Beth Akers

Beth Akers is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she focuses on the economics of higher education. Before joining AEI, she worked as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a visiting research scholar at the Federal Reserve Board, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush.

Dr. Akers is the author of Making College Pay: An Economist Explains How to Make a Smart Bet on Higher Education (Penguin Random House, 2021). She is also the coauthor of Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt (Princeton University Press, 2016) and the coauthor of the chapter “Understanding Changes in the Distribution of Student Loan Debt over Time” in Student Loans and the Dynamics of Debt (Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2015).

Dr. Akers has a PhD in economics from Columbia University and a BS in mathematics and economics from the State University of New York at Albany.