Franklin Eccher

Franklin is a second-year Joint doctoral student in Education and History at Penn where he was awarded the prestigious Berkowitz Fellowship. Berkowitz Fellows receive a joint Ph.D. in Education and History, the only funded joint degree between a school of education and a history department in the United States. At Penn, Franklin is studying the history of American higher education, with a focus on liberal education and the experimental college movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following graduation from Yale College, Franklin worked in Alaska where he designed programs for Outer Coast, an emergent postsecondary institution that is reimagining higher education in Alaska for Alaskans. He is passionate about college access for students historically underserved by American higher education, and about rethinking higher education writ-large to prioritize student agency and to give students the purpose, tools, and hope necessary to create better communities and a better world. At Yale, Franklin received the Gaylord Donnelley Prize for his senior thesis on the environmental history of fly fishing in the Mountain West. For his senior capstone project for Education Studies he conducted a qualitative study of selective college admissions officers’ efforts to boost geographic diversity on their campuses.