Influential Women Profiles Julia Parker Goyer, Rhodes Scholar: Education Researcher and Coach for College Founder
San Jose, California – Julia Parker Goyer, Ed.D., Rhodes Scholar, is a distinguished education researcher, policy scientist, and Founder of Coach for College, a groundbreaking program that empowers student-athletes to engage in meaningful service, cross-cultural learning, and youth mentorship. Currently serving as a Policy Research Scientist at The College Board since January 2022, Parker designs rigorous program evaluations, conducts advanced statistical and econometric analyses, and translates research into actionable insights that inform education policy and practice at scale.
Parker’s career has been shaped by a deep interest in how individuals pursue goals within institutions—particularly how access to college is granted and why students with similar talents can experience vastly different outcomes depending on context. In 2008, she founded Coach for College after formative experiences in Vietnam and Belize, aiming to support low-income, rural Vietnamese adolescents in persisting through school via culturally immersive education programs. The model paired bilingual Vietnamese college students with American college-athletes to teach academics, sports, and life skills during intensive summer camps, combining local relevance with aspirational role models.
As part of her MSc in Comparative and International Education at Oxford, Parker conducted an early evaluation of Coach for College that assessed impacts on students’ motivation and risk of dropout. Findings demonstrated that near-peer role models, structured challenges, and supportive relationships significantly enhanced student engagement and strengthened their educational aspirations. This early work culminated in a published book chapter on the use of sports and college-student role models to boost educational outcomes among rural Vietnamese youth. The program’s second year received funding from a U.S. Department of State international sports programming grant and expanded through partnerships with universities and public institutions.
Over nine years, Parker scaled Coach for College from a pilot at Duke University and UNC–Chapel Hill to a program involving student-athletes from more than 35 universities, including institutions that were often athletic rivals. Leveraging support from senior university leaders, the program grew nationally through the Atlantic Coast Conference, serving thousands of Vietnamese youth across multiple regions. Designed for durability, Coach for College continues to operate today under new leadership and has adapted during COVID-19 to maintain continuity via virtual camps.
Parker’s approach to bridging research and practice began at Duke University, where the emphasis on knowledge in the service of society shaped her perspective. Her doctoral training at Harvard included a randomized controlled trial of Coach for College in two provinces in Vietnam. Subsequent postdoctoral appointments at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania allowed her to work on large-scale field experiments involving tens of thousands of students, multi-institution research teams, and interdisciplinary collaborations. She quickly integrated into established teams, learning data, methods, and institutional constraints, and translating complex analyses into actionable insights.
Several of Parker’s research initiatives are now being extended internationally, including adapting interventions focused on social belonging and discipline for secondary schools in the United Kingdom. These projects build on large-scale field experiments conducted at Stanford that span secondary and postsecondary settings. She also collaborates with economists and policy researchers on multi-site studies examining how environmental and institutional factors influence student learning and persistence across educational contexts.
Today, as a Policy Research Scientist at The College Board, Parker operates at the intersection of research, technology, and practice, connecting evidence to decision-making at the system level. Her work draws on longitudinal data covering millions of students and spans the full educational pipeline from secondary preparation through postsecondary enrollment. Current research includes examining college enrollment shifts after the 2023 Supreme Court affirmative action ruling, showing how high-achieving students from historically underrepresented backgrounds were less likely to attend highly selective institutions. Other projects analyze the causal impact of air pollution on student learning, demonstrating that even moderate pollution can disrupt academic performance, particularly for students in more challenging educational environments.
To support these initiatives, Parker has developed close partnerships with engineering teams and fluency in data systems and analytical tools, bridging researchers with those stewarding sensitive student data infrastructures. She has contributed to national collaborations such as the Admissions Research Consortium and helped develop a nationally normed “challenge” metric that contextualizes educational, socioeconomic, and neighborhood-level factors. Parker has also collaborated with professional organizations in law and medicine, integrating historical applicant data with College Board records and creating contextual measures for admissions evaluation.
Parker’s professional success is grounded in mentorship, disciplined curiosity, and an understanding of institutional dynamics. She emphasizes that persistence alone is insufficient—alignment with the right pathways, incentives, and supports is essential for ideas to thrive. Her career demonstrates the ability to integrate into existing systems, assess what works, identify gaps, and contribute in ways that strengthen institutions while translating evidence into effective, equitable policy and practice.
She provides guidance for emerging professionals, particularly young women entering higher education and policy, encouraging strong analytical, quantitative, and writing skills while understanding how institutional contexts shape strategy. Progress in this field requires knowing when to persist, when to pivot, and how to adapt strategies to institutional constraints. Mentorship, curiosity, and critical thinking are essential for long-term success.
A key challenge in education research and policy is the gap between high-quality evidence and institutions’ ability to act upon it. At the same time, unprecedented longitudinal datasets present opportunities to study how policy, context, and institutional design shape outcomes over time. Parker’s work focuses on building pathways to translate evidence into fair, usable, and sustainable decision-making.
Guided by values of bridge-building, honesty, and long-term impact, Parker emphasizes alignment across people, data, and institutions. Her work is dedicated to expanding access to higher education, fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration, and ensuring that evidence informs practice in ways that are responsible, effective, and transformative. Across all her roles, she has consistently translated complex systems and research into actionable insights that empower institutions and improve student outcomes.
Currently, Parker is working on a book and a theory paper that synthesizes her research and founding experiences into a broader framework for understanding how institutions create—or constrain—opportunity.
Through her scholarship, leadership, and innovative programming, Julia Parker Goyer continues to shape the future of education, ensuring that evidence drives meaningful change for students, educators, and policymakers worldwide.
Learn More about Julia Parker Goyer:
Through her Influential Women profile, https://influentialwomen.com/connect/julia-goyer
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