Browsing by Author "Baum, Sandy"

Now showing 1 - 17 of 17
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    After Graduate and Professional School: How Students Fare in the Labor Market
    Baum, Sandy; Steele, Patricia (The Urban Institute, 2018-02-16)
    Many people enroll in graduate and professional degree programs to advance their careers and increase their earnings. On average, advanced degrees are valuable in the labor market, but students pursuing a graduate or professional degree still face considerable uncertainty. This report explores employment and earnings outcomes among advanced degree recipients. Examining these outcomes across degree, occupational, and demographic categories paints a nuanced picture of the payoffs of graduate and professional education.
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    Community Colleges: Multiple Missions, Diverse Student Bodies, and a Range of Policy Solutions
    Baime, David; Baum, Sandy (Urban Institute, 2016-08-01)
    The national commitment to increasing postsecondary educational attainment, combined with growing economic anxiety, has made community colleges the focus of many federal and state policy initiatives. There is good reason for this: by virtue of their nature and reach, community colleges—public institutions of higher education that predominantly award associate degrees and sometimes bachelor’s degrees—are indispensable to meeting national goals for educational attainment as well as for the development of a productive workforce. But no national system of community colleges exists, and national policies to improve opportunity and success at community colleges should reflect their diversity of students, programs, missions, and funding structures. In this report, the authors focus on key variables that differentiate community colleges, and elaborate on their significance for students. They first describe the range of missions and programs across institutions in this sector and explore differences in their student bodies. They then focus on student financing and national policies designed to address both affordability and broader concerns about student success. Finally, they discuss how some community colleges, frequently in partnership with states and other stakeholders, are effectively working on a student success agenda.
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    Delivering Early Information about College Financial Aid: Exploring the Options for Middle School Students
    Baum, Sandy; Minton, Sarah; Blatt, Lorraine (The Urban Institute, 2015-07-15)
    Postsecondary education plays a vital role in generating opportunities for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to improve their prospects, and financial aid is critical to making this education accessible. Providing information early could help overcome the lack of awareness of financial aid, limited understanding of the system, and the tendency to overestimate the price of college. This study examines approaches to using participation in social service programs or the filing of federal income taxes as an avenue to increasing early awareness of college financial aid. Although there is not one simple route, several communication avenues through established programs have potential.
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    Endowments and Federal Tax Policy
    Baum, Sandy (The Urban Institute, 2019-07-01)
    Understanding how endowment assets are distributed across institutions, why institutions build endowments, and the arguments for and against subsidizing higher education by exempting endowment income from taxation sheds light on the merits of this policy change. The discussion in this brief and the analysis on which it is based lead to the conclusion that it is vital that the inequality of resources across educational institutions be diminished. But if the goal is to increase college access, affordability, and success, taxing endowments is unlikely to be effective. Instead, the focus should be on increasing subsidies to low- and moderate-income students and the institutions that educate them.
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    Examining the Federal-State Partnership in Higher Education
    Baum, Sandy (Urban Institute, 2017-05-01)
    Each state has its own system of public higher education. States design, regulate, and fund the public colleges and universities that educate the states’ residents. In many states, local governments also provide funds, particularly for community colleges. At the same time, the federal government provides a growing share of the funding for these institutions, and with the funding come motivation and responsibility for monitoring quality and outcomes. This trend raises difficult questions about how federal and state governments should work together to ensure the efficient and equitable use of public funds to provide high-quality widespread postsecondary educational opportunity. This brief provides background information and perspectives to help foster a productive national conversation about the federal-state partnership. It asks what the main problems facing the current system are and what the goals of any efforts for reform should be. Drawing on three recent papers from the Urban Institute, this brief provides background for developing constructive strategies, focusing on potential pitfalls. The argument does not support wholesale reform or a shift to a more centralized, federalized system of higher education. But it does support a more conscious and nuanced role for the federal government and greater coordination across state lines to improve educational outcomes for students across the nation.
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    The Federal-State Higher Education Partnership How States Manage Their Roles
    Chingos, Matthew M.; Baum, Sandy (Urban Institute, 2017-05-16)
    State funding of public higher education is central to college access and affordability and to postsecondary educational attainment. State support translates into resources colleges and universities can spend on instruction and other activities or to charge lower tuition prices, especially to in-state students. Each state develops its own higher education systems and determines funding for public institutions and for financial aid for its students. Differences in institutional structures and funding models combine with economic and demographic differences to create sharp variation in the educational opportunities available to students across the nation. This brief describes differences across states in per student funding levels, distribution of funding across postsecondary sectors, systems for determining these funding patterns, and state grant aid offered to students who enroll in these institutions. It examines how these policies interact with federal subsidies for college students and how they further or counteract the goals underlying federal policies.
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    The Federal-State Higher Education Partnership Lessons from Other Federal-State Partnerships
    Conklin, Kristin D.; Baum, Sandy (Urban Institute, 2017-05-01)
    Lessons from federal-state partnerships in other public policy areas might inform efforts to strengthen the partnership in higher education. This paper looks to the forms of cooperation between these levels of government in transportation, housing, and elementary through secondary education as examples. The federal role should have clearly defined goals, including strengthening the social norm of equitable access to high quality postsecondary education. Preserving flexibility for the states is a critical component of effective federal policy.
