Stephen Porter is Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Adult & Higher Education at North Carolina State University, where he teaches courses in statistics and causal inference with observational data. He is also a principal in Percontor, an educational research and consulting firm, and one of the developers of the Revealing Institutional Strengths and Challenges student success survey.
He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester, with a concentration in econometrics. Prior to his faculty career, he spent almost a decade in higher education administration as an institutional researcher, most recently as Director of Institutional Research at Wesleyan University.
His research focuses on student success, with an emphasis on evaluation using methods for causal inference, and survey methodology. He has published in journals such as AERA Open, Economics of Education Review, Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, and Public Opinion Quarterly. The U.S. Department of Education, the Institute of Education Sciences, the Lumina Foundation, and the National Science Foundation have funded his research. He presents regularly at national education research conferences.
Dr. Porter is currently an editorial board member for Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Research in Higher Education, and has served on the boards of the American Educational Research Journal, Journal of College Student Development, and Review of Higher Education.
He has chaired three different review panels for the Institute of Education Sciences, and has served as a Visiting Scholar for both the Center of Excellence for Complex Data Analysis and the Education and Workforce Development division at RTI International. He has also served as a consultant for the 2016 and 2020 NCES National Postsecondary Student Aid Studies.
Updated 10/18