Samuel Abrams is a senior research fellow at the University of Turku as well as the director of the International Partnership for the Study of Educational Privatization, anchored at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 2026-27, he is collaborating with Rauno Huttunen in piloting a version of Columbia University's Core Curriculum course in philosophy at the University of Turku, listed as Seminar in Moral and Political Philosophy (KATO 0112-3001). Abrams is the author of Education and the Commercial Mindset (Harvard University Press, 2016; paperback, 2018), an analysis of the impact of market forces on public education in the United States and abroad. He was previously a high school history teacher for 18 years and has since taught graduate courses in the economics and politics of education at Columbia as well as undergraduate courses in philosophy as part of the Core Curriculum faculty at Columbia. He has written on matters of education policy for The New Republic, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, and Political Science Quarterly, ​​​​​​​among other publications. In 2022-23, he served as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Turku. For his advancement of the understanding of Finnish education in the United States, he was made a Knight, First Class, Order of the Lion of Finland, by the Finnish government in 2014. His recent research projects include a study funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center and published in 2023 concerning the impact of vouchers and tuition tax-credit scholarships on public school budgets. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Columbia.