On Tuesday, FAS Dean Hopi Hoekstra announced that David Deming will serve as the next Harvard College Dean. The Dean oversees the College’s affairs, shaping priorities for undergraduates in academics, student life, and discipline. Rakesh Khurana, who has held the post since 2014, announced his retirement last fall and will remain on the faculty. Deming’s present appointments span multiple schools. At the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), he is the Black professor of political economy, and previously served as both academic dean and director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy; at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he is professor of education and economics; in the College, he is faculty dean of Kirkland House.
Deming is an economist who studies education, labor markets, and economic inequality. As a principal investigator with the CLIMB Initiative at Opportunity Insights, he researches how colleges drive intergenerational mobility. He also co-leads the University-wide Project on Workforce, which explores how to best prepare students for the modern workforce. He co-founded the Skills Lab, which studies the role of “soft” skills in the workplace. (Read about his research on teamwork in “Picking Team Players,” September-October 2023.)
Even before assuming the deanship, Deming influenced Harvard College policy. When the College announced in April 2024 that it would reinstitute mandatory submission of standardized test scores for applicants, it cited a working paper coauthored in 2023 by Deming, which found that standardized tests help identify promising students at less well-resourced high schools.
Deming grew up primarily in Nashville, Tennessee, and moved to Shaker Heights, Ohio, at age 15. He studied economics and political science at Ohio State University, received a master’s degree in public policy from the University of California-Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, and a Ph.D. in public policy from HKS.
President Alan M. Garber praised Deming as “a stellar researcher, a great educator, a beloved faculty dean, and a role model to students and faculty alike…. His work on education and social mobility, and much else, gets to core questions in education, and I have benefited greatly from his expertise and his ability to distill the key implications of his research. I am excited that he has agreed to take on this critical role for the College and the University, as he shapes the experiences of generations of undergraduates.”
Deming was reportedly a finalist for the HKS deanship, which was given to Stanford political scientist Jeremy Weinstein in April 2024. Now, he will lead Harvard College.
Read the full University announcement here.
Update, May 15: An earlier version of this story said that Deming was currently the HKS faculty dean and director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy—those appointments ended in 2024 and 2022, respectively.
