Larry D. Singell

Professor Singell served for 23 years as a faculty member, chair and Associate Dean at the University of Oregon. He served as the Executive Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University from 2010 to 2019 and as the Senior Vice Provost for Resource Management from 2019 to 2025. He returned to the faculty in the LBJ School in August 2025.

Larry Singell has worked extensively in the field of applied labor economics. His research focuses on the role that education plays in labor-market outcomes and the extent to which these investments differentially affect choices and opportunities. Professor Singell’s recent work has studied a wide range of topics from the effects of financial aid programs on access, retention, and graduation to how early background and training effect placement in leadership positions in business, higher education and even in sport franchises. He serves on the Editorial Board of the Economics of Education Review, the leading journal in the economics of education.

He is presently writing a book titled “Good Leadership: Learning from the Inside Out.” The aim of the book is to demonstrate that good leadership is, as Peter Drucker claims, a “liberal art” that requires both the knowledge of a “liberal” education directed at understanding the human condition and the “art” of putting this knowledge into practice. The book contends that these efforts also help leaders to live the good life for themselves and for those who they lead. The material for the book includes short, intellectually digestible chapters that draw from the work of multiple disciplines to show that the practice of good leadership starts at the individual level where our thoughts, actions, and will have the most agency and moves outward through an organization from interpersonal, to team, to the organization as a whole where our agency diminishes.