Amber Villalobos is a fellow at The Century Foundation working on higher education policy, with a focus on for-profit education, online education, and institutional accountability. Prior to joining The Century Foundation, Amber was a postdoctoral fellow at the Higher Education, Race, and the Economy Lab at The University of California, Merced, where she studied online degree programs in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors as well as race and class differentials in the uptake of income-driven repayment.
Amber is an expert in higher education and inequality research. Her work has been featured in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World and is forthcoming in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences and Social Forces. She has also written about student debt for The New York Times.
Amber received her Ph.D and M.A. in sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles and her B.A. in sociology from The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to graduate school, Amber taught elementary school through Teach For America in the Texas Rio Grande Valley.
