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:

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 »

One of the comments on last week’s post asked for a map of tuition. Below are maps of the enrollment-weighted, average tuition by state for (1) all colleges, (2) four-year colleges, and (3) two-year colleges.

There is a lot of interesting information buried in these maps, but three things jumped out at me.

First, tuition tends to be highest inContinue Reading »

As a graduate of The College of William and Mary (master’s of public policy, 2008), I was disappointed to read about the school’s adoption of the so-called “high-tuition, high-aid” financial model. Proponents claim that this model helps institutions target resources to low-income students, but that goal fails when low-income students are scared off by high sticker prices and when institutions rContinue Reading »

My paper, Selling Students Short, released on March 20, 2013, examined teaching loads among tenured and tenure-track faculty. I relied on teaching load data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Data Analysis System (DAS). After publication of the paper, further investigation revealed that the teaching load data I used was incorrect.

Specifically, the 1987-88 DAS output for the “mean” Continue Reading »