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April 17, 2025
Turn Public Service Loan Forgiveness into a State Block Grant
As Congress negotiates a bill to overhaul the federal budget, lawmakers looking to save money should note $30 billion in potential savings hiding in plain sight. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, which fully discharges the student loans of borrowers who work for the government or a nonprofit for 10 years, is one of…
April 8, 2025
Could A Higher Endowment Tax Pressure Elite Schools To Expand?
Congressional Republicans are considering a significant hike in the excise tax on the endowments of rich universities as part of a broader tax reform effort. Most private universities with more than $500,000 in endowment assets per student are subject to a 1.4 percent excise tax on their net investment income. Some Republicans have proposed raising that tax rate to…
March 25, 2025
Less Than Half of Student Borrowers Are Paying Their Loans
Student loan payments have been due for six months now—yet no one seems to have told the students. The federal government effectively suspended payments on student loans for four and a half years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, leading many borrowers to lose touch with their loan servicers and disengage from the repayment system. False promises of loan cancellation…
March 13, 2025
The Return To Student Loan Repayment, In Four Charts
In March 2020, the federal government enacted a “temporary” pause on student loan repayment, which the Trump and Biden administrations extended a grand total of eight times. But as of October 2024, loan repayment has officially resumed—meaning borrowers who miss payments will face consequences such as negative credit reports. As of September 2024—the latest month…
January 23, 2025
Four College Enrollment Trends to Watch
The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) published its biannual report on college enrollment trends this morning, providing a comprehensive look at how student numbers totaled up in fall 2024. NSC’s preliminary figures, released in October, initially reported a significant drop in college freshman enrollment. That finding, however, was the result of a data error; this morning’s release of the…
January 6, 2025
Congress Can Block Student Loan Cancellation—Forever
Over the holiday season, the Biden administration withdrew two pending regulations to unilaterally cancel hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of student loans. Officials evidently judged that the administration would not have time to finalize and implement the new regulations before the Trump administration takes over. For the time being, loan cancellation by executive action is dead. But a…
December 18, 2024
Employers Should Drop Hiring Preferences for “Elite 34” Colleges
How do you know if someone went to Harvard? They’ll tell you. If a recent Wall Street Journal story is any indication, though, that classic joke may soon be outdated. According to the Journal, some employers have dropped hiring preferences for graduates of elite universities—and a few even consider an Ivy League degree a black mark. The cases…
December 3, 2024
How States Can Shake Up the Stagnant Higher Education Market
Artificial barriers to entry have been a feature of markets for millennia, from medieval guilds to modern occupational licenses. Though often defended on the basis of consumer protection, barriers which keep new providers of a good or service out of the market also serve to protect incumbent businesses, hamstring innovation, and increase prices. Such barriers…
November 25, 2024
Don’t Write Off Workforce Pell Grants
Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, a former administrator of the Small Business Administration, is a proponent of expanding Pell Grants to short-term workforce education programs. In a September op-ed, McMahon boosted the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, which would allow students to use Pell Grants for high-quality workforce education programs as short as eight weeks in duration (the…
November 20, 2024
End Federal Loans for Graduate School
President-elect Donald Trump and his top advisors have announced plans to create a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a commission tasked with slashing wasteful spending throughout the federal budget. One place they could start is the federal student loan program. The federal government loses tens of billions of dollars per year on lending to graduate students, a…