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 educational statistics and causal inference with observational data. He is also a principal in Percontor, an educational research and consulting firm. Recently he served as Visiting Scholar at the Center of Excellence for Complex Data Analysis at RTI International, and he is currently a Visiting Scholar with their Education and Workforce Development division.
He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester, with a concentration in econometrics. Prior to his faculty positions at North Carolina State and Iowa State University, he spent nine years in higher education administration in the field of institutional research, working first at the University of Maryland, College Park, and most recently as Director of Institutional Research at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
His current research focuses on student success, with an emphasis on quasi-experimental methods, and survey methods, particularly the validity of college student survey questions. He has published in journals such as Economics of Education Review, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, and Public Opinion Quarterly. He presents regularly at national education research conferences.
Dr. Porter is an editorial board member for American Educational Research Journal, Journal of Higher Education, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Research in Higher Education, and formerly served on the boards of Journal of College Student Development and Review of Higher Education. He is Chair of the Education Systems and Broad Reform grant review panel at the Institute of Education Sciences, and is currently serving as a consultant for the 2016 NCES National Postsecondary Student Aid Study.