Thomas Bailey is the president of Teachers College, Columbia University, and the George and Abby O'Neill Professor of Economics and Education at TC. He was the founding director of CCRC and is currently a senior fellow with the center. Previously, Bailey directed the IES-funded Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness (2014–2019), the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment (2011–2017), and the National Center for Postsecondary Research (2006–2012).
Dr. Bailey has been the director of the Institute on Education and the Economy at Teachers College since 1992, and in 1996 established the Community College Research Center (CCRC) with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In June 2010, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appointed him chair of the Committee on Measures of Student Success, which developed recommendations for community colleges to comply with completion rate disclosure requirements under the Higher Education Opportunity Act. Dr. Bailey and the CCRC won the Terry O'Banion Prize for Teaching and Learning at the annual conference for the League for Innovation in the Community College in 2013 and was also inducted as an AERA Fellow in the same year. He has been a member of the National Academy of Education since 2012.
His papers have appeared in a wide variety of education, policy-oriented and academic journals, and he has authored or co-authored several books on the employment and training of immigrants and the extent and effects of on-the-job training. Dr. Bailey is the author with Shanna Smith Jaggars and Davis Jenkins of Redesigning America's Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success which was published by Harvard University Press in April 2015. Other books include Defending the Community College Equity Agenda (John Hopkings University Press, 2006), co-edited with Vanessa Morest; Working Knowledge: Work-Based Learning and Education Reform (Routledge, 2004), co-authored with Katherine Hughes and David Moore; Manufacturing Advantage (Cornell University Press, 2000), written with Eileen Appelbaum, Peter Berg, and Arne Kalleberg; andThe Double Helix of Education and the Economy (IEE, 1992), co-authored with Sue Berryman. Dr. Bailey holds a PhD in labor economics from MIT.