Assistant Professor Kaitlyn Sims on Policy, Purpose, and Preparing Students to Make an Impact

The Korbel professor on heavy topics, sustainable careers, and the question she asks every student who wants their work to mean something.

For years, Dr. Kaitlyn Sims assumed her high school's ban on shorts from October through April was just a strict dress code. Only later did she learn it was a quiet welfare measure, meant to make sure all kids were dressed warmly enough for the winter, and looking out for students whose parents might not have been. That idea of looking past the surface of a rule and asking who it actually serves is the kind of thinking that inspires her work today.

With a background in economics, Sims brings her skill set to subjects that traditional economists often don't address: domestic violence, housing insecurity, jails, and the emotional toll of poverty. Those topics can feel far removed from a field like economics, but her role at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs allows her to apply the discipline through a policy lens, giving her room to apply her training to tough issues that benefit from it.

Before finding her way to Korbel, Sims knew she wanted to teach but didn’t see herself in a traditional economics department. Her interests were too interdisciplinary, and her methods were too varied to fit into the mold of a traditional economist. Conveniently, Korbel was looking for an economist who thought about the world from a policy angle. The fit was immediate. It let her build a career around one guiding question: "What are the pressing policy challenges that I want to have an impact on?”

However, choosing meaningful problems is only half of it. Economists tend to chase the questions their data can already answer, and Sims is wary of that pull. Her work on jails is a case in point. Most incarceration research focuses on prisons, where the data is cleaner, even though most people who touch the criminal legal system pass through a jail, not a prison. With collaborators in the Jail Justice Initiative, she studies what they call "jailization," the way the wider carceral system has reorganized itself around the jail as its first point of contact. Jails are their own kind of environment, she points out: stays are short, the population is always turning over, and the services attached to them look nothing like a prison's. More recently, the group has traced the historical roots of jailization and the part that cash bail and bond systems play in keeping people there.

In addition to her work on jails, Sims founded the SHAPE Lab (Systems, Housing, and Anti-Violence Policy Evaluation) in 2024, a home for her policy evaluation work and a place to train graduate researchers. The lab studies how people make decisions under conditions of poverty, domestic violence, and instability, and tests whether the policies meant to help them actually do. Its projects run across much of the social safety net, from emergency domestic violence shelters to the Earned Income Tax Credit, Section 8 housing vouchers, public insurance, and Housing First. The recurring question is whether a given program changes the choices available to someone in crisis, and by how much.

The same concern with measurement is a focal point of her upcoming book, expected in. It asks what happens when metrics-driven policymaking meets services that cannot be measured that way, with domestic violence shelters as its central case. Most abuse goes unreported, handled privately or through confidential services, so the data funders rely on captures only a sliver of the problem.

On reform, she rejects the usual either/or. Radical change and marginal improvement are not a choice between two camps, she argues, but two processes that have to happen at once. "Big radical change is hard, and it's lumpy, and it takes a really long time." Marginal change is what makes the world better while that larger shift is underway. Just as important, she says, is not trying to be an army of one. You make a change in your area and see yourself as part of a larger movement.

That same philosophy shapes how she teaches. As director of Korbel's Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy, Sims mentors students who arrive wanting to change the world but lacking the tools to make it happen. She treats the study of public policy as the applied toolset to make a real difference: break a problem into its root causes, its limits, its levers, then ask what you can actually do, locally or nationally, large or small.

Her advice for students who want a career that means something starts with a question: What are the nouns you're thinking of? A student who says they want to work in criminal justice gets a list back: attorney, judge, corrections officer, youth court advocate, courtroom navigator, housing navigator for people leaving prison, so the abstract goal becomes something concrete enough to picture. Ruling the paths a student doesn’t want to take matters just as much as finding what lights their fire. An internship that turns out to be a bad fit can be as clarifying as one that clicks. Then comes the honest part: if the thing you choose is heavy, how will you build the stamina to do it for the long haul? "I can't do everything," she tells them, "but I can do that, and that's what really matters for me."