In August 2022, the U.S Department of Education (ED) announced it would invoke the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 (HEROES Act) to cancel up to $20,000 of federal student loan debts for borrowers who fell below certain income thresholds. The HEROES Act authorizes the Secretary to "waive or modify" statutory…

Student borrowing is a major higher education public policy issue, with students in both England and the United States increasingly relying on loans to finance postsecondary education. Our paper examines prospective higher education students' attitudes towards debt in England and the United States. It exploits a unique dataset which allows us to…

Do employees at public colleges and universities have better retirement benefits than K-12 employees? This is the central question in the new report "Choice and Quality Among Retirement Plans for Educators." To answer this question, we evaluate the quality of higher education and K-12 retirement plans using five key variables: (1)…

In the last 40 years, college costs have more than doubled. Students pay exorbitant amounts of money to attend college, even going into crushing debt. Meanwhile, universities increase their administrative overhead and other non-instructional costs. "Priced Out: What College Costs America," takes a personalized look into 50 universities…

This position article proposes that bankruptcy counseling and education should be tailored so that bankrupts and consumer debtors can attain "solvency literacy," a new construct developed for this initiative. They need to (a) handle their financial affairs "during" the insolvency process while (b) concurrently striving for a…

The gainful employment rule enforces the Higher Education Act's requirement that all career education programs receiving federal student aid "prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation." The rule uses debt-to-earnings ratios to assess whether career education programs at public, nonprofit, and for-profit colleges…

Nearly 43 million college student borrowers across the United States owe more than $1.56 trillion in outstanding federal student loans. The number of student borrowers in the country has increased by 1.3 million, or 3.1 percent, over the past five years, while the amount of outstanding student debt in the country has increased by a whopping $…

For millions of college-going students, one of the most urgent concerns is the rising cost of college and how to pay for it -- and not just for tuition but other necessities like textbooks, housing, food, and transportation. The idea that one can work one's way through college with a minimum-wage job is, in most cases, a myth. Students from…

In January 2020, the Committee for Economic Development of The Conference Board (CED) embarked on the 2020 election project, releasing monthly Solutions Briefs that have been updated to address the dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and are compiled in this Compendium. The objective is to analyze the most important business and economic…

The National Council on School Facilities is interested in maintaining good quality local, state, and national facilities data that can be analyzed and reported to inform policy, practice, and spending. The "State of Our Schools" 2016 report examined 20 years of school district and state funding for K-12 public school facilities…

Why aren't teacher salaries rising? This puzzle can be explained by three trends eating into teachers' take-home pay: rising health care costs, declining student/teacher ratios, and rising retirement costs. Retirement costs are the most hidden of these three factors. The result is that most teachers are getting the worst of both worlds. Teachers…

Federal free-college policies are now at the center of the Democratic higher education agenda. Sen. Bernie Sanders helped move the idea into the mainstream during the 2016 presidential campaign, and other lawmakers have since worked to advance the policy in Congress. Joe Biden effectively put free college on the ballot in 2020 when he fully…

The U.S. Census Bureau conducts the Census of Governments and the Annual Surveys of State and Local Government Finances as authorized by law under Title 13, U.S. Code, Sections 161 and 182. The Census of Governments has been conducted every 5 years since 1957, while the annual survey has been conducted annually since 1977 in years when the Census…

This First Look report presents data on public elementary and secondary education revenues and expenditures at the local education agency (LEA) or school district level for fiscal year (FY) 2014.1 Specifically, this report includes findings from the following types of school finance data: (1) Revenue and expenditure totals by state and the 100…

Research shows that school functioning and student achievement often suffer when effective principals leave their schools and that principal retention is related to the conditions they experience in five areas: working conditions, compensation, accountability, decision-making authority, and professional learning. A recent NASSP-LPI study examined…