Hill (he/him) works in MDRC’s Postsecondary Education Policy area, with a focus on improving access, achievement, and completion rates for community college students with low incomes. Having co-authored over a dozen reports, commentaries, and peer-reviewed articles, he is an experienced mixed methods policy researcher.
Hill currently leads data acquisition, processing, and analysis across many MDRC studies, including multiple long-term follow-up studies of CUNY ASAP. He has collaborated with program staff, state and federal agencies, and academics to produce timely, accurate, and policy-relevant findings for a wide range of postsecondary interventions. His work has appeared in Evaluation Review, Journal of Postsecondary Student Success, the National College Attainment Network, Community College Daily, and many national education conferences. Additionally, he has provided press interviews for Inside Higher Ed and Higher Ed Dive.
Hill’s data management expertise has contributed to advancing tools that equip researchers with tools for conducting high-quality, efficient postsecondary randomized controlled trials that follow best open science practices and enable cross-study analyses. He led the programming work that underpins both The Higher Education Randomized Control Trial Restricted Access File (THE-RCT RAF), a restricted access file containing individual-level data on over 80,000 students from more than 30 RCTs, and the Intervention Return on Investment Tool, a free, interactive web application that allows community college administrators to estimate the costs and revenues associated with implementing an intervention.
Outside of his research projects, Colin leads MDRC’s Queer Affinity Group and is the Vice President of Social Policy Workers United. He graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in statistics and data science and education studies.
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