Welcome to Our Research Archive
Search and filter by content type, issue area, author, and keyword
- ✕ Clear Filter
- Artificial Intelligence (12)
- Child Tax Credit (9)
- Cost of Living (1)
- Deaths of Despair (1)
- Early Childhood (1)
- Earned Income Tax Credit (1)
- Economic Opportunity and Mobility (20)
- Economic Well-Being (28)
- Education (32)
- Election (1)
- Family (1)
- Family affordability (1)
- Featured (62)
- Fraud (1)
- Gender Gap (2)
- higher education (16)
- Housing (4)
- Immigration (2)
- Income (2)
- Innovation (1)
- Intergenerational Mobility (1)
- Kevin Corinth (1)
- Labor Market (3)
- Marriage (1)
- marriage penalties (1)
- opportunity (6)
- poverty (4)
- Regulation (2)
- Remote Work (2)
- Safety Net (6)
- SNAP (7)
- Social Capital (6)
- Society and Culture (4)
- State Policy (1)
- Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (1)
- Tax & Transfer Policies (3)
- technology (3)
- Technology and Innovation (4)
- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) (1)
- Unemployment (3)
- Unemployment Insurance (10)
- Urban policy (1)
- Welfare (9)
- Workforce (5)
- Workforce Development (14)
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 If a recent Wall Street Journal story is any indication, though, that classic joke may soon be outdated.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 11, 2024
US Students Best Other Nations—in Achievement Gap Growth
US scores on the 2023 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are another sign not only that American students are losing ground in math and science, but that the achievement gap between high-performers and low-performers has grown dramatically. As I wrote a couple days ago, these trends started well before the pandemic and are…
December 9, 2024
TIMSS Shows the Bottom Is Falling Out for US Test Scores
Last week’s release of 2023 scores from the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)—an international assessment measuring fourth and eighth graders in math and science—offers a fresh look at the academic performance of US and international students. The results are grim. Three things stand out. First (and perhaps not surprisingly), the pandemic harmed student…
November 21, 2024
A Consensus on Common-Sense Education Reform
Is common ground possible in an age of extreme polarization? Perhaps! “Toward a Potential Grand Bargain for the Nation” is a new report by a group of experts from think tanks and academia meant to share consensus “policies in each of these areas: economic growth and mobility; education; environment; health; taxes; and the federal budget.”…
November 19, 2024
We Aren’t Testing Students on the Computer Skills They Actually Need
The results of the 2023 International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) were just released. ICILS is given to a sample of eighth-grade students and is supposed to measure their ability to use information and communications technology. Including the United States, 35 education systems worldwide participated in the study of “computer and information literacy,” while a subset…
November 12, 2024
The National Assessment of Educational Progress Recompete: Is It Real Change or Lipstick on a Pig?
Key Points Read the PDF. The American government runs on contracts between government agencies and private companies (both for- and not-for-profit).1 When things go awry, it is often because a long-term incumbent contractor lacked the incentive to provide more cost-effective services or accountability for a poor product, both of which have been made clear by the…
November 12, 2024
Government Contracting for “America’s Report Card” Is Broken
If you tried to apply for federal student aid this 2024–2025 school year, you would have been met with a glitch-filled online form created using 40-year-old code, released three months behind schedule, and that might have arrived too late for a college to offer you the aid you applied for. This failure of the Education Department and…
November 8, 2024
It’s Time for Conservatives to Reclaim Our Place in Ed Reform
As the results of the election came into focus Tuesday night, Chuck Todd made a keen observation on NBC: Republicans’ biggest gains among Hispanic voters came in Florida and Texas, states that “have been very aggressive about expanding school choice.” That’s not a coincidence. Conservatives have long understood that school choice is a winning issue, especially in…
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…