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July 15, 2024

It Is Time to Set Goals for Cutting Chronic Absenteeism

Believe it or not, the 2024–25 school year will begin in some parts of the country in less than a month, and students will return to school. Whether they return to school consistently is the most important question at the opening of this school year. Whether schools, districts, and states make chronic absenteeism their top…

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…

May 23, 2024

Biden’s Unending Student Loan Forgiveness Run

On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced $7.7 billion in student debt cancellation for about 161,000 borrowers, equating to about $48,000 per borrower. Compared to what has already been spent on loan forgiveness since the pandemic began, that’s an enormous drop in a gargantuan bucket. AEI’s Student Debt Forgiveness Tracker, which I run, tracks all student loan revenue from…

May 6, 2024

How Much Are You Willing to Spend on Student Loan Forgiveness?

Last Wednesday, the Biden administration announced $6.1 billion in student debt cancellation for over 300,000 borrowers who attended the Art Institutes, a defunct network of for-profit colleges that, according to the Department of Education, defrauded borrowers. This cancellation is generous—all borrowers, regardless of their current economic circumstances, who attended the Art Institutes between 2004 and 2017 will have their…

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 3, 2024

Feds Should Take a Big Step Back on Student Loans

The federal student loan program has gone off the rails. What was first designed as a program to alleviate the liquidity problem students face when paying for college is now an out-of-control entitlement program that rewards students for spending as much as possible on higher education, causing tuition costs to skyrocket in turn. Biden’s reforms…

March 11, 2024

Louisiana’s FAFSA U-Turn Signals That “College-for-All” Has Peaked

Fifteen years ago, AEI’s ever-prescient Charles Murray argued in Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality that too many students were going to college—that “college-for-all” loomed too large in K-12 schooling, distorted our priorities, and had fueled the neglect of career and technical education. That take was noxious to education advocates, philanthropists,…

January 29, 2024

How Should Students Think About College?

In recent years, there has been a marked decline in public confidence in higher education, sparking debate on the value of a bachelor’s degree. In a new report published by AEI’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility, we seek to add some much-needed nuance to an increasingly go/no-go debate. Despite public perception, the bachelor’s degree continues to have great…

November 8, 2023

Perspective: The 4-Year Dividing Line

New survey shows the compounding benefits of college degrees. Here’s how to help those without degrees to catch up When it comes to jobs and work, the past three years have been among the most tumultuous in decades. From mass layoffs in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic to surging reemployment and wages as the country…