At many colleges across the nation, as administrators fret about the effects of a worsening economy, students arriving this fall will get more help securing jobs and more advice on paying for their educations. Some students will even find colleges willing to cut their tuition bills. This article reports that as banks tighten standards for private…

As a graduate of Dartmouth College who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the author launched her academic career with a total debt load of over $105,000. As soon as she started working as a full-time faculty member six years ago, she began to make payments of between $600 and $1,000 a month to creditors, depending on what her…

The Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) has been advanced as having many desirable properties. These have been discussed largely from the theoretical perspective, and with the individual rather than the family as the reference point. This paper explores whether HECS is working the way it was intended. Is it having undesirable or…

The lax underwriting in non-prime mortgage markets is widely perceived as one cause of the recent difficulties in the housing market. Policymakers are currently considering moves such as enforcing more careful underwriting to provide additional discipline to mortgage markets. This research explores the possibility of another approach to supplement…

Student loans schemes are in operation in more than seventy countries around the world. Most loans schemes benefit from sizeable built-in government subsidies and, in addition, are subject to repayment default and administrative costs that are not passed on to student borrowers. We probe two issues in this paper, for 44 loans schemes in 39…

In recent times there has been considerable change and instability with respect to Thailand student loans policy. The contribution of what follows is to compare and contrast the consequences of disparate possible approaches to the payment of tuition in two main respects: the effect on internal rates of return for higher education investments; and…

There is significant irresolution in many countries concerning the design of student loan schemes. In no country recently has there been more uncertainty as to the form that loans should take than Thailand. The Student Loans Fund (SLF), a conventional approach to financing, was introduced in 1996, discontinued at the end of 2005, and re-introduced…

As more countries are planning to inaugurate or enlarge student loan schemes, much of the debate is over the question of the optimal form of the repayment obligation: specifically, whether it should be according to a fixed schedule of payments or a percentage of earnings or income. This paper argues that the current fascination with income…

This paper explores the impact of recent economic volatility on higher education and discusses the lessons learned and the strategies for the future. The author believes that America's higher education is in danger, but has an extraordinary opportunity. Several reports point to the country's lagging behind other advanced countries in educational…

The Thai higher education sector has expanded quickly during the past decade, making a transition from an elitist to a mass institution. A driving force behind the expansion was believed to be the Student Loan Fund (SLF), introduced in 1996. During the first 10 years of its operation, the SLF has lent to more than 2.6 million students, with the…

Many urban districts in the United States have difficulty attracting and retaining quality teachers, yet they are often the most in need of them. In response, U.S. states and districts are experimenting with financial incentives to attract and retain high-quality teachers in high-need, low-achieving, or hard-to-staff urban schools. However,…

The troubled student-loan market is a hot topic among legislators, policy makers, and the public. Two recurring issues are how to ensure that enough funds are available to students and how to ensure that lenders are fully repaid. Yet despite all the talk about loans, little has been proposed to help college students and their families with the…

Government student loan schemes typically have implicit interest rate subsidies which, while these are a cost to taxpayers, they have the benefit of diminishing repayment burdens for graduates. Our goal is to illustrate the extent of both interest rate subsidies and repayment burdens with respect to Thailand's Student Loans Fund (SLF), using…

The lack of industry wide data on homeownership education and counseling (HEC) programs has severely limited evaluation. In particular, very little evidence exists on the relationship between HEC completion and loan prepayment, an outcome of interest to both mortgage lenders and consumer advocates. Where mortgage prepayment directly influences the…

In a period of student loan scandals and U.S. financial market instability impacting on the cost and availability of student loans, this paper looks at alternative models of higher education funding. In this context, it also considers the level of financial support that the government should provide to higher education.