Section: People
Do You Know: Rey Hernández-Julián, assistant professor of economics
Jan 31, 2007

Assistant Professor of Economics Rey Hernández-Julián is intrigued by studying the cause and effect of student performance.

Rey Hernández-Julián embodies the “inherent intellectual creativity” of Metro State professors, to which President Stephen Jordan referred at the Professional Development Conference earlier this month.

The youthful assistant professor of economics (he’s 27) has been intrigued by and conducted in-depth research on topics ranging from grade inflation in higher education to school choice at K-12 levels and the effect of immigration on schools in border towns. When he describes his research projects, it is with enough infectious enthusiasm to interest even a lay person.

Hernández-Julián was part of the large cohort of new faculty to join Metro State this fall. He has turned his doctoral research--on various aspects of student performance in higher education--into three papers for publication. Using performance and demographic data for 40,000 Clemson University students from 1990-2002 (“We had 700,000 grade observations!”), Hernández-Julián studied three questions:

    1) Whether a long-term increase in grades was due to grade inflation or increased effort on the part of students who had received merit-based scholarships dependent on maintaining a threshold grade-point average. (He concluded that each factor had about a 50 percent causal effect.)

    2) How student performance changes throughout the course of the day, from the morning hours to evening. He found a “tiny but unambiguous” result that students do perform better later in the day, but “not a big enough result to change any policy.”

    3) Transfer college quality and student performance: Hernández-Julián looked at how students transferring into Clemson performed academically, depending on which type of institution they transferred from and controlling for such factors as race, income, gender and SAT scores. His conclusion was that “if you intend to transfer to a selective program at a research institution and want to be as well-prepared as you can, you are better served by going to a better institution initially (e.g., a four-year versus a two-year), at least academically.”

Hernández-Julián is waiting to hear whether papers he’s written on the first two questions will be published. The third paper, on transfer college quality and student performance, has been accepted for publication in the Eastern Economic Journal. It was also picked up by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, which posts working papers on its Web site. (See it at http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/)

His intrigue with studying causes and effects of student performance has led him to pursue more research projects this year. The first is whether grade inflation is at least in part caused by “substitution,” the fact that students gravitate toward professors and majors that tend to give higher grades. Adam Looney, a member of the Federal Reserve Board, read Hernández-Julián’s paper on transfer students and “loved the data. He suggested we do a study together.” The second is the effect of school choice at the K-12 level on non-academic outcomes, such as behavior. In addition, he is writing a grant with some UCDHSC professors on the effects of immigration on schools in certain towns along the U.S./Mexico border.

Studying the Spanish-speaking population is a natural fit for Hernández-Julián, who was raised in the Dominican Republic by Spanish-speaking parents. And yet his English is completely unaccented. “I went to an American school in the Dominican Republic and came to the U.S. when I was 16,” he explains. He received his undergraduate degree from Bob Jones University and his doctorate from Clemson University. He taught for a year at St. Lawrence College in upstate New York before coming to Metro State.

In addition to his research pursuits, Hernández-Julián says he “loves teaching” here. Now in his second semester with the College, he has taught or is teaching A Citizen’s Guide to Economics (“mostly for non-majors”), Econometrics, Labor Economics and Principles of Macroeconomics.