Amrit Thapa

Amrit Thapa is a senior lecturer in the International Educational Development Program at Penn GSE. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Sri Sathya Sai University, India, and M.Phil. and Ph.D. in economics and education from Columbia University. Dr. Thapa is also a consultatnt to UNESCO Institute of Statistics and an affiliated researcher for the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Penn GSE; co-founder of UNNAT Nepal, a non-profit organization; and vice president and representative to the United Nations for the Institute of Global Education (IGE), an NGO that has consultative status with the Economic & Social Council of the United Nations. In 2019, Dr. Thapa was honored with the Penn GSE Excellence in Teaching Award.

Dr. Thapa’s current research focuses on economics of education, education program evaluation/monitoring and evaluation, studies of privatization and marketization of education in developing countries, the relationship between education and economic development, higher education, school climate, and education policy. As the vice-president of the Institute of Global Education, he has led a project exploring the use of online education for teaching the English language and computer literacy in Nepal. This project was awarded the best field initiative by the South Asia SIG at the annual conference of Comparative and International Society in 2018. Besides South Asia, Dr. Thapa’s research spans Latin American countries as well. He was awarded a research grant by the Global Engagement Fund at Penn as the principal investigator along with Dr. Jere Behrman (Co-PI) from the Department of Economics at Penn’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In this mixed methods research project, Dr. Thapa and team, in collaboration with researchers at Grupo de Análisis para el Desarrollo (GRADE), examined the economic and equity aspects of marketization of higher education in Peru. Dr. Thapa is also involved in a number of school climate/socio-emotional learning related research works, particularly in the development and validity and reliability studies of school climate assessment tools.