Faculty & Staff

From Wheelock to Washington

Associate professor Joshua Goodman spent a year with the Biden administration’s Council of Economic Advisers

Between August 2022 and July 2023, Joshua Goodman was up at 5 am every Tuesday to catch a 7 am flight to Washington, D.C. By 9 am, the associate professor of education and economics was at his desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. 

“It’s a credit to JetBlue and the D.C. Metro system, which is a little more functional than the MBTA,” says Goodman, who returned home to Cambridge every Thursday evening. 

On July 14, Goodman wrapped a yearlong stint as a senior staff economist on the Biden administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he lent his expertise on topics such as higher education funding and student debt. 

“My office window looked out on the White House and the West Wing, which is pretty darn exciting,” he says. 

Goodman and other staff economists crunched the numbers, carefully parsing policies and their projected effects, and advised the council and other administration officials on what they found. 

Key projects included reviewing reforms to income-driven repayment of student loans from the federal government. “The administration put forward a plan to basically make it substantially more protective of low-income borrowers,” says Goodman, who is also affiliated faculty with the Wheelock Educational Policy Center. 

Generally, Goodman says, the council economists worked to balance the desire to help student borrowers and the program’s budgetary cost. “We tried to help the administration understand what the trade-offs are.” 

The Biden administration is also interested in the fact that some school districts are struggling to hire teachers. During his time on the council, Goodman and his colleagues tried to make projections about the future of the teacher workforce. 

Among the concrete benefits, he says, is a much clearer and more comprehensive sense of what the federal government is working on in both higher education and K–12 schools. “I think I can speak much more intelligently about a number of federal policies and regulations than I could a year ago, and I hope that will come across to my students.”