Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword
November 13, 2024
Donald Trump has won a decisive election victory and will take office next year as the 47th president of the United States. As of this writing, his party will hold at least 52 seats in the U.S. Senate and will probably control the House of Representatives. The results should afford President-elect Trump plenty of opportunity to enact…
November 1, 2024
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 11, 2024
The aftermath of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) has put a spotlight on the capriciousness of admissions practices at selective colleges. In SFFA, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. After immense consternation about the impact of the ruling, dire warnings, and earnest discussion about…
October 9, 2024
Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a new statewide ban on legacy admissions. It bars all colleges and universities, public or private, from taking into consideration an applicant’s relationship to alumni or donors after the ban takes effect in September 2025. In a signing statement, Newsom said, “In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through…
October 7, 2024
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…
June 13, 2024
Last month, President Joe Biden bragged about how he forgave another $7 billion in student loans. “The Supreme Court blocked me,” he said, “but they didn’t stop me.” These billions were added to the administration’s tab that already exceeds $400 billion. And that doesn’t count the $500 billion the Supreme Court blocked him from forgiving, or the over $1 trillion he’s effectively trying to…
May 9, 2024
The Biden administration recently announced its most ambitious attempt yet at student debt forgiveness. Taken together with the series of initiatives the administration has already pushed forward, the new plans promise to reduce or eliminate student debt for more than 30 million borrowers. Unfortunately, the debt-cancellation campaign fails to address the underlying problems with student lending — and such efforts at mass forgiveness only…
March 19, 2024
Ideological opposition to “woke” colleges and universities could harm conservatives and rural communities. American’s faith in our colleges and universities has seen a marked decline in recent years, with the percentage of adults who say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the institutions of higher education plunging from 57 percent to…
January 10, 2024
The old federal formula for higher education financial aid is dead. The new formula creates winners and losers. Specifically, the new formula harms middle-class families with more than one child in college at a time. It’s not that the new formula doesn’t take family size into account at all—it does, barely. The issue is that the new formula calculates the total…
September 26, 2023
When I tell people that I write about child welfare and the foster care system, the question I am most often asked is “What can we do about the problem of kids aging out?” “Aging out” is what happens when these teens and young adults — about 40,000 each year — leave foster care without being adopted…