What barriers to compliance do research administrators face at liberal arts colleges and predominantly undergraduate institutions? What solutions can be offered to overcome these challenges? All academic institutions that receive government funding must abide by the same federally imposed rules and regulations for financial assistance, whether for…

Research universities and the federal government partner to foster societal, scientific, and technological advancements, but the federal research grant process is criticized for its procedural inefficiencies. Principal investigators and research administrators lament losing time to bureaucratic regulations, unwieldy processes, and burgeoning…

Governments must strike a balance between promoting access to financial aid while at the same time remaining good stewards of taxpayer funds by preventing fraudulent access. This paper focuses on one of the largest-scale and most consequential policies determining whether students maintain access to Title IV aid, the "Return of Title IV"…

The purpose of the U.S. Department of Education's (Department's) fiscal year (FY) 2024 "Agency Financial Report" (AFR) is to inform Congress, the President, other external stakeholders, and the American people on how the Department used the federal resources entrusted to it to advance the mission of the Department to promote student…

This article is the first of a three-part series based on the book, Basic Guide to Financial Aid. The contents within are abridged from the publication, with additional emphasis on the impact federal student aid administration has on non-financial aid professionals in higher education today. It should be noted that this information is not…

Accreditation is a major barrier to higher education reform. Constitutional or not, accreditors are an administrative anomaly: private nonprofit agencies that nonetheless possess life-and-death power over higher education. To maintain federal funding, universities must satisfy the administrative requirements and whims of these unelected entities.…

Scholarly assessments of Philippine education during the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos understandably focus on its authoritarian bent. What many neglect is how his dictatorship, in partnership with the World Bank (WB), incubated neoliberal education in the country. While there are academic analyses that show how WB loan programmes influenced…

The 1988 Dawkins reforms were designed, at least in part, to encourage public universities to organize themselves as if they were corporate enterprises, in order to create a more efficient and competitive sector that was less reliant on government funding. This paper assesses whether successive policy changes since the 1988 Dawkins reforms have…

The purpose of the paper is to examine the financial health of selected public universities in Malaysia. The study assessed the performance of Malaysian research universities, on the primary reserve ratio, viability ratio, return on net asset ratio and net operating revenue ratio, as well as the Hirschman-Herfindahl Index for revenue…

The reinstatement of Pell grant eligibility for incarcerated individuals marks a pivotal moment in the landscape of higher education in prison (HEP) programming in the United States. However, despite this promising development, financial barriers persist, hindering the growth and sustainability of HEP initiatives. This qualitative study delves…

The flexibility federal block grants provide recipients poses challenges for evaluation. These challenges include aggregating data on wide-ranging activities grant recipients implement and the outcomes they achieve. In 2014, we began designing an evaluation to address the challenges of assessing outcomes and to improve outcome accountability for…

When a community loses its Head Start provider, the Office of Head Start (OHS) deploys its interim manager to temporarily operate this federally funded early childhood education program. Since 2000, OHS has placed more than 200 programs under interim management. As of September 2024, 18 of 1,600 Head Start programs nationwide were under interim…

This statutory report presents the activities and accomplishments of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General (OIG) from April 1, 2024, through September 30, 2024. The audits, investigations, and related work highlighted in the report are products of OIG's mission to identify and stop fraud, waste, and abuse; and promote…

To address the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress authorized the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF I) in March 2020 with over $6 billion allocated for emergency financial aid. In this paper, we utilize the administrative burden framework to analyze HEERF I implementation for a stratified random sample of…

This article is the third of a three-part series based on the book, "Basic Guide to Financial Aid," which recently won NASFAA's Robert P. Huff Golden Quill Award. The contents within are adapted from the publication, with additional emphasis on the impact federal student aid administration has on non-financial aid professionals in higher…