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March 21, 2025

Increasing Financial Aid Isn’t the Solution to High College Costs

Harvard University recently announced it would make tuition free for students from families earning below $200,000—but for middle-class students not lucky enough to receive a Harvard acceptance letter, college tuition is still far too expensive. As a solution, many have proposed significant increases in taxpayer-funded financial aid to reduce or even eliminate tuition for many students. This…

March 20, 2025

To Transform K-12 Education, the Trump Administration Should Measure What Matters

When the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) was first administered in 1969, nearly nine out of 10 American children were born into married, two-parent homes. By 2023, this number had decreased to six out of 10 children on average, with wide variations across racial groups. Stunning disparities in married, two-parent households by race tightly correlate with disparities in child poverty, domestic violence, and father absence—all…

March 14, 2025

A Historic Opportunity for Higher Education Reform 

Once a sleepy policy area on the national scale, higher education is now a central issue making headlines in the overall political discourse.   Believe it or not, the education policy divides between mainstream Democrats and Republicans used to be trivial. For example, 10 years ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) proposal to lower student loan interest rates to 3.9…

March 12, 2025

Why Alabama Needs The Success Sequence

“The American Dream is beyond my reach.” This is increasingly the view that many young men and women take regarding the long-held belief that anyone can succeed in the United States. In fact, over half of young adults today believe the American Dream is no longer within their reach. What many of them do not know is that…

February 24, 2025

A Glut of MBAs?

It’s all about the skills, not the credentials. You know the labor market times are changing when Harvard MBAs start showing up in the unemployment stories. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, 23 percent of recent Harvard Business School grads were still looking for work three months after graduation. In 2022, that figure was only 10 percent….

February 7, 2025

Low-Performing Students Fall Farther Behind the Pack

On January 29, the National Assessment of Education Progress, NAEP, released results from its 2024 assessment. This latest installment of the self-styled “Nation’s Report Card” makes depressing reading. Indeed, if it weren’t for bad news, there would be hardly any news at all. The previous 2022 NAEP results were bad—but they could be blamed on…

January 21, 2025

How Trump Can Permanently Fix the Student Loan Program

Even before he took office, President Donald Trump was already securing major policy wins. Trump’s election induced the Biden administration to withdraw two pending regulations that would have canceled over $250 billion in federal student loans, without congressional approval. Biden officials judged that they did not have enough time to finalize the loan cancellation plans before the new administration takes over….

December 17, 2024

Make America Smart Again: The Jeopardy Test for Graduation

President-elect Donald Trump has signaled his intention to try to abolish the Education Department, long considered wasteful in a nation where public education is provided locally. If he were to succeed — a long shot, to be sure — state and local education overseers would have to step up to ensure quality education. On this front, the news is not promising….

December 11, 2024

Some College Graduates Are Taking Lower-Paying Jobs

The promise of higher education is to equip students with new ideas and skills that will help them land higher-paying jobs. For many students, this dream comes true—but that is not what happens across the board. As college degree attainment has risen over time, many graduates find themselves taking jobs that traditionally belonged to those…

November 14, 2024

The Rotting of the College Board

n 1947, the College Board opened an office in Berkeley, California. Previously, from the turn of the century onward, the organization had been administering entrance examinations for schools in the Northeast, and in 1926 it created and began using the original Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT. The Board’s western expansion after World War II was…