Professor Susan Curnan held the inaugural Florence G. Heller Chair as Associate Professor of the Practice. She is also the co-founder of the Center for Youth and Communities, for which she served as director from 1990 to 2023. The results of her work, and that of the center, have been used to inform national policy and improve programs that address the profound inequities in the distribution of opportunities and outcomes among our nation’s youth.
How did you first become interested in education and workforce development?
Prior to arriving at Brandeis in 1983, I led a national demonstration project in rural New England sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor and private foundations to address the school dropout problem. We designed a program to award academic credit for work-based learning using a competency-based approach for students at risk of dropping out of high school. It worked! We replicated the program in New York City to test the viability in an urban environment where the young people in Harlem and the Lower East Side worked to replace windows in low-income housing during the energy crisis while their rural counterparts worked in natural resource conservation. And that worked, too. During this time, I was invited to contribute to Vice President Mondale’s Youth Employment Task Force — the first time since FDR that the White House administration focused on this area in recognition of the growing crisis. It may be time again for such national focus.
Tell me more about your research.
Like so much of the social science research conducted at the Heller School, my research, and that of the center, uses a mixed-methods approach that is community-engaged and focused on not only proving that something does or does not work but for whom and under what conditions, so that a policy or program can be improved. We believe results should be useful, usable, and timely for management and learning.
Can you share a few examples of social impact from your portfolio of work over the years?
During my tenure as director of the Center for Youth and Communities, we conducted hundreds of studies throughout the U.S. as well as globally. These were supported by more than $125 million of funding from public and private sources. We carried out studies for the U.S. Department of Labor, the United States Agency for International Development, the Corporation for National and Community Service, AmeriCorps, America’s Promise, and privately funded studies on STEM, higher education, the future of work, and education.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the center conducted national and local studies of both the education and workforce systems, and helped identify and define the great “supply-and-demand mismatch,” or the gap between youth preparation and the critical skills employers were demanding. This was a time of urgency and crisis, with high levels of youth unemployment; decline in academic test scores and high school graduation rates; low college aspiration and graduation rates; increased crime; the beginning of unprecedented demographic shifts; and technological innovations that would transform the world of work. I was interested in uncovering why these issues persisted and how they might be better addressed. I thought then, and know now, that Brandeis would be a good platform for both discovery research and dissemination of best practices in policy and management.
My research expanded into emerging technology, higher education-community college transitions, and service learning in the early 2000s. In the last decade in particular, I have conducted work at the global scale, including in Africa with universities, with FIRST Robotics in many countries, as well as efforts involving social-emotional learning and mental health.
How have Heller and Brandeis supported you in your work?
I always remind my students that Brandeis is a good place to be and to be from. That was true throughout the years. As an active “practitioner-scholar,” I always had one foot in the academy and one foot in the community — bringing scholarship and best practices to the community, and a reality check to classrooms and research circles. Brandeis’ storied reputation for academic excellence and Heller’s mission of “knowledge advancing social justice” is a unique base for addressing inequities in education and employment, and welcomed by our partners in communities, philanthropy, and government. Having said that, I recognize that knowledge by itself does little; using that knowledge is critical to improving the conditions for all people to thrive. Our center’s mantra, “enough is known for action,” is a catalyst for making that knowledge productive.