The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released the May 2013 baseline cost estimates for the Pell grant and student loan programs. One of the things that jumped out at me was that for 2013 and 2014, the government estimates that it will make more money on student loans than it spends on Pell grants.

Indeed, if the CBO is right, then student loans are now a profit center for the goContinue Reading »

An unusual organization of policy leaders has joined the chorus for higher education reform. Chief state budget officers rarely speak collectively or publicly about higher education—instead focusing on state revenue issues, adjusting budgets in light of revenue surpluses (a rare event of late) or shortfalls, and enacting a budget.

But in a recent report, these state officials spoke out oContinue Reading »

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the Perkins Loan program “provides lowinterest [sic] loans to help needy students finance the costs of postsecondary education.” Pell grants target needy students as well, so the chart below shows the number of students receiving Perkins loans and the number of students receiving Pell grants at a sample of colleges.

The blue line shoContinue Reading »

Our new study, Degrees of Value, explores the returns to investing in college and finds that much more attention should be paid in the vast ranges of outcomes that students experience.

One of my strangest experiences as a researcher is the period of time between when work on a study is finished and when it is released. For me, this timing issue greatly complicates public outreach effortsContinue Reading »

The interest rate “crisis” is heating up again, so now is a good time to revisit the last time this played out (last summer). To refresh your memory, a 2007 law gradually reduced the interest rates on some student loans to 3.4 percent by 2011-12. But rates were scheduled to return to 6.8 percent last summer. The “crisis” began in late April 2012, as proposals to keep rates low began to emerge, Continue Reading »

The accreditation woes of City College of San Francisco are the closest thing higher education has to a soap opera. Like any soap opera, it can be hard to jump in midstream, so here is my recap of the story so far for those of you just joining us:

We are pleased to release Degrees of Value today. This paper aims to provide information on one important aspect of college—the return on investment. While there is certainly more to a college education than the financial payoff, the fact remains that this is an increasingly dominant concern for students. More tahn 80 percent of students now cite “to be able to get a better job” as a very imporContinue Reading »

Guess which major news magazine had this cover headline last week: “Time to Scrap Affirmative Action.” (Note there is no question mark.) In past years, one might have thought it was National Review or The Weekly Standard. Not this time. The story belongs to that well known “right-wing publication,” The Economist.

The Economist’s article discusses a case before the U.S. Supreme Court on tContinue Reading »

A few commenters asked for institutional aid/net tuition maps. Since net tuition (tuition minus grant aid) includes institutional aid/grants, I will focus on net tuition in this post. The one caveat is that per-student aid data is only available for “full-time, first-time degree/certificate-seeking undergraduates,” meaning that this is really an estimate of net tuition for those students. It isContinue Reading »

A paper released recently by the Community College Research Center reminds the champions of MOOCs and other online initiatives of one very important detail: Not all students prefer an online education; many higher education students still want in-person discussions and on-the-spot feedback.

But that’s not to say it will stay that way.

The CCRC paper is based on a small survey of cContinue Reading »