Harold J. Noah

Harold J. Noah (born 1925) is an American educator, whose research and writing have focused on comparative education and economics of education. He was born in London, England and moved to the United States in 1958. His higher education began at the London School of Economics and King’s College, University of London, and was followed by a Ph.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University. He served as Professor at Teachers College, Columbia, from 1964 to 1987. He was appointed to the Gardner Cowles chair in economics of education. He served as Dean of the College from 1976 to 1981. He is widely recognized as a distinguished authority in the field of comparative education.

In studies of Soviet education in the 1960s and 1970s Noah dealt primarily with the economic and public finance aspects of schools and higher education in that country. In his teaching he espoused the use of what were at the time increasingly accepted concepts of human capital and rates of return to examine the nature and extent of private and public investments in education and training, in both market and command economies.

From the mid-1960s onward, Noah advocated the use of empirical social science methods in comparative education. Much of this work was done in collaboration with his long-standing coauthor, Max A. Eckstein. This collaboration began with “Toward A Science of Comparative Education”, which described and critiqued the development over time of methods of comparing national systems of education. The book sounded a powerful call for the application of positivist methods in comparative education studies.

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