Blair Named Associate Professor

Dean Bridget Terry Long has announced that Peter Q. Blair has been named an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) effective July 1.

“Peter is a rising star with multiple projects that demonstrate his creativity in approaching rigorous research,” says Long. “His work is also highly relevant to current policy discussions, and we are already seeing the impact of several of his studies on policies across the country. At his core, Peter is extremely curious, and his colleagues praise his collegiality, student mentorship, and public service. I hope he will have a long career at HGSE.”

Blair joined HGSE in 2018 as an assistant professor after three years at Clemson University. Since 2020, he has been the faculty co-director of the Harvard Project on Workforce, an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Harvard Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, the Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work Project, and HGSE. Blair teaches courses at HGSE on the future of work and educational inequality.

“I'm delighted to be named associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,” says Blair. “This is a shared accomplishment given the deep investment of love and support that I have received from my family, friends, mentors, colleagues, collaborators, and the many students that I have had the privilege to teach and write with. It is a vote of confidence by my senior colleagues of the value and impact of the body work that my collaborators and I have cultivated.”

Blair worked in the White House for the Council of Economic Advisers during the 2020–21 presidential transition. He was also a scholar-in-residence at Stanford University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality in 2019, and a national fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford in the 2022–23 academic year. Since 2018, Blair has worked with the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is now a faculty research associate.

Blair’s work is framed by his own experience as a first-generation college student from the Bahamas. His research is centered on understanding how we can design policies, including education policies, that create a more just and equitable economy.

More specifically, his research focuses on the role of job market signals such as licensure and college degree requirements in promoting or hindering economic mobility, especially for traditionally minoritized populations. Blair’s work has also examined residential segregation, school spending, the effect of divorce laws on educational investments, and the decision-making of elite colleges to not expand capacity despite high demand.

Blair notes that his research into unlocking the potential of workers in the United States categorized as skilled through alternative routes, or “STARs,” has enriched academic debate and sparked policy changes in more than 16 states, including the national “Tear the Paper Ceiling” campaign.

In the coming years, Blair says he will continue to build on the success of the STARS research by studying the impacts of state changes on the economic mobility of STARS. He also will continue to research and write on occupational licensing, a topic he says is “massively under researched.”

“One of the most exciting elements of continuing on the faculty at Harvard is that my scholarly pursuits resonate with the university’s overarching commitment to advance new ideas and promote enduring knowledge,” says Blair, “and align closely with the mission of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which seeks to ‘change the world by expanding opportunities and outcomes for learners everywhere.’”

Blair received his Ph.D. in applied economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. He has an M.Sc. in theoretical physics from Harvard University and a B.Sc. in physics and mathematics from Duke University.