Over the last 3 decades, the Direct Loan program has grown in size and complexity, with over $1.3 trillion in outstanding loans as of September 2023. This program provides financial assistance to help students and their parents pay for postsecondary education. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to review issues related to…

The cost of a college education continues to trend upward and state funding for higher education has trended downward, shifting more of the financial burden to students through student loans. About half of all 2010-2011 financial aid originated from student loans, and total federal student loan borrowing rose 319% between 1990 and 2010.…

This study was designed to investigate the influence of the implementation of the best practices in repayment in the pre college preparation, in the in college period and in the after college period (the grace period and repayment) in increasing collections of the due students' loans. The study was geared towards achieving the following…

This study explored whether a predictive model of student loan default could be developed with data from an institution's three-year cohort default rate report. The study used borrower data provided by a large two-year community college. Independent variables under investigation included total undergraduate Stafford student loan debt, total number…

We propose a simple theoretical model which shows how the combined effect of wage uncertainty and risk aversion can modify the individual willingness to pay for a HE system financed by an ICL or a ML. We calibrate our model using real data from the 1970 British Cohort Survey together with the features of the English HE financing system. We allow…

Access and affordability are the main themes of Goal 1 of The Virginia Plan for Higher Education. Progress toward these goals can be measured by a variety of means, but access and affordability serve as foundational guiding principles as the Commonwealth of Virginia crafts its annual and biennial higher-education budgets. Student-loan debt is but…

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.

This article investigates the extent to which student borrowers might be induced to prepay by an offer from the government to share a portion of its savings expected from prepayment. The analysis suggests that potential savings are not likely to be large enough to induce significant prepayment. (Author/MLW)

Federal student loans include a complex consolidation option that gives borrowers the opportunity to combine several loans into a single loan with a longer term to maturity and, for loans originated before July 2006, to convert from a variable- to a fixed-rate loan. The consolidation option adds substantial costs to the federal student loan…

A comparative study was made between a medium-sized university and a smaller public community college in the same urban area to determine profiles of student populations and to correlate student characteristics to default rates. Demographic makeup is shown to influence an institution's categorization as "high risk" for student loan…

The relationship between college costs and family income is examined, along with the debt burden incurred by students while pursuing a postsecondary education. Attention is directed to an analytical model of discretionary income, the families' current income and college costs and how these have changed over the last decade, and general empirical…

The cost to a typical borrower of participating in the Guaranteed Student Loan (GSL) program was studied, based on the analysis of automated models that calculate total borrower costs under various scenarios. The focus was related to the actual costs of obtaining and repaying a student loan. Conclusions are as follows: (1) student borrowers under…

This document on contingent student assistance repayment plans in Ontario universities contains a paper on policy options for repayment plans and the manual for a simulation model for testing policy options. The policy options paper begins by describing the contingent repayment concept in which the test for receiving a public subsidy is shifted…

Default on guaranteed student loans has been increasing. The use of discriminant analysis as a technique to identify "good" v "bad" student loans based on information available from the loan application is discussed. Research to test the ability of models to such predictions is reported. (Author/MLW)

At a time when college degrees are increasingly a prerequisite for middle-class wages, less than 40 percent of college students are able to demonstrate proficiency on literacy tests, barely half of college students graduate on time, and many do not graduate at all. At the same time. the price of college continues to increase quickly and…