Ozan Jaquette

Ozan Jaquette is an associate professor of education and (by courtesy) an associate professor of information studies. His research specializations are organizational behavior, enrollment management, higher education finance, and edtech. Ozan draws primarily from sociology and is president-elect of the Sociology of Education Association. His previous research examined the causes and consequences of public universities increasing nonresident enrollment. His current/previous research investigates college recruiting behavior and the third-party products colleges utilize to identify and recruit prospects. His current/future research investigates private investment – venture capital and private equity – in edtech. The motivating question is, given that for-profit, third-party vendors increasingly provide core functions to schools and colleges, how can we steer the private, edtech ecosystem towards public-good goals of education. Ozan teaches courses in programming, statistics, and organizational behavior. He has developed courses on-ramp courses in data science using R that are designed for students who are anxious about learning to code: https://anyone-can-cook.github.io/rclass1/ and https://anyone-can-cook.github.io/rclass2/.

For prospective PhD students interested in working with Ozan Jaquette:

For the next five years my research program will focus on the role of private equity (PE), venture capital (VC), and venture philanthropy (e.g., foundations investing in startups) in education. This research will primarily utilize secondary, tabular data from platforms that track investment activity (e.g., PitchBook) and may also utilize semi/unstructured text data from contracts between vendors and public schools/colleges. Analyses will utilize traditional statistics and social network analysis, and potentially natural language processing for analysis of contracts. Interested students should have some foundation in statistics and in programming and a strong willingness to invest in these skills. Interested students should have a foundation or willingness to learn about VC/PE and about capitalism. I usually recommend that students take the full-year statistics sequence offered by the political science department. This sequence is a nice balance between not-too-much and not-too-little math. Students should be willing to re-invest in foundational math concepts (algebra, calculus) necessary to succeed in this sequence.