W. Steven Barnett is a U.S. American education economist who currently serves as a Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University, where - being one of its founders - he also directs the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER).
[1] He is one of the world's leading scholars on early child development and the economics of pre-schools.
[citation needed] Steven Barnett earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.
[4] He is also a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group at the University of Chicago.
[6] 20 years later, Barnett has been able to confirm the maintenance of these effects, confirming that preschooling strongly increased the lifetime earnings and decreased the criminal activity of recipients, yielding enormously positive social and private returns on investment (e.g. benefits to the general public, assuming a 3% discount rate, already amount to $12.90 per dollar invested); the by far largest share of the programme's social gain accrues due to the reduction in male crime rates (with Milagros Nores, Clive R. Belfield and Lawrence Schweinhart).