Robert Kelchen

This post first appeared at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center Chalkboard blog. The U.S. Department of Education recently released its annual report on the federal Pell Grant program, which provides detailed information about the program’s finances and who is receiving grants. The most recent report includes data from the 2013-14 academic year, and I summarize […]

This article I wrote was originally published on The Conversation. Americans owed nearly $1.2 trillion in student loan debt as of March 2015, more than three times the amount of debt from just a decade ago. Part of this increase in debt is due to more students attending college, but part can also be attributed […]

One of the eternal debates in higher education policy is the validity of the Bennett Hypothesis, first stated by William Bennett (President Reagan’s Secretary of Education) in 1987: “If anything, increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion […]

President Obama’s 2013 announcement that a set of federal college ratings would be created and then tied to federal financial aid dollars caught the higher education world by surprise. Some media coverage at the time even expected what came to be known as the Postsecondary Institution Ratings System (PIRS) to challenge U.S. News & World […]

The higher education world is abuzz about this week’s great piece in The Wall Street Journal questioning the effectiveness of higher education accrediting agencies, whose seal of approval is required for a college to receive federal student financial aid dollars. In the front-page article, Andrea Fuller and Douglas Belkin of the WSJ note that at […]

Alan Morrison is right that the U.S. News law school rankings are far from perfect and that it’s impossible to determine which school will be best for you from any one ranking. That said, we at Washington Monthly have no plans to get into the business of ranking law schools anytime soon. The primary reason […]

Recent articles by Jeff Selingo in the Washington Post and Matt Reed in Inside Higher Ed have address the idea of “unbundling” college credits. Selingo contends in his piece that two of the reasons why students pay so much for college is that they face the same price if taking 12 or 15 credits per […]

As the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee continues to slowly move toward Higher Education Act reauthorization, the committee held a hearing this week on the possibility of institutional risk-sharing with respect to federal student financial aid programs. This idea, which has bipartisan support at least in principle, would require at least some low-performing […]

The question of whether states adequately fund public higher education has been a common discussion over the last few decades—and the typical answer from the higher education community is a resounding “No.” This is evident in two recent pieces that have gotten a lot of attention in recent weeks. The first piece is a chart […]

Jonathan Rothwell and Siddharth Kulkarni of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings made a big splash today with the release of a set of college “value-added” rankings (link to full study and Inside Higher Ed summary) focused primarily on labor market outcomes. Value-added measures, which adjust for student and institutional characteristics to get a better […]