While the tuition fee system has had a large amount of political and media attention in the last two decades, far less attention has been paid to the student maintenance system -- the amount of funding students have access to for day to day living expenses. But for many students, this funding is of more immediate importance, and can have a major…

Between 1965 and 2010, most federal student loans were issued by private lending institutions and guaranteed by the government, and most student loan borrowers made fixed monthly payments over a set period--typically 10 years. Since 2010, however, all federal student loans have been issued directly by the federal government, and borrowers have…

In this paper, we consider lessons for other countries about the design of student loans with income-contingent repayments (i.e. repayments calculated as "x" per cent of each borrower's subsequent income). Using a dataset of 20,000 simulated lifetime graduate earnings paths, we estimate the cost and distributional effects of reforms in…