Xueli Wang

Dr. Xueli Wang (pronounced similar to “Shoo-lee Wong”) is the Barbara and Glenn Thompson Endowed Professor in Educational Leadership at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She teaches graduate courses on community colleges, mixed methods research, and assessment in higher education. With a focus on community colleges and postsecondary STEM education, her program of research examines educational practices, structures, and policies that promote students’ holistic well-being and equitable access, experiences, and outcomes. With expertise in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodological approaches, Dr. Wang’s work spans a range of specific topics, including students’ success and mental health, transfer trajectories, faculty development, teaching and learning, and educational change and innovation. She has secured over $10 million in research funding and frequently collaborates with community colleges to implement holistic support strategies that foster student success.
Dr. Wang is the author of On My Own: The Challenge and Promise of Building Equitable STEM Transfer Pathways (Harvard Education Press, 2020), which received the 2021 Publication of the Year Award from the American Educational Research Association’s Postsecondary Education Division. This book highlights both students’ high motivation and assets, as well as the disparities they face due to systemic barriers, and issues a call for action toward equitable transfer pathways. Dr. Wang’s latest book, Delivering Promise: Equity-Driven Educational Change and Innovation in Community and Technical Colleges (Harvard Education Press, 2024), advances a new vision of community and technical colleges as powerful engines of both innovation and equity. Her research has also been widely published in top-tier journals across both specialized and broader fields of education, including American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, Teachers College Record, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Journal of Higher Education, Review of Higher Education, Research in Higher Education, and Community College Review.
Among her numerous accolades, Dr. Wang is the recipient of the Transfer Champion-Catalyst Award from the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students (2021), the Barbara Townsend Lecture Award from the Association for the Study of Higher Education (2020), the Faculty Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education (2020), and six Teacher of the Year awards from her department at UW–Madison. In 2025, Dr. Wang earned the Senior Scholar Award from the Council for the Study of Community Colleges. In the same year, she was inducted as an American Educational Research Association (AERA) Fellow.