Making college accessible to all includes making it affordable to lower-income families. A growing policy strategy at the state level is to provide individual students with need-based financial aid to offset tuition and living expenses. This strategy inherently presents challenges in choosing which income levels are eligible to receive aid,…

State policies to promote postsecondary education historically have been devoted to funding and operating public colleges and universities. Increasingly, states are funding direct aid to their residents to attend public and private colleges within state borders. The majority of state aid is targeted based on the student's family income. States are…

Voucher and education savings account (ESA) programs fund students' private school education expenses, such as tuition. In school year 2014-15, 22 such school choice programs were operating nationwide, all but one of which was state funded. Under two federal grant programs, one for students with disabilities and one for students from disadvantaged…

The Race to the Top - Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) program, authorized by Congress in 2011, is designed to improve the quality of early learning and development programs for children from birth through age 5. This discretionary grant program is administered jointly by the U.S. Departments of Education (ED) and Health and Human Services…

Students and families all over the country are saving, working, taking out loans, and taking steps to make college affordable. Yet they still find themselves facing an unreasonably high price for college, with unexpected, and sometimes untenable, expenses, and fall short of the resources they need to successfully complete degrees. Financial…

In the United States, approximately 65 percent of all jobs in 2020 will require some level of postsecondary education, and the demand will reach 68 percent in Iowa. This report seeks to inform public discourse on higher education by providing key performance indicators relevant to the goal of improving educational attainment for a healthy economy…

In the United States, approximately 65 percent of all jobs in 2020 will require some level of postsecondary education, and the demand will reach 62 percent in Wisconsin. This report seeks to inform public discourse on higher education by providing key performance indicators relevant to the goal of improving educational attainment for a healthy…

The Head Start program, overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services and administered by the Office of Head Start, provides child development services primarily to low-income families and their children. Federal law allows up to 10 percent of enrolled families to have incomes above 130 percent of the poverty line--GAO (Government…

We use the random assignment of a private Wisconsin need-based grant to estimate the impacts of financial aid on college persistence among Pell Grant recipients at 13 public universities over three years. For equity and efficiency reasons, governments use conditional cash transfers to reduce the relationship between family income and college…

In the United States, approximately 65 percent of all jobs in 2020 will require some level of postsecondary education, and the demand will reach 62 percent in Wisconsin. This report seeks to inform public discourse on higher education by providing key performance indicators relevant to the goal of improving educational attainment in Wisconsin.…

The way public college students finance college was studied, based on student resource and expenditure surveys from four states: Arizona, California, New York, and Wisconsin. Comparisons were made of demographic and academic variables, as well as expenditure patterns of students receiving different kinds of aid. The following four aid recipient…