David Figlio ranked among top education scholars for public impact in 2025

(Initially published January 29, 2025 on the University of Rochester’s News Center)

David Figlio, the Gordon Fyfe Professor of Economics and a professor of education at the University’s Warner School of Education and Human Development, has been named to the top 200 list of university-based scholars in the United States who did the most in the past year to shape educational practice and policy. Assembled by Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an Education Week blogger, the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings measure scholars’ influences on their field, both within and outside academia. Figlio, who ranks 122nd for public impact, garnered the highest possible score for scholarly impact.

Having made the list every year since its inception in 2015, Figlio focuses his research on a wide range of education and health policy issues—from school accountability and standards to welfare policy and policy design, as well as the interrelationship between education and health.

In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Education. An economist by training, Figlio currently serves as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn and a member of the CESifo Network on the Economics of Education in Munich—both in Germany. He is also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Access the list of top finishers on the RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings.