Take a woman from a blue-collar fishing town, then polish her passion for ideas and analysis with three advanced degrees at Boston College, and you might find the right candidate to lead one of the nation’s oldest public policy institutes.
That recipe worked for The Century Foundation, which hired Julie Margetta Morgan ’06 in April 2025 as president of the 107-year-old think tank that was founded by Edward Filene of Boston retailing fame.
Morgan took over TCF several years after serving with the Biden Administration, first as a Deputy Under Secretary at the US Department of Education, working on college loan forgiveness, then as an Associate Director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Now as president of TCF, she has a hand in selecting which issues to elevate, such as the financial insecurity of many American families, the continued concentration of the country’s wealth into a smaller slice of the population, and the difficulty of affording a higher education for many young people. “The piece that’s fun about running one of these organizations is to think how we take the measure of what’s happening in the world and how we drive through all our differences,” said Morgan, 44, who lives with her two children and husband US Magistrate Judge Christopher Morgan, also an ’06 BC Law graduate. She commutes to DC on a regular basis.
“The piece that’s fun about running one of these organizations is to think how we take the measure of what’s happening in the world and how we drive through all our differences.”
Julie Margetta Morgan ’06
To accomplish these goals, Morgan will continue to draw upon her many past experiences. She was analyzing higher education and economic policy through the lens of her Fall River, MA, upbringing even before she enrolled at BC in the Law and Education Dual Degree Program. After earning her bachelor’s degree, she worked with the Pathways to Success program in New Bedford, another fishing community a short drive from Fall River. Morgan was charged with helping financially insecure high school seniors plot careers without the benefit of going to college.
Holding tight to the twin issues of higher education and wealth concentration, Morgan also worked with Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, plus at other public policy institutes, like the Roosevelt Institute and the Center for American Progress. She then received the chance to craft policy about student loan forgiveness with the Department of Education after Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020.
The US Supreme Court in 2023 struck down many of the loan forgiveness provisions that Morgan and others wrote for the Biden Administration. Despite that setback, Morgan said the loan forgiveness policies that did survive helped millions of people save billions of dollars.
She said she still meets people who have benefitted from those programs. Their appreciation makes her feel “very proud.”