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October 3, 2024

Six Ideas to Fix Higher Education in 2025

America will have a new president and a new Congress in 2025, and with that change comes the opportunity to rethink federal policy towards higher education. The federal approach suffers from many problems, but the core one is that federal subsidies indiscriminately fund traditional colleges, regardless of their financial value, and shortchange promising alternatives, such…

September 23, 2024

The Last Bipartisan Policy

Name a policy that Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Ron DeSantis, and Gavin Newsome all support. And I don’t mean something they are passively allowing or a shallow endorsement of motherhood and apple pie, but real, meaningful policy they are running on in campaigns and enacting while in office. The list of such policies is not…

September 16, 2024

A Pyrrhic Victory Against Student Loan Default

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has published a new report on federal student loan repayment, and the picture isn’t pretty. Six years after first entering repayment on their loans, over half of borrowers owe more than they did when they started repayment. This disappointing fact is partially the result of a program that, ironically, was meant to…

September 11, 2024

After Decades of Competitive Admissions, Getting into College Has Finally Become Easier

High school seniors fretting over whether they’ll receive a college acceptance letter can sleep a little easier. College admissions rates, which had been declining for decades, are now on the upswing. Indeed, most colleges now accept a greater share of their applicants today than they did twenty years ago. Until recently, rising admissions rates were far…

September 6, 2024

The Latest Chronic Absenteeism Numbers

A new school year is beginning, and students are returning to school, but the question this year is how many will return to attending consistently. Chronic absenteeism, the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of the school year, nearly doubled during the pandemic, surging from 15 percent of K–12 students in 2019 to…

August 2, 2024

Democrats’ Automatic Stimulus Proposals Undermine the Administration’s “Strongest Economy” Claims

Today’s US jobs report finds the nation’s unemployment rate increased to 4.3 percent in July. According to a measure often cited by liberal policymakers, that suggests the US has entered a recession, undercutting President Biden’s boast just last week that the US has “the strongest economy in the world.” That grinding contradiction is only reinforced…

July 29, 2024

The Real Impact of Zoning and Land Use Reforms Contrary to the Urban Institute’s Claims

Not in my backyard (NIMBY) adherents across the country are beginning to weaponize a recent Urban Institute study that reviewed 180 zoning reforms and concluded these reforms barely affected the housing supply. Given Urban’s wide distribution and the paper’s seemingly comprehensive approach, coupled with the eagerness of NIMBYs to exploit such research, housing supply advocates need to be aware…

July 17, 2024

Key Takeaways from a New Report on Potential Unemployment Insurance Reforms

Yesterday, the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) released the final report of its Unemployment Insurance (UI) Task Force, of which I am a member. The task force was created in December 2020, as state UI agencies were besieged by record pandemic benefit claims and unprecedented fraud. I was one of several members added in late 2023. The purpose…

May 30, 2024

Building a High Tech Workforce for the Future

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that a bidding war has broken out among the tech giants for scarce and valuable generative AI talent. This scramble is part of a much bigger talent shortage that looms over the US economy in coming years as AI becomes critical business infrastructure. Since generative AI (GAI) burst onto the scene in late 2022, the technology has sped ahead, driven…

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…