Senior Trustee, Yale Board of Trustees
Catharine Bond Hill is managing director of Ithaka S&R, ITHAKA. For the past ten years, Hill served as president of Vassar College. She is a noted economist, whose research focuses on the affordability of and access to higher education, as well as on economic development and reform in Africa.
After graduating summa cum laude from Williams College, Hill earned B.A. and M.A. degrees at Brasenose College, University of Oxford, with first-class honors in politics, philosophy, and economics. She completed her Ph.D. in economics at Yale in 1985. At the start of her career, she worked for the World Bank and the Fiscal Analysis Division of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. Prior to her Vassar presidency, Hill served as provost of Williams College, where she had chief academic and financial officer responsibilities. She originally joined the economics faculty at Williams in 1985. Hill lived in the Republic of Zambia, where she was the fiscal/trade advisor and then head of the Harvard Institute for International Development’s Project on Macroeconomic Reform, working in the Ministry of Finance and with the Bank of Zambia. Hill has received scholarly awards, grants, and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Brookings Institution, National Science Foundation, and Social Science Research Council, among other organizations. In 2011 she joined the board of Yale–NUS College, Singapore’s first liberal arts college. Hill previously served on the Yale board of trustees as an alumni fellow. She was named a successor trustee and senior trustee in 2018.