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Roland Fryer    

Professor of Economics at Harvard University; Authority on Education, Inequality & Race

Roland Fryer is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a co-founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures, an early-stage seed fund, and several start-ups. He sits on several boards with an emphasis on business analytics, talent management, and product strategy. His research combines economic theory, big data, AI, and randomized social experiments to help design policies that can increase social mobility in America.

Fryer was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, the John Bates Clark Medal (given by the American Economic Association to the best American Economist under age 40), the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, among others. He was a member of the 2009 Time 100 (most influential people in the world) and has been twice featured in Esquire "Genius issue."

Fryer earned a Bachelor of the Arts degree in economics from the University of Texas at Arlington and a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from Penn State University.

News

The Costs of Inequality: Education Is the Key to It All
Before Deval Patrick '78, J.D. '82, was the popular and successful two-term governor of Massachusetts, before he was managing director of high-flying Bain Capital, and long before he was Harvard's most recent Commencement speaker, he was a poor black schoolchild in the battered housing projects of Chicago's South Side. The odds of his escaping a poverty-ridden lifestyle, despite innate intelligence and drive, were long. So how did he help mold his own narrative and triumph over baked-in societal inequality? Through education. "Education has been the path to better opportunity for generations of American strivers, no less for me," Patrick said in an email when asked how getting a solid education, in his case at Milton Academy and at Harvard, changed his life. "What great teachers gave me was not just the skills to take advantage of new opportunities, but the ability to imagine what those opportunities could be. For a kid from the South Side of Chicago, that's huge."

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