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March 25, 2025

AI Talent: It’s Not Just for High Tech Anymore

We appear to be approaching the break-out phase of artificial intelligence’s diffusion across the American economy. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, recent data from the University of Maryland’s  AI job tracker finds that nearly 25 percent of tech job postings earlier this year mentioned AI skills. And it isn’t just the tech sector that’s hiring—finance, professional…

By Brent Orrell

March 25, 2025

Less Than Half of Student Borrowers Are Paying Their Loans

Student loan payments have been due for six months now—yet no one seems to have told the students. The federal government effectively suspended payments on student loans for four and a half years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, leading many borrowers to lose touch with their loan servicers and disengage from the repayment system. False promises of loan cancellation…

By Preston Cooper

March 25, 2025

Reimagining Federal Education R&D: IES, Workforce Skills, and State Leadership

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has taken a hit from DOGE, losing about 90 percent of its workforce. Regardless of the future of the Education Department, we need to continue to improve education R&D and identify what in IES should be preserved, or indeed expanded, to meet the nation’s needs today and in the…

By Mark Schneider

March 24, 2025

Keeping Medicaid Sustainable While Prioritizing the Vulnerable

The unsustainability of future federal budget deficits necessitates reduced entitlement spending. Finding savings from Medicaid will likely be a central part of this year’s budget debate. What are the costs and benefits of various reform proposals affecting children, working-age adults, and the elderly? How can policymakers best prioritize vulnerable populations as they debate ways to…

By Scott Winship

March 24, 2025

Tax Abatements: The Best-Kept Secret to Revitalizing Struggling Communities—Without Spending Taxpayer Money

A well-designed property tax abatement program can dramatically shift project economics by temporarily reducing tax burdens, making new housing development financially viable—without requiring government subsidies. Philadelphia’s 10-year tax abatement is a powerful example: a simple policy that helped reverse decades of decline by unlocking private investment and spurring the construction of tens of thousands of…

By Tobias Peter

March 24, 2025

The Student Loan Payment Pause Was a Catastrophic Mistake

In March 2020, as America shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed a law suspending federal student loan payments for six months. The payment pause ended up lasting, in effect, for four and a half years. Though well-intentioned, the pause and its repeated extensions may go down as one of the worst mistakes in…

By Preston Cooper

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…

By Preston Cooper

March 20, 2025

Homesteading 2.0: A Proposal to Make Housing Affordable Again

Across the Western US, rising home prices are slowing economic growth and stripping first-time homebuyers and middle-class families of homeownership opportunities. Commonsense, market-driven solutions to expand the housing supply are urgently needed. The Homesteading 2.0 proposal is one such approach. By unlocking 0.3 percent (850 square miles) of Bureau of Land Management land, the West…

By Edward J. Pinto | Michael Burkentine | Arthur Gailes | Makinizi Hoover | Jeffrey Mason

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…

By Ian Rowe | Goldy Brown III

March 19, 2025

What Can We Learn from Louisiana’s Progress in K–12 Education?

The 2024 National Assessment for Educational Progress results revealed a nation in academic decline, with scores “below pre-pandemic levels . . . in ALL tested grades and subjects,” according to the National Assessment Governing Board. Louisiana, however, is an outlier: It was one of only two states that experienced growth over its pre-pandemic levels in fourth-grade…

By Robert Pondiscio