Sarah E. Turner (born July 25, 1966) is an American professor of economics and education and Souder Family Endowed Chair at the University of Virginia.
[5][7] Some of her more recent papers include "Public Universities: The Supply Side of Building a Skilled Workforce", which investigates and analyses the correlation between the decline in state funding per student and educational and research outcomes of schools, and "The Right Way to Capture College 'Opportunity'", which suggests measurement challenges in identifying whether high educational institutions actually provide opportunities for low-income students.
As of today, Turner's research has been cited in 6,966 working and published papers[8] as she continues to analyze economics of education in the United States.
She is currently collaborating with John Bound at the Russell Sage Foundation in order to examine the mobility of high-educated workers through the U.S. census data.
[9] Regardless of the potential for significant federal financial assistance and the low cost of returning to school for the unemployed, very few do due to its difficult navigation characteristics.
This paper's findings propose how well-coordinated information intervention can be more cost-efficient than raising financial aid policies to increase postsecondary enrollment participation.
Turner and Hoxby propose a project called Expanding College Opportunities (ECO), which is an intervention designed to test their hypothesis on how the high-achieving low-income students were less likely to apply in postsecondary institutions that have more resource-intensive characteristics as their net prices were harder to ascertain.
[10] The ECO intervention presents guidance on how to apply in higher education, its costs, graduation rates, the institution's resources, and no-paperwork fee waivers.
[12] In this paper, Turner and Avery analyze a framework that takes into account student loans (not as an anecdote) as something that can be optimally invested for postsecondary benefits.