Browsing by Author "Delisle, Jason D."
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- Ensuring Accountability and Effectiveness at the Office of Federal Student AidMiller, Ben; Delisle, Jason D. (American Enterprise Institute, 2019-05-01)As student loans become an increasingly common tool that Americans use to finance higher education, there are significant worries about the management and oversight of the federal financial aid programs. Watch Dogs within the government have raised concerns about a range of issues in the aid program. This report examines whether students are sufficiently protected from low-quality institutions of higher education; whether there is enough accountability around the private companies that service federal student loans on the U.S Department of the Treasury’s behalf; whether the amount of transparency around loan repayment outcomes is sufficient; and how the cost of loan repayment plans is estimated.
- Evidence Against the Free-College Agenda: An Analysis of Prices, Financial Aid, and Affordability at Public UniversitiesDelisle, Jason D. (American Enterprise Institute, 2020-05-01)The 2020 Democratic presidential primary elevated free-college plans to the top of the national agenda, with many candidates proposing expansive programs to help states make public colleges and universities free for in-state students. This report questions the need for free-college policies by assessing affordability and prices at public universities for in-state students after all financial aid is applied and how these “net prices” have changed since the mid-1990s. This report focuses on two groups of students at public four-year institutions that broadly encompass the students whom free-college policies are meant to assist: those from families earning less than $125,000 and those who receive federal Pell Grants, which are generally restricted to families earning less than $75,000.
- Federal Student Loan Defaults: What Happens After Borrowers Default and WhyDelisle, Jason D.; Cooper, Preston; Christensen, Cody (American Enterprise Institute, 2018-08-13)Student loan default has attracted considerable attention from journalists and the research community over the past several years, as the Department of Education projects that more than a quarter of federal student loans to undergraduates will end up in default at some point. But less commonly discussed are the pathways that student borrowers follow after defaulting on a federal loan. In this report, the authors combine a comprehensive review of federal policies surrounding default with an analysis of post-default pathways using a newly constructed federal data set of student borrowers.
- Graduate Schools with The Lowest Rates of Student Loan RepaymentDelisle, Jason D. (American Enterprise Institute, 2018-06-14)Borrowers’ progress in paying their federal student loans is considered a proxy for the quality and value of a higher education institution. Historically, however, efforts to report student loan repayment progress have not focused on graduate and professional degrees. A new data set allows the authors to examine the progress of graduate students from each higher education institution in paying down federal student loans between 2009 and 2014.
- How to Make Student Debt Affordable and EquitableDelisle, Jason D. (American Enterprise Institute, 2019-07-01)The federal student loan program is needlessly complex, fails to offer an effective safety net for borrowers in financial difficulty, and distributes the largest benefits to borrowers who need them the least. This report proposes a plan to simplify the system by providing all eligible students with a single $50,000 line of credit, with repayments structured as an income-share agreement (ISA). Borrowers would remit a small fraction of their earnings to the government on their income taxes, capped at 1.75 times the amount borrowed and for a maximum term of 25 years.
- Lessons from Chile’s Transition to Free CollegeDelisle, Jason D.; Bernasconi, Andres (The Brookings Institution, 2018-03-15)Supporters of free college proposals in the U.S. often look to Europe for case studies, but Chile may actually provide a better comparative study. Tuition free higher education emerged in Chile as a popular idea in the wake of the massive student protests in 2011 in response to what students argued was unaffordable tuition, high student debt, and large concentration of enrollments in private higher education institutions. Chilean lawmakers ultimately adopted a tuition-free policy in 2016, or “gratuidad” in Spanish. This policy is not as sweeping as it may seem. Policymakers included a number of features to limit its cost and scope. Not all colleges and universities are eligible to participate and others opted not to; the benefit is restricted to students with low and middle incomes; and many students eligible for gratuidad already had access to generous amounts of government-issued grants and scholarships. Notably, more low-income students gained access to government aid under “gratuidad” because the program does not require students to meet a test-score cutoff, unlike the system of grants and loans it partially replaced. Public universities, which must offer free tuition under gratuidad, argue that government appropriations are not sufficient to make up for the lost tuition revenue and cover the costs of educating students. Empirical evidence suggests that absent a large increase in capacity at Chilean universities, gratuidad is likely to crowd out low-income students.
- Low-Income Students at Selective Colleges: Disappearing or Holding Steady?Delisle, Jason D.; Cooper, Preston (American Enterprise Institute, 2018-07-12)Alarming stories about increasing economic stratification at America’s selective colleges frequently appear in the news media. But this genre of education journalism comes with several caveats. Much of the research on economic stratification at selective colleges relies on data with limitations that tend to restrict how comprehensively or accurately studies can assess the incomes of students enrolled at selective universities, particularly over time. In this report, the authors set out to address some of the limitations in the literature on enrollment at selective universities and test the popular narratives related to this topic. They use a data set that few researchers have enlisted for this type of analysis, the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, and they define selective colleges as the 200 most selective public and private institutions nationally. They also conduct a separate analysis for public flagship universities. The authors do not find evidence that the share of students enrolled at these 200 institutions who are from the lowest income quartile declined during the years covered in their study.
- The Merit Aid Illusion: The Hidden Winners in a Competition for Affluent College StudentsDelisle, Jason D.; Christensen, Cody (American Enterprise Institute, 2019-05-08)There is widespread concern in the policy community that colleges and universities are increasingly shifting their financial aid budgets to favor students from high-income families. Observers often argue that institutions of higher education are offering more merit aid to the most affluent students, leaving less aid for their low-income peers. In this report, the authors use a comprehensive approach that compares the net tuition that institutions charged students relative to what the institutions spent on each student, focusing on changes between the 2003–04 and 2015–16 academic years. The results contradict the claim that rising institutional aid has increasingly favored wealthy students. They find that the subsidies institutions of higher education provide to low-income students have increased relative to their high-income peers.
- Pell Grant mission creep: How a federal program for low-income families expanded to the middle classDelisle, Jason D.; Christensen, Cody (American Enterprise Institute, 2019-07-11)The federal Pell Grant was designed to help low income students pay for college. But over the past two decades, a growing share of middle-income students have become eligible for the program. This was not policymakers’ explicit goal. The change appears to have happened inadvertently and gradually. Eligibility for a Pell Grant is primarily based on the size of the maximum grant that the program awards, and there is no absolute income cutoff. This report examines how the program came to increasingly provide students from middle-income families with grants, particularly those earning between $50,000 and $60,000, focusing on changes that occurred between the 1995–96 and 2018–19 academic years. It concludes with recommendations for policymakers to improve the targeting of the Pell Grant program.
- Student and parent perspectives on higher education financing: Findings from a Nationally Representative Survey on income-share agreementsDelisle, Jason D. (American Enterprise Institute, 2017-01-26)Income-share agreements (ISAs) are a new higher education financing tool meant to supplement or replace student loans. With an ISA, students agree to pay a set percentage of their future income for a set number of years in return for financing for their college educations. Because the private market for ISAs is small, little is known about the potential demand for the product. Will students and parents be receptive to ISAs or prefer them to traditional student loans? What would a core market for ISAs look like? What features of an ISA do potential recipients like or dislike? What type of student or family might seek out an ISA or opt to use one? To answer these questions and more, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) commissioned a nationally representative survey of 400 college and high school students and 400 parents of current and future college students to assess their interest in ISAs. This report points out the main findings and conclusions.