Weiss is a senior fellow at MDRC with more than 15 years of experience advancing evidence-based strategies to improve postsecondary education outcomes, particularly for students from low-income backgrounds. His work centers on identifying interventions that promote college success and expanding access to rigorous, transparent research methods.
He currently leads initiatives that synthesize higher education evidence and strengthen research practices. He directs a project that helps researchers conduct cluster randomized controlled trials, clarify their target of inference, and select appropriate analytic approaches. Weiss also oversees efforts to equip researchers with tools for conducting high-quality, efficient postsecondary randomized controlled trials that follow best open science practices and enable cross-study analyses. In addition, he leads a long-term follow-up of MDRC’s landmark evaluation of CUNY’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), a project examining how community college interventions affect racial inequality in academic outcomes.
A major highlight of Weiss’s career is his collaboration on MDRC’s evaluation of CUNY ASAP, which demonstrated the program’s effectiveness and contributed to its expansion within CUNY and adoption by colleges nationwide. He has also collaborated on frameworks for understanding heterogeneous intervention effects and on strategies to make advanced methods for studying effect variation more accessible to researchers.
Weiss joined MDRC in 2008 and continues to play a leading role in shaping research that informs policy and practice in higher education.
Projects
Other Publications
Weiss, Michael J., and Camille Headlam. Forthcoming. “A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Modularized, Computer-Assisted, Self-Paced, Approach to Developmental Math.” Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness.
Weiss, Michael J., Alyssa Ratledge, Colleen Sommo, and Himani Gupta. 2019. “Supporting Community College Students from Start to Degree Completion: Long-Term Evidence from a Randomized Trial of CUNY’s ASAP.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 11, 3.
Bloom, Howard S., Stephen W. Raudenbush, Michael J. Weiss, and Kristin Porter. 2017. “Using Multisite Experiments to Study Cross-Site Variation in Treatment Effects: A Hybrid Approach With Fixed Intercepts and a Random Treatment Coefficient.” Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness 10, 4: 817-842.
Weiss, M. J., Lockwood, J. R., & McCaffrey, D. 2015. " Estimating the Standard Error of the Impact Estimator in Individually Randomized Trials with Clustering." Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness.
Weiss, Michael J., Howard S. Bloom, Natalya Verbitsky-Savitz, Himani Gupta, Alma E. Vigil, and Daniel N. Cullinan. 2017. “How Much Do the Effects of Education and Training Programs Vary Across Sites? Evidence from Past Multisite Randomized Trials.” Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness (April 19): 1-34. Website: www.tandfonline.com.
Weiss, Michael J., Mary G. Visher, Evan Weissman, and Heather Wathington. 2015. “The Impact of Learning Communities for Students in Developmental Education: A Synthesis of Findings from Randomized Trials at Six Community Colleges.” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Weiss, Michael Joseph, Alexander Mayer, Dan Cullinan, Alyssa Ratledge, Colleen Sommo, and John Diamond. 2015. “A Random Assignment Evaluation of Learning Communities at Kingsborough Community College: Seven Years Later.” Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness 8, 2: 189-217.
Weiss, Michael J., Howard S. Bloom, and Thomas Brock. 2014. “A Conceptual Framework for Studying the Sources of Variation in Program Effects.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 33, 3.
Weiss, Michael J., and Henry May. 2012. “A Policy Analysis of the Federal Growth Model Pilot Program's Measures of School Performance: The Florida Case.” Education Finance and Policy 7, 1: 44-73.
Weiss, Michael J. 2010. “The Implications of Teacher Selection and the Teacher Effect in Individually Randomized Group Treatment Trials.” Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness 3, 4: 381-405.
Cole, Russell, and Michael J. Weiss. 2009. “Identifying Organizational Influentials: Methods and Application using Social Network Data.” Connections 29, 2: 45-61.