The Board of Directors and staff of MDRC mourn the passing of Howard Rosen, a leader in the field of labor economics, who died on May 8 at the age of 99. Howard was, in many ways, responsible for the birth of the employment and training field, then formally called manpower. He was also one of the main actors in the creation of MDRC (then called the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation). As the Director of the Office of Research and Development in the Department of Labor’s Manpower Administration, he led the consortium of six federal agencies that joined with the Ford Foundation to found MDRC in 1974.

In his role at the Department of Labor, Howard helped build the fields of labor and manpower economics by offering doctoral dissertation fellowships to draw promising students from the nation’s most prominent economics departments to study labor markets and employment programs; by using an institutional grants program to seed the creation of university-based master’s degree programs to train administrators and policy analysts to lead the emerging employment and training programs for the disadvantaged; and by pioneering the use of rigorous evidence, including research and demonstration projects that used random assignment research designs to reliably learn what programs were working for what target populations.  

Under his leadership, the Office of Research and Development became the prototype for the modern federal department of research and development that evaluates existing programs, supports basic research to identify existing and future problems warranting government intervention, and rigorously demonstrates the potential of new program approaches, all while maintaining its independence and the right to publish of the research organizations it funds.

Howard was a great teacher both in and out of government, having been associated with Brandeis University, George Washington University, and American University. He was also a respected peer and confidant of nearly every Secretary of Labor and many Assistant Secretaries of Labor during his tenure at the Office of Research and Development.

On behalf of MDRC, I want to celebrate the life of Howard Rosen, whose many contributions to labor policy and research live on — not least of all in the work that we do every day at MDRC.