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 in Iowa. Performance…

Echoing the words and thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, California's state constitution embraces the noblest of principles in its vision for public higher education. Over the decades, California public higher education has dominated policy discussions as a model of access and excellence and a powerful engine of economic growth. Indeed, it would be…

This document addresses the status of equality in access to higher education. Some of the motivating factors behind this presentation include: (1) College completion rates including rates of bachelor's degree completion are falling today, particularly among young Americans; (2) Reversing the current trend and increasing college completion has…

This is the First Look at the results of the 2007-08 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:08), the most comprehensive, nationally representative survey of student financing of postsecondary education in the United States. About 114,000 undergraduate students and 14,000 graduate and first professional students were randomly selected from…

While higher education is regarded a high priority for economic development in many countries, public budgets often fall short to support desired levels of expansion in higher education. This leads to cost-sharing: students and their families are required to contribute more to the costs of higher education. This paper explores worldwide trends to…

This report measures Illinois' educational performance from early childhood through postsecondary education. It tracks how students have performed during the past decade and how that performance compares with students in other states. The state knows that improvement does not happen overnight. By tracking what happens to students over time,…

In recent years, students and parents have seen tuition costs at colleges and universities rise, to the extent that many low-income families may feel a college education for their child is out of their financial reach. However, this sky-high tuition is often partially, or even largely, subsidized by various forms of financial aid. For families to…

"Trends in College Spending, 1999-2009: Where does the money come from? Where does it go? What does it buy?" is the fourth in a series of reports on college and university spending from the Delta Cost Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability. The mission of the Delta Cost Project is to improve public…

We critique the "college for all" discourse by unveiling its relationship to the politics of education, the broader economic and political contexts, and the class and race structures embedded in society and schooling, including higher education. We analyze the current and future labor markets to demonstrate the ways that the "college for all"…

In order to understand whether loans actually expand opportunities among community college students, it is important to understand who is borrowing and who is not. A binary logistic regression was used to determine which financially needy students are likely to borrow from federal loan programs. The current study found that the following types of…

Half of college students drop out without completing a degree. This paper establishes a causal link between college costs and degree completion. I use quasi-experimental methodology to analyze two state scholarship programs. The programs increase the share of the exposed population with a college degree by three percentage points, with stronger…

Making college education more affordable is a central goal of the Obama Administration and has been a focus of Vice-President Biden's Taskforce on the Middle Class. To that end, the Task Force asked U.S. Treasury Department to prepare this report on how to make Section 529 college savings plans a more effective and reliable tool for families to…

The requirements for a model that could allow higher education to expand rapidly in the developing world are that it be readily scalable (wide access), academically credible (high quality) and affordable (low cost). This could be achieved by building higher education networks around credible examination systems run by national or independent…

While studies have examined the relationship between financial aid and college access, few have evaluated the relationship between financial aid and academic success. Factors that are associated with financial need, such as being low income, are also associated with a lack of academic success, making it difficult to isolate the effect of…

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…