Dr. Virginia Hettinger’s path to an academic career took many twists and turns. She graduated from Indiana University with a double major in economics and folklore. Like many liberal arts majors at the time, she had little sense of what to do next or even how to go about finding something to do next.
After a brief stint as a retail manager and assistant buyer, Dr. Hettinger earned a Masters in Public Administration at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her second career took her to the Virginia Department of Planning and Budget and then the Virginia Department of Education. In both agencies she worked on evaluation projects and program reviews. Dr. Hettinger loved working on solutions for problems in areas as diverse as child support, educational equity, prison and jail population growth, and Medicaid expenditure growth, but she also wished to concentrate her focus on the questions she found most interesting as opposed to those deemed important by legislators and bureaucrats. Graduate school called to her again. Continue reading