Living the good life. Teachers report some of the highest well-being and emotional health, according to a new Gallup index. (The Gallup Blog)

“Something like buried treasure.” There are up to 15 times the number of high-achieving, low-income students than college admissions staff believe, according to a forthcoming paper. (Chalkboard/Brookings Institution)

Bizarre. A man maintaineContinue Reading »

Pressure’s on. About one-third of low-income, high-achieving high school graduates attend selective institutions, according to new research. (New York Times)

This doesn’t bode well. Less than 30 percent of professors who teach MOOCs believe that college credit should be tied to their courses. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

An abandoned school. In 14 slides.  (Philly.com)

As a country, we have (rightly) decided that we want to subsidize education. But does it matter whether we give the money to students to spend or directly to colleges? Yes.

Most of the incentives in the current system encourage a college to spend as much money as possible to try and become a “better” version of itself. To the extent that the methods of becoming “better” are in conflict wContinue Reading »

Legal troubles over state takeover. 101 Birmingham, Ala., school employees, who were either fired to transferred during a state takeover of schools, are suing to get their jobs back. They say the board didn’t approve the job cuts, and that the state superintendent wrongfully stepped in to override its decision. (Birmingham News)

Depressing statistic of the day. “Poor students with practiContinue Reading »

A large-scale study of an economic integration experiment designed to break the link between income and neighborhood found “few detectable long-term effects on achievement and educational outcomes, physical health, and several aspects of risky behavior.” The Moving to Opportunity program recruited 4,600 low-income families and randomly assigned some families a housing voucher to move to lower pContinue Reading »

My last post on the Bennett Hypothesis (the idea that federal financial aid can lead to higher tuition) elicited a comment from “Craigie” which is worth addressing. After acknowledging that aid (GradPLUS loans) does lead to higher tuition for law schools, Craigie declares that it is “the exception that proves the rule: the Bennett hypothesis is false.” This tendency to discount mixed evidence iContinue Reading »

Defining school down. Virginia has a lot of work to do as it revises its new standards. “Setting passing rates for black and Hispanic students far below the cutoff scores for white and Asian students is deplorable.” (Richmond Times Dispatch)

Persistence, and the lack of. Only 9 percent of low-income students get a bachelor’s degree by age 24. Why? (American RadioWorks)

Delinquent Continue Reading »

Photo Credit: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Yesterday, you approved an amendment sponsored by Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) to ensure postsecondary credits earned through early colleges would be earned “at no cost to students or their families.” This ensures low-income students would have free access to early colleges as part of the new Pathways to College grant program in theContinue Reading »

On Fox and Friends last Saturday, the president of Belmont University criticized early college high schools for “watering down the process” because “high schools have a role, they should play that role; and universities have a role.”

Unfortunately, this type of status quo thinking can impede innovations that help our neediest students.  Early college high schools were designed specificalContinue Reading »

Last week’s release of Academically Adrift has caused a stir in the higher education community because of its claim that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.” But one of the book’s overlooked findings is that students who receive grants as their primary form of financial aid learn more than students who receive mostly loans.  Continue Reading »