Assistant Professor, Hobby School of Public Affairs

Expertise: Education policy, economics of education, labor economics, program evaluation, with a focus on alternative academic pathways and adult education.

Career Highlights:

Blake Heller is an assistant professor of public policy at the Hobby School of Public Affairs. He earned his Ph.D. in Public Policy from Harvard University, M.Sc. in Economics and Philosophy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and an M.A. in Teaching from Dominican University. His research and teaching focus on applied microeconomics and policy analysis, with a particular emphasis on education policy topics including alternative academic pathways, vocational education, adult training and immigrant language skills.

Heller is the co-PI of the Massachusetts English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) Impact Study in partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which assesses the impact of adult ESOL services on measures of immigrant integration, including civic engagement, health and reported earnings. He was recognized as an AEI/Fordhan Emerging Education Policy Scholar and a 2024 NAEd/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellow, and is a faculty affiliate of Georgia Policy Labs at Georgia State University, the Center for Public Policy at the University of Houston and the Wilson Sheehan Laboratory for Economic Opportunity at the University of Notre Dame.

Heller's work is published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management and Education Finance and Policy, among others. Before joining the University of Houston, he was a post-doctoral research scholar at Vanderbilt University. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked as a research analyst and project manager at the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University and taught mathematics to middle school and high school students at 21^st Century Charter School in Gary, Indiana.