Karen Paulson
Karen Paulson is a Senior Associate at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS). Her areas of expertise include assessment, evaluation, and the use of data in state policymaking. Currently she is evaluating state activities for the State Scholars Initiative, a program administered by WICHE for the federal Office of Vocational and Adult Education. She has evaluated numerous FIPSE and Title III grants and recently completed work with FIPSE on an evaluation website.
She is the author of Adult Learners in the United States: A National Profile (co-authored with Marianne Boeke for the American Council on Education, 2006), A Data Audit and Analysis Toolkit to Support Assessment of the First College Year (2003) and Following the Mobile Student: Can We Develop the Capacity for a Comprehensive Database to Assess Student Progression? (co-authored with Peter Ewell and Paula Schild for the Lumina Foundation for Education Research Report, 2003).
She previously worked on a team for a distributed evaluation effort for the NSF-funded engineering education coalition, ECSEL, that required working with local evaluators at seven universities to collect student-level data. She holds engineering degrees in addition to her higher education study. Her Ph.D. is in Higher Education with a minor in Policy Analysis from The Pennsylvania State University.