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Welcome to the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Gutman Library on HGSE campus

Our Mission

The mission of the Harvard Graduate School of Education is to prepare education leaders and innovators who will change the world by expanding opportunities and outcomes for learners everywhere. We’re an institution committed to making the broadest impact possible, putting powerful ideas and evidence-based research into practice.

To do this, we focus on:

  • Preparing education leaders, researchers, and innovators to make a transformative contribution.
  • Generating new discoveries and evidence to create equitable solutions and improve outcomes.
  • Engaging and serving the field through powerful partnerships and collaborations, actionable knowledge-sharing, and meaningful convenings of scholars, leaders, and advocates.  

About HGSE

For more than 100 years, the Harvard Graduate School of Education has prepared talented, passionate individuals to become transformative leaders in education.

Founded in 1920, HGSE is an exceptional and collaborative community of faculty, students, staff, and alumni dedicated to improving lives and expanding opportunities through the comprehensive study and effective practice of education. Through its residential and online master’s degree, doctoral degree, and professional development programs, HGSE cultivates innovative leaders and entrepreneurs, explores the most important questions in education, and shares groundbreaking ideas and best practices with the world.

We are a community of educators in the broadest sense possible — we are teachers, researchers, policymakers, counselors, administrators, nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs, learning designers, innovators, and philanthropists. What binds us together is a passion for improving education through various approaches: from working inside of schools or colleges to leading nonprofit organizations and community initiatives; from focusing on our youngest learners to supporting the needs of adults both in the United States and globally; from concentrating on classroom activities to designing the policies of a state or country.

We believe that research-based education practice and policy have the power to create a more just and prosperous society. Our faculty and students produce groundbreaking research in fields as diverse as the moral development of children, international education policy, organizational leadership, arts and media, and learning design. They also engage in evidence-based practices to support students, schools, organizations, and systems and to enact equitable and collaborative solutions that address today’s problems in education.

Since its inception, the Harvard Graduate School of Education has graduated more than 30,000 students. Our alumni, together with more than 13,000 professional education participants each year, influence the lives of countless others through their work across the field of education — creating the conditions for equity, opportunity, and successful outcomes around the world.