Inside Higher Ed

In a blog post Thursday, Jason Delisle and Alex Holt of the New America Foundation’s Federal Education Budget Project argued that the new, more generous income-based repayment program -- which allows students to put 10 percent of their monthly discretionary income toward their loans -- makes subsidized loans “obsolete.”

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In a blog post Thursday, Jason Delisle and Alex Holt of the New America Foundation's Federal Education Budget Project argued that the new, more generous income-based repayment program -- which allows students to put 10 percent of their monthly ...

“The president himself, not just his advisers, is very interested in the college cost and college outcomes issue,” said Amy Laitinen, deputy director for higher education at the New America Foundation and a former Education Department policy adviser ...

"I wouldn't bet against them," says Steve Burd, a senior policy analyst at the New America Foundation and frequent critic of for-profits. Burd joined fellow skeptics about the industry as well as some financial analysts in praising Phoenix for making painful but proactive moves to reposition itself ...

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“They want good actors to do something good with this,” said Amy Laitinen, deputy director for higher education at the New America Foundation and a former Education Department official. As a result, the Education Department is trying to seek a balance ...

Andrew Carnegie never intended for the time-based credit hour to be used to measure student learning, according to a new report from the New America Foundation and Education Sector, which tracks the standard's history. But it has become both a measure ...

Imagine you’ve just been accepted to the college of your dreams. At first you feel elation, but then anxiety sets in — will you and your family be able to afford it? Since financial aid packages often blur the line between grants and loans, it might be hard to tell. A $40,000 "award" at one school might seem like a much better deal than a $20,000 package at another — unless you realize the larger "award" consists mostly of loans. With borrowing and loan default rates on the rise, aid packages have huge consequences for students’ educational and financial lives.

July 31 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of the late economist Milton Friedman. As a champion of school vouchers and other well-known conservative ideas, Friedman is far more heralded on the right than the left. But Friedman is also widely cited as the father of one idea that many progressives love: income-contingent student loans, in which borrowers pay a certain percentage of their income and loans are often forgiven after a certain time.

For example, the 35 percent loan repayment rate is an “embarrassingly low number,” wrote Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation, on one of the group’s blogs. “Could any credible person explain the public policy rationale for allowing programs to access federal financial aid when graduates are twice as likely to be in non-repayment as otherwise? I think not.”

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One key to the expansion of competency-based education will be the setting of fair guidelines that are applied systematically across all of higher education, said Amy Laitinen, a panelist who is a policy analyst with the New America Foundation and a former official at the Department of Education.

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