At a time when Wisconsin faces severe workforce shortages in several key sectors and demand for skilled workers has skyrocketed, enrollment in the state's colleges and universities has generally been declining even faster than the national trend. Enrollments in Wisconsin across all public and private institutions were falling even prior to the…

Deregulation of for-profit colleges led to a precipitous rise in enrollments from 1990 to 2010. Since 2010, regulation, investigations, and sanctions have led to enrollment declines in for-profit postsecondary institutions. Initially barred from receiving Title IV federal funds, in the form of Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, for-profit colleges…

States and the federal government have long provided substantial financial support for higher education, but in recent years, their respective levels of contribution have shifted significantly. Given the essential role that government funding plays in higher education access and operations, policymakers across the nation frequently face difficult…

This paper examines the rise in student loan default and delinquency. It draws on a unique set of administrative data on federal student borrowing matched to earnings records from de-identified tax records. Most of the increase in default is associated with borrowers at for-profit schools, 2-year institutions, and certain other nonselective…

A quality education is the primary instrument of social and economic mobility in the United States. As open-access institutions, community colleges are the gateway to postsecondary education for millions of Americans. Many of these students would be unable to afford college without federal resources, such as student financial aid and tax credits.…

This Statistics in Brief focuses on students who do not complete a postsecondary credential and the substantial federal education debt they accrue. Specifically, the analysis compares the cumulative debt from Stafford and Perkins loan programs of students who did not complete a degree within 6 years of first enrolling ("noncompleters")…

American consumers owe more than $150 billion in outstanding private student loan debt. While this amount is significantly less than the amount outstanding on student loans guaranteed by the federal government, the private student loan ("PSL") product is an important component of higher education finance and does not appear to be well…

These tables show undergraduate Stafford loan borrowing rates and average Stafford loan amounts from 1989-90 to 2007-08, using data from six separate administrations of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS): NPSAS:90, NPSAS:93, NPSAS:96, NPSAS:2000, NPSAS:04, and NPSAS:08. The estimates that appear in these tables reflect the newly…

While the effects of the shift from need- to merit-based grants on student enrollment and receipt of aid have been examined thoroughly by a number of analysts, very few recent reports have examined the effects of these grants on students' persistence towards completing bachelor's degrees. To examine this issue, this report explores the linkages…

A study was conducted on the number of legal immigrants that received student financial aid for higher education, the amount of aid they received, the states in which they lived, and the types of schools they attended. The study focused on Pell grants and Stafford loans and used data from Department of Education recipient files for academic year…

A study of college affordability compared changes in family income, Pell grants, Stafford loans, and state grants with changes in the average costs of public two- and four-year colleges. It concluded that both sectors became more affordable to low- and middle-income families in the 1970s but less affordable in the 1980s. (Author/DB)

This document provides information on student charges at public 4-year colleges and universities in the United States for the academic year 1996-97. A narrative section of the report discusses: what is included in the cost of college, the most recent cost figures for public institutions, average costs for American Association of State Colleges and…