About
Dr. Kayla C. Elliott is a lifelong nerd who turned a love of reading and learning into a career as a writer, researcher, and advocate.
Personally, Kayla is a loving daughter, a caring sister, a doting aunt, and a loyal friend. She lives in DC where she enjoys eating, dancing, cooking, and exploring activities and festivals around the nation’s capitol.
Kayla is an avid bookworm. Her favorite genre is fiction, including literary fiction like Bernice McFadden’s Sugar, young adult literature like the Legacy of Orisha and Harry Potter series, and sci-fi like Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. In recent years, Kayla also developed an affinity for theory such as Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought and Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.
As a budding writer, Kayla has published a number of academic pieces, included a co-authored book, book chapters, and journal articles. She has also published social and political commentary in essays, blogs, and op eds. Kayla occasionally blogs on life and culture on this site, and is exploring her creative voice through memoir and fiction. She hopes to publish a fictionalized narrative of the case study in her dissertation that allows a broad audience to understand issues of race, power, politics, and policy in higher education and the the treatment of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
Professionally, Kayla is Director of Higher Education policy at the Education Trust. Ed Trust is a national nonprofit that works towards educational equity students of color and students from low-income families through our research and advocacy. Before leading the team of analysts, Kayla primarily worked on state and federal accountability issues such as consumer protection, institutional funding equity, and student success.
Prior to Ed Trust, Kayla worked as a research assistant at Florida Atlantic University, where she earned a Ph.D. in higher education leadership. Her dissertation and much of her work examined the influence of performance-based funding systems on HBCUs. At FAU, Kayla served as a member of the Urban Male Initiative research team and as associate research director for ADVANCE FAU, a National Science Foundation-supported initiative focused on eliminating institutional barriers for women and minority STEM faculty.
The daughter and granddaughter of career educators, Kayla continued their legacy as she taught undergraduate courses on leadership, diversity, and student success, and served as a teaching assistant for graduate courses on qualitative research methods and philanthropy.
Kayla holds a master’s degree from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Over the last 10 years, she has worked with a range of nonprofit education organizations, including Lumina Foundation, the Southern Education Foundation, and Teach For America.
A proud third generation HBCU alumna, Kayla earned a B.S. in business administration from Fisk University, where her experience serving as a student representative on the university’s board of trustees piqued her interest in higher education advocacy.