Billie Jo Day

Billie Jo Day is a senior researcher at AIR. She has worked in both public and private universities in a variety of capacities. Dr. Day has over 15 years of experience in education policy which includes rural and college and career readiness. Some selected examples of her work have addressed rural college access, rural community college enrollment and retention, college access programming, and strategies to support college and career readiness across the K-12 continuum.

Presently, Dr. Day is the partnership facilitator for a collaborative research partnership for REL Midwest. In this role she supports the partnership by building and maintaining relationships with geographically diverse stakeholder groups, facilitating a research agenda development process, planning and facilitating regular alliance convenings, and overseeing the development of an annual work plan. She is also the state liaison for Indiana for REL Midwest; she provides consultation to education serving organizations including the Indiana Department of Education. Additionally, Dr. Day also is also on the research team evaluating the Gates Foundation’s Frontier Set, a project aimed at increasing students’ post-secondary academic success. In this role she leads a team to better understand student success reform initiatives at six community colleges across the country, including three rural community colleges. At AIR, Day co-leads a research initiative to highlight and disseminate rural research performed by AIR. 

Her dissertation research examined how rurality and attachment to place are related to postsecondary enrollment while accounting for both student-level and high school-level variables.