Rate My Professor Harry Patrinos

Harry Patrinos is the Department Head of Education Reform and 21st Century Endowed Chair in Education Policy at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. An expert in K-12 education policy, he joined the faculty in the College of Education and Health Professions in August 2024 after a distinguished career at the World Bank, where he served as Senior Adviser for Education. Patrinos studied economics at the University of Ottawa, earned his master's degree from Carleton University, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Sussex with a dissertation on education, earnings, and inequality. Earlier in his career, he worked as an economist at the Economic Council of Canada and held various management positions at the World Bank, overseeing education teams across multiple regions including Europe and Central Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Middle East and North Africa, and leading operations in Latin America. He co-led the development of the Harmonized Learning Outcomes database, integral to the World Bank's Human Capital Index published in Nature.

Patrinos specializes in the economics of education, focusing on returns to schooling, school-based management, demand-side financing, public-private partnerships, and the socioeconomic conditions of Indigenous Peoples. His research addresses school finance, results-based accountability, educational leadership, teacher quality, and school choice, promoting education as a driver of equity and development globally. With over 220 scholarly publications—including 85 journal articles, 74 working papers, and 56 books and book chapters—his work has garnered more than 22,625 citations, 8,634 in the past five years, ranking him seventh among all scholars at the University of Arkansas. Notable publications include "Returns to investment in education: a further update" (2002, World Bank), "Returns to investment in education: a decennial review of the global literature" (2018, Education Economics), "Learning loss during Covid-19: An early systematic review" (2022, Prospects), "Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Development" (2012, Cambridge University Press), and "Making schools work: New evidence on accountability reforms" (2011, World Bank). He is associate editor of Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training and a fellow of the Institute of Labor Economics and Global Labor Organization.