New Data on Long-Term Student Loan Default Rates
In recent years, more data have come out on how well students are able to manage repaying their loans beyond the three-year window currently used for federal accountability purposes (via cohort default rates). A great 2015 paper by Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis used tax records merged with data from the National Student Loan Data… Read more »
Examining Trends in Student Loan Repayment Rates
It’s been a good week for higher education data nerds. The Department of Education released updated student loan cohort default rates on Wednesday afternoon (see my summary here), followed by an update to the massive College Scorecard dataset on Thursday morning. This is the third update to the Scorecard, with this year’s update also featuring… Read more »
A Peek Inside the New IPEDS Outcome Measures Dataset
Much of higher education policy focuses on “traditional” college students—those who started college at age 18 after getting dropped off in the family station wagon or minivan, enrolled full-time, and stayed at that institution until graduation. Yet although this is how many policymakers and academics experienced college (I’m no exception), this represents a minority of… Read more »
Comments on the Trump Higher Education Budget Proposal
The Trump administration released its first full budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2018 today, and it is safe to say that it represents a sharp break from the Obama administration’s budget proposals. The proposed discretionary budget for the Department of Education is about $69 billion, $10 billion less than the Fiscal Year 2017 budget. Below,… Read more »
Five Takeaways from Five Years of Public Engagement
When I was beginning my final year of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I started a blog with the goal of thinking through some of the interesting issues in higher education policy by writing about them. I joined Twitter a few months later (in February 2013), and I’ve done my best to consistently… Read more »
