CSMGEP Profiles: Kalena E. Cortes
Aspirations vs. Expectations
As a college freshman aspiring to be a veterinarian, Kalena E. Cortes at first saw her required economics class as something to get over with. It wasn’t easy: High school hadn’t prepared her for the calculus she needed in class, so she spent her weekends poring over her economics textbook as she worked to grasp both the math and the concepts.
It was a chore, until it wasn’t. She soon realized she found the material interesting, even exciting. Those weekends with her economics textbook became something she looked forward to.
“It just changed my life,” she recalls of that class at University of California at San Diego, “and I never looked back.”
She went on to get a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and now Cortes, a labor economist, holds the Verlin and Howard Kruse ’52 Founders Professorship at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and is the inaugural director of the school’s education policy program. She is also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Economics of Education and Children and Families programs and a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor. She was named Texas A&M’s 2020 Presidential Impact Fellow and 2021 Chancellor Enhancing Development and Generating Excellence in Scholarship Fellow. For the last year and a half, she was a visiting scholar at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. Much of her work focuses on equity and access in K-12 and postsecondary schools. The questions she pursues, she readily admits, are often shaped by her own experiences.
Growing up as a self-described “border girl” in the San Diego region that includes Chula Vista and San Ysidro, Calif., Baja California, and Tijuana, she absorbed both Mexican and American culture and felt a strong pull to attend college, becoming the first in her family to do so. As she weighed her college choices, she knew that she didn’t want to move far away from her family, and she turned down acceptances at more distant schools to stay close to home. That has colored her recent research into factors that influence college choice, as well as her work in economic decision-making among immigrants more generally.
“It’s hard not to be influenced by your own experiences” when considering areas of research, she says. “The fun thing about it is I can create hypotheses and test them out with data.”
Cortes’ own college decision-making informs her current research agenda on community colleges. Specifically, she’s looking at how “” — regions with few or no four-year or two-year institutions — affect the enrollment of Hispanic, Black, and low-income students. She’s found that white and higher-income students who live a long distance from two-year colleges may be less likely to seek opportunities at that kind of institution, but more likely to attend a four-year college. Their Hispanic, Black, and low-income peers, however, tend to forego college altogether when the distance is too much to overcome.
Another part of her research on this topic asks whether the attainment gap could be mitigated if more potential college students knew that . She’s looking at the needs of different kinds of college students, and how two-year and four-year colleges may fit different needs for different populations. As both kinds of colleges face financial pressures, in some cases closing and reducing options for their local community, “that actually has implications in terms of, ‘Well, what's going to happen to the attainment gap and the social mobility of individuals?’” Cortes explains.
A different project Cortes is leading explores the power of parent engagement in student achievement. Parents, she believes, are an underutilized resource in education. With a program called , she has partnered with school districts to send text messages that guide parents of middle schoolers through offering support for the students’ academic success. It’s the latest in a string of research that measures how technology — specifically text messages — can be harnessed to bolster academic outcomes. Cortes believes that parents can not only support their children’s learning, but also create a crucial environment of expectation that can lead students forward.
“You might aspire to be the first to go to college, or, hey, get a Ph.D. in economics. But are you expected to? There is a difference between aspirations and expectations,” she explains.
It all calls to mind the unwavering support Cortes received from her family throughout her academic journey.
“I don't think I would be here if I didn't have the support of my grandmother and my mom as well,” she says. “That's very, very important to where I'm at. So I think that parents can make a difference.”
But others can have an impact, too, as Cortes learned firsthand as an undergraduate. She still keeps in touch with many of the professors she met once she switched to studying economics at UC-San Diego, and is grateful even now for their support and advice.
“That's something I've always had in my life, somebody that's always believed in me,” Cortes says, “somebody there in the right moment to course correct you.”
She’s run into a few of her old professors at recent conferences. One told her he’d had his class read one of her papers, and another reminded her of how far she’s come.
“She said, ‘Kalena, I still see you as this little thing running around the halls as an undergraduate in economics, and now you're a professor!’”
When she can grab some free time amid her research and teaching, Cortes likes to create things via crafting. When she couldn’t find a planner that fit her needs this year, she made her own. Likewise, she has created her own niche in economics, and she loves setting an example for her students who might not yet realize how widely economics can be applied.
When she talks about her research, she often gets the response: “Oh, you can do that?”
“Yes,” she’s happy to explain. “You can!”
Proust Questionnaire
A salon and parlor game of the 19th century made famous by Marcel Proust’s answers, the Proust Questionnaire (adapted here) gets to the heart of things ...
What’s on your nightstand?
Nail polish, a flashlight, and books
What job would you like to have if you weren’t an economist?鈥�
Personal shopper
What is an ideal day? 鈥�
No zoom meetings! It’d be a quiet day, sipping coffee.
What trait do you deplore in other people? 鈥�
Jealousy
What trait do you most admire in people? 鈥�
Trustworthiness
Who do you most admire?
My grandmother and my mom
What is your favorite extravagance?
Really good coffee
What is your most treasured possession?
My cats (Olive and Rosie)!
What is your worst habit?
Too much coffee
Which talent would you most like to have?
Playing guitar
Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman? 鈥�
Maynard Keynes
What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?
Grad school
What is your personal motto?
Be supportive!