Name: Kai A. Schafft
Title: Professor of Education and Rural Sociology (Educational Leadership Program)
Department: Education Policy Studies
Phone: 814-863-2031
Email: kas45@psu.edu
Office address: 204E Rackley Building
Directory entry: https://ed.psu.edu/directory/dr-kai-schafft
Kai Schafft is professor of education and rural sociology in the College of Education at Penn State based within the Educational Leadership program. He directs the college's Center for Rural Education and Communities and serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Research in Rural Education. Trained as a rural sociologist with his doctorate in development sociology from Cornell University, he conducts research that broadly examines the relationship between social inequality, spatial inequality and rural development. Schafft also has conducted research on rural poverty, student transiency, the determinants of rural childhood obesity, youth aspirations and rural brain drain, and the role of schools in rural community development. More recent work has examined the school and community impacts of unconventional gas development within Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale, as well as education and the contexts for youth development within post-socialist contexts.
During the spring of 2015, Schafft was a Fulbright Fellow at Central European University's Institute for Advanced Studies in Budapest, Hungary, where he conducted research on the social and political implications of Hungary's nationality self-government system for Hungary’s Roma minority. He served in as president of the Rural Sociological Society (2020-22). In 2023-24, on his second awarded Fulbright, he will teach and conduct research on educational access for Roma youth at the Transilvania University of Brasov, in Romania.