Across the country, colleges using Complete College America (CCA) strategies are improving graduation rates. But despite these overall gains, data continues to show persistent institutional performance gaps for BILPOC (Black, Indigenous, Latinx, People of Color) students and students ages 25 and older. Students in both of these groups…

In this report, the authors tally the cost of child care and the price of attending a public four-year college--including tuition and fees, housing, food, books, and transportation--to determine a student parent's actual annual cost of pursuing a degree. That number is used to calculate the "student parent affordability gap," that is,…

Higher education leaders are looking for high impact ways to improve retention and graduation rates in a climate of austere budgets. Increasingly, higher education sees the interplay of finances and academic performance as a key driver of student success. Across the nation, measurable improvements in student success outcomes are observed when…

The State of Student Aid and Higher Education in Texas (SOSA) annual report from Trellis Research provides information helpful in informing policy and programs for higher education student financial aid. The report serves as a reference for colleges, universities, and policymakers, and provides a comparison of Texas state and federal student aid…

The combination of work and study has been hailed as crucial to ensure that youth develop the skills required on the labour market so that transitions from school to work are shorter and smoother. This paper fills an important gap in availability of internationally-comparable data. Using the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), it draws a…

Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill teamed up with UnidosUS to explore whether and how our debt-driven higher education system makes it difficult for students to finish a college program or degree. The quantitative research, gathered from more than 1,500 respondents from across the country, offers insight into the primary…

For decades, the popular conception of a college student in this country has been the full-time residential financially dependent student who enrolls in a four-year college immediately after graduating from high school. That student has not been the norm at U.S. postsecondary institutions for more than 30 years. Such students exist but they are…

Researchers from the Georgetown University Center on Education and Workforce, Anthony Carnevale and Nicole Smith, examine the challenges working students face and the impacts of these challenges on completion and debt. Working and paying tuition and fees "as you go" is no longer an option for the majority of America's college students;…

Student employment subsidies are one of the largest types of federal employment subsidies, and one of the oldest forms of student aid. Yet it is unclear whether they help or harm students' long term outcomes. This document contains the appendices to the report "Should Student Employment Be Subsidized? Conditional Counterfactuals and the…

TG provides critical support to schools, students, and borrowers at every stage of the federal student aid process--from providing information on how to pay for a higher education including financial aid options, to facilitating successful loan repayment after graduation. This issue of "State of Student Aid and Higher Education in Texas"…

Community colleges across the country have created innovative, data-informed programs that are models for educating underprepared students, engaging traditionally underserved students, and helping students from all backgrounds succeed. However, because most of these programs have limited scope, the field now has pockets of success rather than…

To identify key trends in college student volunteering and to understand their implications for growing volunteering among college students, the Corporation has produced a new report, titled "College Students Helping America," the most comprehensive national report ever conducted on college student volunteering in the United States. The…

This brief paper summarizes statistics on the rate at which 16-24 year old full-time college students were employed during October from 1970 to 1993, categorized by race/ethnicity (White, Black, and Hispanic) and hours worked per week. The data indicated that 46 percent of all full-time students were employed in 1993, and about one-fourth worked…

The U.S. Congress has mandated that the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) produce an annual report to help inform policymakers about the progress of education in the United States. Using data from across the center and from other sources of education data, "The Condition of Education 2015" presents 42 key indicators on…

Trends in paid employment among college students since the early 1960s are described, effects on student persistence and the financial rate of return for individual students while in college are analyzed, and possible explanations for the rising trend in employment are examined. (Author/MSE)