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    Financing Graduate and Professional Education
    Baum, Sandy; Steele, Patricia (Urban Institute, 2018-01-04)
    There is wide variation in the way graduate and professional degree students finance their education. Research doctoral students outside of the for-profit sector get considerable aid from their institutions; many master’s degree students are employed while they are in school; and professional degree student are most reliant on student debt.
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    Financing Public Higher Education: Variation across States
    Baum, Sandy; Johnson, Martha C. (Urban Institute, 2015-11-01)
    In this report, the authors examine patterns of public college pricing, funding, and enrollment across the nation, as well as instructional expenditures and student grant aids. Because most students remain in state to take advantage of lower tuition, a clear view of cross-state variation is vital for understanding the nature and extent of barriers to college affordability and for developing policies to address those barriers.
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    Graduate and Professional School Debt: How Much Students Borrow
    Baum, Sandy; Steele, Patricia (The Urban Institute, 2018-01-05)
    Graduate and professional degree students hold a sizable amount of outstanding student debt, and these students on average borrow more than three times as much as undergraduate students. Research doctoral students borrow less than professional degree students and black graduate students accrue higher levels of debt than others pursuing similar degrees.
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    A Principled Federal Role in Higher Education
    Baum, Sandy; Harris, Douglas N.; Kelly, Andrew P.; Mitchell, Ted (Urban Institute, 2017-09-01)
    A new research brief from the Urban Institute outlines perspectives by nationally respected scholars and experts regarding some of the most critical issues in higher education, along with recommendations on evidence-based policy solutions. The goal of the report is to offer a framework for what it calls a “principled approach” to the federal role in higher education.
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    Redesigning the Pell Grant Program for the Twenty-First Century
    Baum, Sandy; Scott-Clayton, Judith (The Hamilton Project, 2013-10-21)
    Developed more than four decades ago, the Pell Grant program has expanded in sheer numbers without evolving structurally. While it continues to encourage recent high school graduates from poor families to undertake various forms of higher education, today’s limited funding prospects, low degree-completion rates, and workforce realities demand that the program be redesigned. In this article, the authors propose three major structural reforms. Taken together, the reforms that they propose would for the first time make Pell a true program, and not just a grant, thus inducing its beneficiaries to become full participants, and not just recipients.
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    Reforming Federal Student Loan Repayment: A Single, Automatic, Income-Driven System
    Chingos, Matthew M.; Baum, Sandy (Urban Institute, 2017-09-01)
    The federal role in higher education has grown over the past two decades, and now a new administration has the opportunity to strengthen policies that support students and their colleges and universities. To help inform these decisions, the Urban Institute convened a bipartisan group of scholars and policy advisers to write a series of memos highlighting some of the most critical issues in higher education and recommending policy solutions. This report proposes a new system of income-driven loan repayment designed to address some of the problems with the current repayment options.
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    Reshaping Parent PLUS Loans: Recommendations for Reforming the Parent PLUS Program
    Baum, Sandy; Blagg, Kristin; Fishman, Rachel (Urban Institute, 2019-04-01)
    The use of Parent PLUS loans—federal loans for parents of dependent undergraduates—is increasing, even as student borrowing is declining. Parent PLUS loans were originally designed to provide liquidity to high-asset families who could not cover their expected family contributions (EFCs) with current income. But policymakers have pushed the Parent PLUS program past this original mission. Now, just 38 percent of Parent PLUS loans are equal to or less than the family’s EFC, and loans are too frequently issued to borrowers who cannot repay. In this article, the authors argue that stopgap solutions, such as expanding income-driven repayment (IDR) for Parent PLUS borrowers, will only worsen the problem, providing large subsidies to affluent families. They propose returning to the program’s original intent, lending limited amounts to parents who can repay and providing additional financial aid directly to low-income students, rather than to their parents.
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    The Role of College and University Endowments
    Baum, Sandy; Lee, Victoria (Urban Institute, 2019-07-01)
    This report examines the justification for the tax-exempt status of public and private nonprofit college and university endowments—and the public subsidy that policy involves—and the merits of the arguments for and against modifying this exemption. The authors find that taxing endowments is not the most effective way for the federal government to increase college access, affordability, and success for low-income students. Instead, the federal government should provide more funds to under resourced institutions and students. At the same time, colleges and universities that hold significant endowment assets should redouble their efforts to make larger contributions to increasing educational opportunities for students from low- and moderate-income backgrounds, reducing inequality, and building a society committed to these goals.
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    Strengthening Federal Student Aid: Reforming the Student Loan Repayment System
    Baum, Sandy; Johnson, Martha C. (Urban Institute, 2016-02-01)
    Amid concerns about student debt and default, many experts are calling for an income-driven student loan repayment system that will better protect students and significantly reduce defaults. The review of detailed proposals related to income-driven repayment in the Strengthening Federal Student Aid report reveals how alternative designs would lead to different outcomes for borrowers and for taxpayers, suggesting some important guidelines. The program should provide insurance for borrowers with unforeseen difficulties in repayment. Rather than minimizing payments, the design should ensure that most borrowers eventually repay and that incentives for institutions to overcharge and for students to over-borrow are minimized.
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    Who Goes to Grad School and Who Succeeds?
    Baum, Sandy; Steele, Patricia (Urban Institute, 2017-01-01)
    This report argues that students from higher-income backgrounds are more likely than others to enroll in advanced degree programs, more likely to complete their programs, and more likely to earn degrees that promise high value in the labor market.