Lily Fesler is a Researcher at Mathematica. She finished her PhD in economics of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education in 2020, where she was a NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellow, an Institute of Education Sciences Fellow, and a Stanford Graduate Fellow in Science and Engineering. She received her MA in economics at Stanford and her BA in economics from Wesleyan University.

Her research focuses on inequality in access to higher education, and how students’ postsecondary choices are influenced by information about the college application process, personal preferences, and various programs and policies. She uses text-as-data and machine learning techniques to characterize students’ experiences navigating the college application process, and quasi-experimental techniques to identify the causal effects of postsecondary access programs. She has served as a teaching assistant for courses on applied quasi-experimental methods in education and founded the student group Computational Text Analysis in the Social Sciences (CTASS) at Stanford.

​She previously interned with the policy research team at the College Board,  worked as an education analyst at Abt Associates and as an economic analyst at Compass Lexecon.

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Ph.D. in Economics of Education, Stanford University (2020)
M.A. in Economics, Stanford University (2018)
Dissertation Committee: Thomas Dee, Eric Bettinger, sean reardon, Justin Grimmer

lfesler at mathematica-mpr dot com