Michael Goldstein

Managing Director   
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Michael Goldstein is a Managing Director for Tyton Partners in the strategy consulting practice.

Mike Goldstein has a long history of close engagement with higher education. He was the founding Director of New York City Urban Corps, the nation’s first large-scale student intern program designed to support access for less affluent students through the use of the Federal Work Study Program. He went on to lead a Ford Foundation-supported effort to establish similar programs in cities across the U.S. He returned to New York City government as Assistant City Administrator and Director of University Relations. From there Mike joined the then-new University of Illinois Chicago campus as Associate Vice Chancellor for Urban Affairs and Associate Professor of Urban Sciences. In 1978, Mike joined the Washington, DC law firm of Dow Lohnes to establish a new legal practice focusing broadly on issues confronting higher education.

By 2014 when his firm merged with the global law firm Cooley LLP, the higher education practice he headed was the largest and one of the highest regarded in the country. Mike has been a pioneer in the development of alternative mechanisms and institutional structures for the delivery of high quality postsecondary education, including helping to accomplish substantial regulatory reforms that made telecommunicated and then online learning broadly available. He is the recipient of the WCET Richard Jonsen Award, CAEL’s Morris Keeton Ward, the President’s Medal from Excelsior College, and USDLA’s Distance Learning Hall of Fame Award, as well as an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Fielding Graduate University for his contributions to the field of adult learning. 

He is a graduate of Cornell University and New York University School of Law, and was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He and his spouse Jinny, an education and media consultant and former head of education for the Public Broadcasting Service, live in Washington, DC.

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