Rate My Professor Astrid Sandsør

Astrid Marie Jorde Sandsør is Professor at the Centre for Research on Equality in Education (CREATE) and the Department of Special Needs Education at the University of Oslo. She serves as Vice Dean of Research in the Faculty of Educational Sciences from 2025 to 2029. Sandsør earned a PhD in Economics from the University of Oslo in 2016, with the dissertation titled "Educational Policy and Student Outcomes," and a Master of Science in Economics from the same institution in 2010.

Her career includes Senior Researcher at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU) since 2015, Researcher in the ERC-funded project EQOP from 2020 to 2023, Associate Professor from 2023 to 2024, and Professor since 2024. She is a CESifo Research Network Affiliate, IZA Research Fellow, and member of the Council at the Frisch Centre. Sandsør's research centers on economics of education and public economics, examining educational policy, grades, admission to education, teacher density, dropout, social inequality, school-based interventions, and early childhood education and care. She uses causal inference methods including RCTs, DiD, RD, IV, and systematic reviews. She leads projects such as ArcEd: The Choice Architecture of Admission to Education, NeuroPathways: A Multidisciplinary Convergence Approach to Understanding and Supporting Neurodevelopmental Variability, and contributes to EQOP: Socioeconomic Gaps in Language Development and School Achievement.

Key publications include "The Widening Achievement Gap Between Rich and Poor in a Nordic Country" (Educational Researcher, 2023), "Kindergarten for All: Long Run Effects of a Universal Intervention" (Economics of Education Review, 2016), "Do Smaller Classes Always Improve Students’ Long-Run Outcomes?" (Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2017), "Small-group Instruction to Improve Student Performance in Mathematics in Early Grades" (Journal of Public Economics, 2022), and "The Genetic Lottery Goes to School: Better Schools Compensate for the Effects of Students' Genetic Differences" (PNAS, 2025). Sandsør received the Faculty of Educational Sciences Dissemination and Innovation Award in 2022 and holds a Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship. She has given public lectures on educational inequality and administrative data in education research.