November 1, 2024
Latest Student Loan Cancellation Proposal Could Be Biggest Yet
The Biden administration unveiled its fourth major student loan cancellation scheme last week. While the administration’s past three cancellation plans have suffered defeats in the courts, officials apparently hope that things will be different this time. The new plan offers loan cancellation to borrowers experiencing “hardship.” If you’re wondering what “hardship” means, so am I. It is…
October 25, 2024
How Workforce Education Can Boost Earnings and Fill Jobs
Republicans and Democrats alike agree about the importance of workforce training. They’re right: Despite a recent labor-market cooling, there are still 7.7 million unfilled jobs in the United States. Unfortunately, America’s workforce-education system is a patchwork of dubious efficacy. Workforce programs are underfunded, tangled in red tape, and often fail to achieve their goals. Fixing this is hard: There’s…
October 23, 2024
The College Enrollment Plunge Is the Biden Administration’s Disaster
The number of first-year students on America’s college campuses dropped five percent this fall, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s new enrollment estimates. The drop—which reverses last year’s four percent increase in freshman enrollment—is directly attributable to the Education Department’s bungled launch of a new financial aid application form, which prevented hundreds of thousands of students…
October 10, 2024
Do Liberal Arts Colleges Pay Off? What the Data Say
Going to a liberal arts college is usually an expensive way to get a bachelor’s degree. With students more mindful of high tuition, many liberal arts colleges are seeing enrollment drop—and some are closing altogether. The schools’ defenders argue that their small class sizes and well-rounded array of courses provide students with a strong foundation on…
October 7, 2024
Has Kamala Harris Given Up on “College for All”?
In 2009, then-President Obama made a bold proposal: “By 2020, this nation will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” His administration then pursued a slew of policies to boost college attendance, including fatter tuition tax credits, a larger Pell Grant, and free tuition at community colleges. Echoing Obama, over the next several…
October 3, 2024
Six Ideas to Fix Higher Education in 2025
America will have a new president and a new Congress in 2025, and with that change comes the opportunity to rethink federal policy towards higher education. The federal approach suffers from many problems, but the core one is that federal subsidies indiscriminately fund traditional colleges, regardless of their financial value, and shortchange promising alternatives, such…
October 2, 2024
Higher Education: Making Education Beyond High School Work for All
Executive Summary and Introduction: For generations, society has told high school students that college is a great investment. The case is familiar: college graduates typically earn more money than their peers without degrees, and a college education is necessary for the 21st century labor market. For low-income students especially, college has been sold as a…
September 16, 2024
A Pyrrhic Victory Against Student Loan Default
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has published a new report on federal student loan repayment, and the picture isn’t pretty. Six years after first entering repayment on their loans, over half of borrowers owe more than they did when they started repayment. This disappointing fact is partially the result of a program that, ironically, was meant to…
September 11, 2024
After Decades of Competitive Admissions, Getting into College Has Finally Become Easier
High school seniors fretting over whether they’ll receive a college acceptance letter can sleep a little easier. College admissions rates, which had been declining for decades, are now on the upswing. Indeed, most colleges now accept a greater share of their applicants today than they did twenty years ago. Until recently, rising admissions rates were far…