research spans community colleges, career and technical education, postsecondary finance, and other federal and state higher education and workforce policy issues.
Rooney holds a doctorate in higher education and public policy from the University of Michigan. Before graduate school, he was a program manager and research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. Before all that, he worked for a decade at his dad’s bakery. He now lives outside Atlanta with his wife and son.
As an AIBM fellow, he studies where boys and men fall out of the postsecondary pipeline and what institutions and policymakers can do about it.