By Susan M. Dynarski. Politicians who complain about college costs frequently cite two numbers: one trillion and seven million. Student borrowers owe more than $1 trillion, and seven million borrowers are in default, according to the latest Department of Education data. More...

By Ben Castleman. Never before has the topic of student loans featured so prominently in the nascent stages of a presidential campaign. Nearly every major candidate has publicly addressed how they would help Americans better manage their student debt, with policy prescriptions ranging from making college debt-free for all students to simplifying and expanding access to income-based repayment options. More...

By Martha Ross. It’s back-to-school time, the annual ritual marking the end of summer and one of this country’s most widely shared rites of passage. Even so, the flood of youth and young adults into schools and classrooms every fall does not include everyone. One in five high school students does not graduate, not every high school graduate goes to college, and not every college student completes his or her degree. More...

By Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff. Only 20 percent of a child’s waking time is spent in school. That means that even with the best schools, the best teachers and the best educational policy, schools cannot close the achievement gap. To be sure, mountains of research demonstrate the significance of early schooling in changing learning trajectories for young children. More...

By Adela Soliz. In August, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton announced her plan to reduce the cost of higher education. Following on the heels of President Obama’s January 2015 proposal to make community college free, a key component of Clinton’s plan is to improve higher education access and affordability by reducing the amount of tuition paid by students who attend public colleges and universities. More...

The American upper middle class is separating, slowly but surely, from the rest of society. This separation is most obvious in terms of income—where the top fifth have been prospering while the majority lags behind. But the separation is not just economic. Gaps are growing on a whole range of dimensions, including family structure, education, lifestyle, and geography. Indeed, these dimensions of advantage appear to be clustering more tightly together, each thereby amplifying the effect of the other. More...