Back in the heady days of 2007, lawmakers began agitating about the massive asset accumulation occurring in the endowments of colleges and universities. While threats of making schools spend at least 5 percent of their accumulated assets (the same requirement faced by other charitable foundations) ultimately prompted some expansions of student financial aid, the subsequent [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Low Income Students'
A Light Breeze of Change for Flagships
The hot higher education paper du jour is yesterday’s report from Education Trust, “Opportunity Adrift,” which takes a hard look at the financial aid and enrollment policies of public flagship institutions. Similar to a 2006 study on the same subject, the report’s authors are highly critical of public flagships, noting that “though they are subsidized [...]
How the Office Got Financial Aid Policy Right
In its continued quest for topicality this season, The Office turned to the issue of college tuition for its episode last Thursday. In a sequence so awkward that even Larry David would cringe, Michael Scott (Steve Carell) had to explain to a room full of high school seniors that he would not be able to [...]
The Limits of Financial Aid Policies
The halftime festivities of many big-time college basketball games feature a contest in which one student gets the opportunity to sink a halfcourt shot or series of shots for a chance to win a car or some other large prize. Paying off a winning prize is expensive, but the organizer doesn’t really have to worry [...]
Dianne Piché on "Plotting School Choice"
If advocates for children were able to draw school district boundaries anew, nobody in their right mind would configure them with the high levels of inefficiency, inequality and segregation we find today in states like California and Texas (included in the study) and others like New Jersey, Connecticut and Ohio. Education Sector’s report on interdistrict [...]
Fact Check
The New York Times, April 20, 2008:
The number of low-income students at top institutions is still fairly low but is growing. The share of Harvard undergraduates receiving Pell grants rose to 13 percent this year, from 10 percent in 2003-4. At Amherst, over the same span, the number has risen to 18 percent from 15 [...]
Choices
Ezra Klein writes about the new, disappointing Reading First results, and concludes:
It would be good if we could really nail down what works in education. But my conclusion, increasingly, is that the best thing you could do for poor kids’ educational prospects is increase their parents’ economic prospects. That’s not to say either exists in [...]
The Coin of the Realm
David Leonhardt turns in an unsatisfactory cover story in the Times Education Life supplement today about recent high-profile moves by elite universities to offer more generous financial aid to low- and middle-income students. Its starts with a dramatic moment in 2003, set in one of higher education’s iconic spaces, the Thomas Jefferson-designed Rotunda of the [...]
Shafting Poor Students in Higher Education
There’s been a fair amount of analysis in recent years about the various ways that low-income students are getting short-changed by higher education financial aid systems, with both states and individual institutions devoting a larger percentage of financial aid dollars to so-called “merit aid” programs that disproportionately benefit well-off students, i.e. those who need the [...]
Ask And You Shall Receive
Last week, I asked whether there were any colleges with unique strategies for controlling tuition and aiding students, but without the help of a gigantic endowment. Lo and behold, Inside HigherEd reports on Blackburn College, a small, private college in Illinois (chances are this school is off the NYT’s radar), that is trying to do [...]
Everyone is Wrong About Vouchers
Both Ezra Klein and Megan McCardle post about vouchers today, and both are wrong, albeit in completely different ways. Megan says:
I very rarely get angry about politics. But every time I see some middle class parent prattling about vouchers “destroying” the public schools by “cherry picking” the best students, when they’ve made damn sure that [...]
Terrible PhD Completion Rates
Richard Vedder is at least two standard deviations more conservative than I am on most issues, but his higher education blog is a consistent source of sharp commentary and outside-the-box thinking. Yesterday he discussed abolishing tuition at Harvard; today’s topic is the shocking state of PhD completion:
A half century ago, it was common for persons [...]
The Greatest Good
As a first-day intern at Education Sector with minimal background experience in the field of education policy, yesterday’s Center for American Progress/Century Foundation forum on “The Future of School Integration” offered me an interesting glimpse into the current state of debate about school integration. Most of the panelists, including John Brittain (a veteran civil [...]
Help for High Performing Schools
The Washington Post ran an article today on how students in Montgomery County, Maryland did on the state’s High School Assessment (HSA), which for the first time is being used as a high-stakes exit exam for this year’s sophomore class. The good news is that the school system plans to implement special programs at low-performing [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.