Mingyan Ma is a doctoral student in Educational Policy Studies at Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, Boston University. She is also a research assistant at the Wheelock Educational Policy Center (WEPC). She will be on the job market in 2026–27.
Her research examines how structural features of education systems create or reduce barriers to opportunity for students and educators, with a focus on the teacher pipeline: who enters the profession, who stays, and under what conditions. She combines causal inference and computational methods, using quasi-experimental designs to estimate the effects of specific policies and natural language processing as a tool for large-scale quantitative text analysis. Her work spans research-practice partnerships with state education agencies and school districts, as well as analyses drawing on large national and state-level public datasets.
Her dissertation examines the teacher pipeline from entry into the profession through early-career development. The centerpiece uses a regression discontinuity design to evaluate a recent state certification policy that allows teacher candidates who narrowly miss a licensure exam to earn certification through a targeted professional learning module, a potential tool for expanding and diversifying the workforce. A second paper examines paraeducators as prospective teachers, investigating the interest, supports, and structural barriers that shape this alternative entry route. A third paper draws on tens of thousands of written narratives from a statewide teacher induction program, linked to administrative records, to map the challenges beginning teachers face and how those challenges shape early-career retention. Beyond the pipeline, she also studies the educational contexts in which teachers and students work, including multilingual learner policy and early childhood education.
She has a B.A. in management from Nanjing University and an M.A. in economics and education from Columbia University. Prior to starting her Ph.D., she was a senior research assistant at Peking University.
CV | Google Scholar | BU Profile
Email: mdma@bu.edu
Bluesky: @mingyanma.bsky.social
Mingyan Ma 