Toward a Sensible Federal Financial Aid Policy
A few weeks ago, I was one of the audience gathered in the Hillsdale College DC campus’s marvelous new but neo-classical auditorium to hear US Education Secretary Linda McMahon discuss…
Funding Should Follow Students
Two years ago, UNC-Chapel Hill introduced a new resource allocation model that ties funding more closely with student demand. This approach makes sense, aligning incentives across academic units and rewarding…
Academic Armageddon Advances
Robert Kelchen of the University of Tennessee, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, described the most dire problem facing higher education today: “The list of institutions trimming academic…
Huge University Spending Yields Little Value
Why do public university officials do the things they do? What drives their decisions to allocate scarce resources in some ways and not others? In his recent book The University…
Student Loans: A Multi-Generational Financial Trap
When the United States began its experiment with federally backed student loans in the 1960s, no one predicted that, by the early 21st century, students would have run up over…
North Carolina Has the Degrees, But What About the Paychecks?
The hot new words in higher education are educational attainment and career outcomes. Educational attainment is the raw share of adults who hold a degree or credential. Career outcomes or…
What Will UNC Tuition Hikes Pay For?
Tuition hikes in higher education are painful, reluctantly accepted, and justified with promises that the money will go to essential needs. If students really must pay more, an important question…
Skin In the Game At Last
Startling news from the world of student-loan reform: A federal intervention appears to be not only working on its own terms but producing beneficial knock-on effects. With apologies to the…
The Pros and Cons of Short-Term Pell Grants
As a general rule, when the government intervenes in free economic transactions in a market, it distorts that market and makes people worse off. We might not see such negative…
New Data on the “Plight” of Adjuncts
New data are out on adjuncts—the part-time, untenured faculty who teach many college classes—and the tale they tell isn’t great. However, dive a little deeper and the truth becomes more…