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 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…
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…
August 29, 2024
It’s Time for Radical Reform in Higher Education
There were many years when Republican and Democratic lawmakers weren’t too far apart on higher education policy. Their rhetoric reflected different priorities, but neither party really pushed for a radical departure from the status quo. Debate about reform was largely at the margins. But times have changed. The Overton window on higher education has shifted…
June 27, 2024
New Legal Roadblocks for Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Crusade
Last fall President Biden announced his “Plan B” for student loan cancellation after the Supreme Court ruled his initial efforts unconstitutional. Plan B, named the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan, was an attempt to eliminate the burden of student loans by lessening how much borrowers needed to repay. But this wasn’t in the spirit of…
May 29, 2024
Holding out Hope for a Left-Right Consensus on Federal Student Lending
For as long as we can remember, Republicans and Democrats have been talking past one another when it comes to federal student loan policy. Both sides of the aisle want students from all backgrounds to have access to a valuable and high quality education, but where progressives prioritize federal support, conservatives call for reining in…
April 10, 2024
Biden Irresponsibly Encourages Borrowers to Enroll in SAVE Plan
President Biden is hard at work encouraging student borrowers to enroll in his new SAVE Plan, a de facto loan forgiveness program that faces increasing legal scrutiny. 11 states, led by Kansas, filed a lawsuit. Just recently, Missouri and six other states announced that they would also sue the Biden Administration, bringing the total to 18 states. He…
April 9, 2024
Maddow Spreads Misinformation on Student Loan Cancellation
Last night, progressive television pundit Rachel Maddow took jabs at Republicans concerned with President Biden’s latest effort to cancel student debt. But her jabs were actually sucker punches. She took advantage of the public’s being uninformed on the issue of student debt to spread misinformation, aimed at scoring partisan points and defending Biden’s indefensible vote-buying…
April 9, 2024
Biden Knows Student Loan Cancellation Is a Bad Idea
This morning, President Biden announced new details about the latest effort to cancel student debt that he says will reduce balances or completely cancel student debt for over 30 million Americans. First, he plans to cancel up to $20,000 of accumulated unpaid interest, regardless of the borrowers’ income. Second, the administration plans to automatically cancel debt for…