As students throughout New England head back to school this fall, tens of thousands of them have a head start on a bright future through a Children's Savings Account (CSA). These investments in children's future postsecondary education are offered in cities and states throughout the region--and beyond--and all share a goal of boosting…

If the state of California finds the funds, the Cal Grant Reform Act--as enacted in the 2022 Budget Act--is to be implemented in 2024 to support hundreds of thousands of Californians in affording, accessing, and succeeding in higher education. Instead, the state has proposed adding more funding to the less equitable Middle Class Scholarship (MCS)…

In recent decades, education leaders and researchers have increasingly sought to disaggregate key higher education outcome data--graduation rates, attainment, employment, and income--by race and ethnicity in order to uncover and narrow equity gaps. The same is true, recently, for affordability, especially as it relates to the differential impact…

The purpose of our contribution is to discuss shortcomings of purely descriptive quantitative evaluation of research policies -- based either on inputs (public investment, number of researchers), or outputs (publications, EU grants, number of patents). To give an example, we compare selected indicators across Visegrad countries in the period…

School and district leaders make annual decisions about investing their budgets in a multitude of educational programs. Policy directives set expectations for investing in programs that show evidence of improving student outcomes. However, evaluating many simultaneously-implemented programs under typical school operating conditions is challenging.…

This study reports findings from a higher education investment course designed to enhance skills-based learning through experiential, immersive, live, and technologically empowering elements. Results suggest the following performance for the course. First, pure popularity and peer-to-peer word-of-mouth has seen course numbers grow almost 2.5× over…

An apprenticeship levy was introduced in England in 2017 to help the government meet its target of 3 million apprenticeships between 2015 and 2020. Training levies have been, until recently, something of an anathema in public policy circles in England with most having been abolished by the mid-1980s as the government moved towards creating a…

Aspirations shape important future-oriented behaviors, including educational investment. Higher family aspirations for children predict better educational outcomes in multiple developing countries. Unfortunately, aspirations sometimes outstrip people's ability to pursue them. We study the relationship between family aspirations for children and…

The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) Act of 2014 and the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) Final Rule approved in 2016 outlined major policy changes in four areas: (1) health and safety; (2) consumer education; (3) equal access to high-quality care for children in families with low-incomes; and (4) quality improvement and…

Global Partnership for Education (GPE), the largest global fund dedicated to transforming education, now offers the GPE Match. Through the GPE Match, GPE will double qualifying philanthropic investments made in education in GPE partner countries by the business community or private foundations. That doubles the impact on getting more girls and…

Public higher education institutions (HE institutions) have had to increasingly diversify their financial portfolios due of ongoing reductions in public funding allocations. One-way public HE institutions are diversifying their financial portfolios is by increasingly investing in academic entrepreneurial initiatives implemented by their internal…

This toolkit helps funders and NGOs to address the challenges they face in assessing organisational development needs. It was developed in partnership with five leading Indian intermediary organisations: Dasra, the Dhwani Foundation, Samhita Social Ventures, Sattva, and toolbox INDIA Foundation. All have extensive experience advising NGOs on their…

New York State (NYS) launched the Excelsior Scholarship in 2017. It is designed to make college tuition-free for students who attend publicly funded institutions and meet certain criteria. Is this scholarship a good investment for taxpayers of NYS? How long does it take taxpayers to recover their investment? This case analysis takes a perspective…

This study explores the relationship between objective measures and perceptions of financial well-being for older Americans. Financial well-being is measured objectively using three financial ratios including the liquidity ratio, the debt-to-asset ratio, and the investment ratio. Individuals' perceptions of their financial well-being are measured…

The purpose of this paper is to establish the extent to which Oman is capable of attracting more of the foreign direct investment (FDI) through dunning model instruments. The results of the analysis are determined using responses provided by the foreign companies concerning the features of Oman. Data used in the analysis were collected from 30…