Henry M. Levin is the William Heard Kilpatrick Professor of Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is Co-Director of the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies in Education. He is also the David Jacks Professor of Higher Education and Economics, Emeritus, at Stanford University where he served from 1968-99 after working as an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. From 1978-84 he was the Director of the Institute for Research on Educational Finance at Stanford, a federally-funded R. & D. Center. From 1986-2000 Levin served as the Director of the Accelerated Schools Project, a national school reform initiative for accelerating the education of at-risk youngsters encompassing about 1,000 schools in 41 states.

Levin has held Fulbright Professorships in Barcelona and Mexico and is on the Guest Faculty at Peking University and an Honorary Professor at Beijing Normal University. He has been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Russell Sage Foundation. Levin has been the Editor of the Review of Educational Research and the President of the American Evaluation Association and a winner of its Gunnar Myrdal Award. He is also a recipient of the Outstanding Service Award of the Association for Educational Finance and Policy and an elected member of the National Academy of Education.

Levin is a specialist in the economics of education and human resources and has published 24 books and about 300 articles on these and related subjects. At present he is doing research on educational reform, educational vouchers, cost-effectiveness analysis, educational privatization, and benefit-cost studies in education. Recent books he has authored or co-authored or edited include: Readings in the Economics of Higher Education (Elgar, 2003); Privatizing Educational Choice (Paradigm Publishers, 2005), The Price We Pay: Economic and Social Costs of Inadequate Education (Brookings, 2007), Between Public and Private (Harvard Education Press, 2010), and Economic Evaluation of Education: Cost-Effectiveness and Benefit-Cost Analysis, 3rd Ed. (Sage Publications, 2018).