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November 12, 2024

The National Assessment of Educational Progress Recompete: Is It Real Change or Lipstick on a Pig?

Key Points The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has a congressional mandate to assess American students’ academic performance over time. Unfortunately, the bureaucratic processes to select NAEP’s contractors have…

November 7, 2024

Key Data on Federal Benefits Paid to Illegal Immigrant Households

Soaring illegal immigration during the Biden-Harris administration was a major campaign theme, with a pre-election Harvard poll finding Americans considered immigration the second-most important issue—right behind inflation and ahead of the economy….

November 4, 2024

Again, Tariffs Didn’t Make American Manufacturing Great

Nationalist/populist conservatives, including the Republican nominee, claim that US economic history supports their views of trade protectionism. Donald Trump says “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and…

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…

October 21, 2024

Dueling Child Tax Credit Proposals: Harris vs. Vance

JD Vance and Kamala Harris have at least one thing in common: proposals to expand the child tax credit (CTC). Currently, the CTC offers households up to $2,000 per child…

October 18, 2024

Pro-Marriage Conservatives Should Reject a Per-Child Phase-In of the Child Tax Credit

Earlier this week, scholars from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Niskanen Center, and other right-of-center organizations issued a memo calling for pro-family tax reforms during the upcoming debate over the…

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…

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…

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…

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….