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…

For the most part, American colleges and universities have squandered the opportunity to respond to COVID-19 innovatively. Online education has accelerated, but the quality of colleges' new online courses is low. Rather than innovate, colleges simply hope to stay solvent until they can get back to normal. Many in-person colleges will fail to stay…

This set of Web Tables is the first in a series of four that together provide key information about 2011-12 first-time postsecondary students' characteristics and their 6-year retention, persistence, attainment, withdrawal, stopout, and transfer rates. The series draws on data collected for the 2012/17 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal…

The US population is becoming more educated, but large gaps in postsecondary attainment based on race or ethnicity remain, particularly at more selective colleges. As a growing number of jobs require a college degree, it is imperative to increase college access among all racial and ethnic groups. In this report, we examined whether different…

Between 2009 and 2011, school districts across the country received federal stimulus funds to shore up their budgets during the recession. The hope was that this support would serve as bridge funding during the recession, and that jurisdictions would then replace the federal funds as state and local tax bases grew stronger. However, the research…

Do young tenured professors who receive mentorship differ from those without mentorship in terms of motivation, scholarly performance, and group management practice? We conducted a survey among research group leaders in the biomedical and health sciences in the Netherlands, to study the effects of mentorship. Our results show that mentorship…

Established in the 1920s, the Education Policy Center (EPC) is the oldest center or institute at The University of Alabama. Our work centers on four interrelated areas: (a) access and finance of public higher education, (b) college completion, (c) Pell Grants, and (d) rural community colleges. As place-based institutions with service delivery…

Money, Friends and Making Ends Meet was an inclusive research project; it enabled a group of people with a learning disability who do not receive specialist support services to explore their own lives. This group are often labelled as having a mild learning disability. The research project focused on the strategies they used to cope with day to…

This article focuses on contemporary federal education policy as it manifests in rural schools. Rural schools differ appreciably from nonrural schools in terms of organizational systems, structures, and culture. Federal policies that drive school improvement initiatives (e.g., those regulating the functioning of schools and those managing the…

The Department of Early Learning (DEL) is directed by the state legislature to use currently collected data to compare state-funded child care compensation rates to market rates, cross-compare child care programs in other states and make biennial recommendations to the legislature on compensation models to attract high quality professionals. For…

The Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant Program provides grants of up to $4,000 per year to students who agree to teach for four years at an elementary school, secondary school, or educational service agency that serves students from low-income families and to meet other requirements. This brief report…

Increasing diversity in the geosciences has remained a challenge, despite large investments made by federal agencies in minority-serving institutions (MSIs) and historically black universities and colleges (HBCUs). With increasing challenges associated with climate and environmental change and severe and frequent natural disasters that…

Grantmakers for Education's "Trends in Education Philanthropy: Benchmarking 2018-19" report offers insights on the current and evolving priorities of the education funding community. It can help funders to understand their role in supporting education innovation and identify future priorities that hold the greatest promise for benefiting…

The purpose of this report is to demonstrate the power of connecting Children's Savings Account (CSAs) to college access-success programs and show that, when done together, they produce greater outcomes. First, we briefly describe these closely related fields and explain the merit of partnerships between CSA initiatives and college access and…

Are statewide college Promise programs an effective way to increase college access and success? It's hard to say. While these programs are becoming more common, they vary widely along a number of dimensions. RFA's new "Statewide College Promise Framework" is a tool that can be used to capture and compare important variation in the…