It’s Friday, so it seems like a good day to write about one of the crazy books I have on my shelves (which, as any of my staff can tell you, is a theme that could last for quite some time). Here’s one that’s kind of relevant, given that it’s about an event that ended 50 years ago next week: Shut It Down! A College in Crisis, which is about the strike at San Francisco State (SFS) College in 1968-1969.
Very sadly, Princeton labor economist Alan Krueger died by suicide last week. Krueger was much-loved in the profession. He produced an enormous amount of work on the minimum wage and for a couple of years served as Chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. He also thought a lot about education and famously declared in one paper (co-authored with Stacy Dale) that the effects of attending an extremely selective university (i.e. one of the top Ivy League Schools) on
The following statement was issued in a Massachusetts courtroom yesterday morning. Dozens of individuals involved in a nationwide conspiracy that facilitated cheating on college entrance exams and the admission of students to elite universities as purported athletic recruits were arrested by federal agents in multiple states and charged in documents unsealed on March 12, 2019, in federal court in Boston. Athletic coaches from Yale, Stanford, USC, Wake Forest and Georgetown, among others, are implicated, as well as parents and exam
One of the weirder sub-fields of student loan policy concerns how loans are accounted for in national budgets and statistics. This sounds like an abstract consideration, but in fact it has the potential to drive student aid and access policy in some very unexpected directions. (I know, I know, this may be my wonkiest post ever, and I may get one or two things wrong because I’m not an accounting expert, so bear with me). For a really good primer
If you spend any time looking at student aid research, you’ll be struck by how much empirical evidence there is on the effectiveness of grants (or, more broadly, “changes in net tuition”), and how little there is in terms of the effectiveness of loans. Thus, one might be tempted to think that this means grants are effective and loans are not, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are a couple of reasons why it has been difficult
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