January 10, 2024
By the Numbers: Here’s How the New Federal Financial Aid Formula Harms Families with More Than One Child
The old federal formula for higher education financial aid is dead. The new formula creates winners and losers. Specifically, the new formula harms middle-class families with more than one child in college at a time. It’s not that the new formula doesn’t take family size into account at all—it does, barely. The issue is that the new formula calculates the total…
December 8, 2023
A Framework for Reforming Federal Graduate Student Aid Policy
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Driven by increases in graduate enrollment and the availability of uncapped loans, graduate debt has become a growing share of federal student lending. Most of the growth in the average and overall levels of student indebtedness in the past fifteen years has been driven by graduate student debt. Despite being just 21 percent…
December 8, 2023
Graduate Student Lending in Desperate Need of Reform
Since 2005, graduate students in the United States have been able to borrow from the federal student loan programs essentially without limit. Before that, loans were available to graduate students from the US Department of Education, but they were constrained to reasonable levels. Since limitless credit became available to graduate students in 2005, graduate student…
September 26, 2023
Former Foster Kids Need More Than Higher Education
When I tell people that I write about child welfare and the foster care system, the question I am most often asked is “What can we do about the problem of kids aging out?” “Aging out” is what happens when these teens and young adults — about 40,000 each year — leave foster care without being adopted…