By Andy Thomason. Any employee will tell you that workplace meetings stink. But there is something especially rank about faculty meetings, complete with gaggles of Ph.D.s seated before a rotating cast of administrators and their jargon-laden PowerPoint slides. More...

By Goldie Blumenstyk. The White House on Saturday unveiled the new college-information website that it developed once it abandoned its ill-fated plan to rate colleges. More...

By Doug Ward. Last fall one of my sons anguished over the price of a $150 textbook for a college calculus class. He looked for a used version or a rental, to no avail. More...

By Sheila Suess Kennedy. Americans are increasingly concerned about two seemingly unrelated issues: a distressing lack of civic literacy and informed civic engagement in the general public, and the escalating burden of student-loan debt. More...

By Ry Marcattilio-McCracken. I’ve fully embraced the benefits and strictures of being a professor in the digital age. In both my online courses and live ones, I have come to rely upon our online classroom portal to disseminate course information, post reminders, log grades, and to serve as the primary method by which students turn in their papers. More...

By Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis. A crisis in student loans? How changes in the characteristics of borrowers and in the institutions they attended contributed to rising loan defaults
This paper examines the rise in student loan delinquency and default drawing on a unique set of administrative data on federal student borrowing, matched to earnings records from de- identified tax records. Most of the increase in default is associated with the rise in the number of borrowers at for-profit schools and, to a lesser extent, 2-year institutions and certain other non-selective institutions, whose students historically composed only a small share of borrowers. More...

In July, world leaders, education experts, and civil society counterparts met in Oslo, Norway for the Oslo Summit on Education for Development. The Summit aimed to strengthen the level of cooperation and commitment in key actors to ensure that all children have access to a good quality education. A recent Brookings report,"Financing Education: Opportunities for Global Action," prepared as a background input for the summit, explores how the basic education targets could be financed based on an analysis of education resources over the previous decade. More...

By Liz Sablich. A new Brookings paper, released yesterday as part of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) Fall 2015 Conference, is generating headlines for its new and significant contribution to the understanding of student debt issues in the United States.  In “A crisis in student loans? How changes in the characteristics of borrowers and in the institutions they attended contributed to rising loan defaults,” authors Adam Looney of the U.S. Treasury Department and Constantine Yannelis of Stanford University effectively overcome the data limitations that have long encumbered research and policymaking in this area. They do so by linking Department of Education data on student borrowing with earnings information derived from de-identified tax records. More...