W. Steven Barnett  W. Steven Barnett is a U.S. American education economist who currently serves as a Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers University, where - being one of its founders - he also directs the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). He is one of the world's leading scholars on early child development and the economics of pre-schools. Steven Barnett earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is working at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education as a Board of Governors Professor and co-directs the National Institute for Early Education Research, which he has founded. In parallel, he also works as Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and the National Education Policy Center. He is also a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group at the University of Chicago. Steven Barnett's research focuses on the impact and economics of early care and education programmes, with a special focus on the Perry preschool and Abecedarian Early Intervention Project. With regard to the impact of the Perry Preschool Program, he finds that the net present value of the programme is positive due to increased earnings, reduced social welfare costs, delinquency and crime costs, and childcare costs, and that its benefits to taxpayers increased its cost. 20 years later, Barnett has been able to confirm the maintenance of these effects, confirming that preschooling strongly increased the lifetime earnings and decreased the criminal activity of recipients, yielding enormously positive social and private returns on investment (e.g. benefits to the general public, assuming a 3% discount rate, already amount to $12.90 per dollar invested); the by far largest share of the programme's social gain accrues due to the reduction in male crime rates (with Milagros Nores, Clive R. Belfield and Lawrence Schweinhart). Overall, Barnett and Belfield highlight the potential of increased preschool investments for the improvement of social mobility, though they emphasize that the potential is strongly tied to the quality of preschool programmes, including highly qualified teachers and small group sizes in preschool.