Robert Kelchen

This post initially appeared at The Conversation, and is co-authored with my Seton Hall colleague Luke Stedrak. States have traditionally provided funding for public colleges and universities based on a combination of the number of students enrolled and how much money they were allocated previously. But, in the face of increasingly tight budgets and pressures […]

This post originally appeared on the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center Chalkboard blog. The stories of financially struggling private colleges, both nonprofit and for-profit, have been told in many news articles. Small private nonprofit colleges are increasing tuition discount rates in an effort to attract a shrinking pool of traditional-age students in many parts of the […]

With cumulative student loan debt exceeding $1.2 trillion and the average net price of college attendance continuing to rise, college affordability has become an important issue in the 2016 presidential election. Most of the attention on this topic has been in the Democratic primary, in which Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State […]

In the last few years, there have been a dizzying number of proposals put forth to reform the complex and confusing system of student financial aid in the United States. From a series of 16 proposals released in the 2012-13 academic year through the Gates Foundation’s Reimagining Aid Design and Delivery project to Sara Goldrick-Rab […]

A January report called “Making Caring Common” sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and endorsed by dozens of researchers and enrollment management professionals made headlines for calling on students seeking to attend elite colleges to focus less on college preparatory tests and more on community service while in high school. (The report also […]

This piece first appeared at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center Chalkboard blog. As student loan debt has exceeded $1.2 trillion and many colleges continue to raise tuition prices faster than inflation, students, their families, and policymakers have further scrutinized how much money students pay to attend college. A key metric of affordability is the net […]

The three Democratic candidates for president all released their plans for higher education fairly early in the campaign cycle, with Sen. Clinton, Gov. O’Malley, and Sen. Sanders’s plans all including some variation of tuition-free or debt-free public college. These plans are all likely dead on arrival in Congress due to their price tags ($350 billion […]

As outstanding student loan debt has roughly tripled in the past decade to reach $1.2 trillion, many people have pushed for measures that would reduce the repayment burden on former students. In the last few years, there were efforts to stop subsidized student loan interest rates from doubling (which were largely successful) and more generous […]

Earlier this week, I unveiled my third annual list of the year’s top higher education policy issues and events (part 1 and part 2). Now it’s time to turn to the “not top ten” list, with Kean University getting a pass this year for topping the 2014 list with its $219,000 conference table. 10. Paul […]

Yesterday, I revealed the first half of my list of top ten higher education events of 2015. Today, I reveal the top five events from the past year, with a list of ‘not top ten’ events (events that either didn’t go as planned or don’t benefit students or the general public) to come tomorrow. Federal […]