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…
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…
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 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…
March 18, 2025
Rebuilding Higher Education Finance: Reform Through Reconciliation
Event Summary On March 18, AEI’s Beth Akers and Preston Cooper spoke with Alex Ricci of the Education Finance Council and Lindsey M. Burke of the Heritage Foundation to discuss what it would look like to pass meaningful higher education finance reform through the budget reconciliation process. First, Dr. Akers introduced the speakers and encouraged…
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 13, 2025
The Return To Student Loan Repayment, In Four Charts
In March 2020, the federal government enacted a “temporary” pause on student loan repayment, which the Trump and Biden administrations extended a grand total of eight times. But as of October 2024, loan repayment has officially resumed—meaning borrowers who miss payments will face consequences such as negative credit reports. As of September 2024—the latest month…
March 13, 2025
Trends in Net College Tuition and Financial Aid, 1990–2020
Key Points Introduction College costs are out of control—or so the narrative goes. In recent years, a counternarrative has emerged that argues, correctly, that the meteoric rise in the sticker price of college is misleading. Net college tuition, or tuition after financial aid is applied, has risen far less quickly than sticker price tuition and…
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…