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Category: Student Aid

What Works in Reducing Inequality

A couple of weeks ago, the World Bank published a very interesting little paper which received little attention.  What Works to Reduce Inequalities in Higher Education?  A Systematic Review of the (Quasi-) Experimental Literature of Outreach and Financial Aid, by Koen Geven and Estelle Herbaut, needs to be read by everyone with an interest in expanding access to higher education.  While there have been many papers which have used meta-analysis techniques to look at financial aid programs, this paper extends those

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June 3, 2019 No Comments

That Augar Report

If you pay attention to UK higher education, you will know that yesterday the long-awaited Augar Report (technically, the Post-18 Review of Education and Funding: Independent Panel Report, but its usually named after its chair, Philip Augar).  It’s a big study – over 200 fairly densely-argued pages – and since I’ve spent the entire day in meetings in Washington DC I haven’t had the time to peruse the document closely and my commentary is based to a considerable degree on

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May 31, 2019 No Comments

Income Share Agreements (Part 2)

Yesterday, I described Income Share Agreements (ISAs) as basically a version of Milton Friedman-like Human Capital Contracts, which are very much like privately administered graduate taxes.  The question we will answer today is: under what circumstances would a private ISA be preferable to a public student loan? Assuming both were equally available and equally subsidized, then in theory a student would be indifferent between the two.  But there are a few reasons why this is unlikely to be the case;

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March 5, 2019 No Comments

Income Share Agreements (Part 1)

Every once in awhile, someone comes up a “new” concept in student financing and people get very excited about it.  As in most other policy fields, the “newness” is a matter of perspective and debate: there’s only so many ways you can lend students money and many of the “new” ideas are just old ideas that got discarded for various reasons and resurrect either because circumstances have changed or because proponents aren’t aware of the history (or both).  The latest

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March 4, 2019 No Comments

Rationing Loans

While student loans are cheaper (and hence more commonly used) than grants, they still cost money, both in terms of interest subsidies and in terms of loan losses through loan defaults.  As a result, nowhere are they unlimited in scope.  Every government finds ways to ration loans.  Today, I thought I’d go through some of the ways governments do that and – in passing – help everyone understand in what ways North American loan systems are generous in comparison with

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February 8, 2019 1 Comment
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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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