Asha Banerjee is a policy analyst on CLASP’s Education, Labor, and Worker Justice team. She focuses on expanding access to postsecondary education, workforce training, and employment pathways for nontraditional students who have historically been marginalized in order to advance their economic and social mobility. She is interested in using data and historical analysis to highlight these issues with a racial equity lens.Prior to joining CLASP, Asha was a graduate student in economic history, with a special focus on the consequences and contagion effects of financial crises, at Balliol College in the University of Oxford, U.K. At Balliol, Asha was the Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) representative for her college and worked to increase access and diversity among the student population. She also helped institute the college’s first unconscious bias training for all new graduate students. In her hometown of Denver, Asha was a volunteer with the East Colfax Youth Center at the African Community Center, a nonprofit working with refugee students in the Denver area.Asha holds a master’s degree in economic and social history and earned a mark of distinction on her graduate dissertation. She double majored in economics and history with a minor in classics from Columbia University, where her thesis on the first historical central bank bailout won Columbia’s Garrett Mattingly prize for superior senior thesis.