UMass Boston

Monnica Chan is an Assistant Professor at UMB's College of Education and Human Development. Her research seeks to understand how social and economic inequalities manifest in students' postsecondary educational experiences. She explores this by using descriptive statistics to document trends over time and quasi-experimental methods to evaluate policy and programmatic impacts on student trajectories in and through college. Her current research projects investigate how students pay for college and the impact of financial aid on student outcomes during and after college. 

Her research has been published in journals such as Educational Researcher and The AIR Professional File. Dr. Chan has testified to the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education and presented work at national research conferences. 

Dr. Chan earned her Ph.D. in Education Policy and Program Evaluation from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Prior to pursuing a Ph.D., she served as the director of policy and research at the New England Board of Higher Education and an AmeriCorps member at Burlington County College, a public two-year institution in New Jersey. She also holds a M.Ed. in higher education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in biochemistry from Barnard College.