The University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) has given Noah D. Drezner, Associate Professor of Higher Education, The Penn GSE Alumni Recent Alumni/Early Career Award of Merit.

This award recognizes a Penn GSE graduate who has shown outstanding service to the University of Pennsylvania and Penn GSE prior to their 10th reunion year and is setting an inspirational example for future alumni of Penn GSE.  

Drezner (Penn GSE GED’04, GR’08), who joined TC’s faculty in Fall 2014, is a leading authority on educational philanthropy and how colleges and universities can engage their alumni in more inclusive ways. He is co-principal investigator for the National Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Alumni, a multi-institutional mixed methods project.

More specifically, Drezner, a former advancement officer at the University of Rochester, has explored issues such as whether alumni who received need-based financial aid are more or less likely to give to higher education institutions than those who received merit-based aid; and how gender, race or sexual orientation affect a donor's propensity to give or level of giving.

In 2015, Drezner received the John Grenzebach Award for Outstanding Research in Philanthropy for Educational Advancement from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) for  “The Social Base of Philanthropic Fundraising in Higher Education: How Frames and Identity Matter,” a population-based survey experiment that evaluated how social identity affects propensity to donate in response to different types of fundraising solicitations. 

This past fall, it was announced that Drezner will edit Philanthropy & Education, a new peer-reviewed journal, to be jointly published by Teachers College and Indiana University Press, that will showcase the increasingly important role of education philanthropy, in the United States and around the world, as private and public colleges, universities, secondary, and primary schools are fundraising for not only for supplemental but also for essential needs.

The inaugural edition of Philanthropy & Education is slated for November 2016.

Published Friday, Mar 25, 2016