Member of the Board of Trustees
David A. Croom
David A. Croom is vice president and program officer at JPMorgan Chase, where he is part of the firm’s Global Philanthropy team. He works within the Jobs & Skills pillar, which focuses on expanding economic opportunity and career pathways. In this role, he manages national philanthropic investments in college access, policy, and youth pathways, including support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Before joining JPMorgan Chase, Croom was director of postsecondary success for parents at Ascend at the Aspen Institute. There, he led the Postsecondary Success for Parents Initiative, which encourages higher education leaders to better support student parents and their families by engaging policymakers and promoting innovative, family-centered models.
Previously, Croom served as HBCU lead and higher education designer at Education Design Lab, where he led institutional engagement with the United Negro College Fund’s Career Pathways Initiative. He also spent over four years as a strategy officer at Lumina Foundation’s Washington, D.C., office, focusing on federal policy and postsecondary finance to increase credential attainment.
Earlier in his career, Croom was a policy analyst at ACT, concentrating on federal postsecondary education policy. During graduate school, he worked with PolicyLink on the California Boys and Men of Color Initiative and consulted for the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and California Competes. His first experience in federal policy came as a congressional aide to Rep. Maxine Waters, where he handled education policy, particularly the regulation of for-profit higher education.
Croom serves on the boards of Raise the Barr and Swipe Out Hunger. A native of South Florida, he lives in Washington, D.C. He holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and a bachelor’s degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management, with a minor in political science.