Austin Slaughter

The pressure to add advanced nursing degrees to ED's list of professional programs, which would allow students to borrow more, continues to grow

150 lawmakers, including 20 Republicans, signed a letter urging ED to reconsider

The big question here is whether the administration is going to start using FERPA investigations to stymie research it doesn't like or if this investigation is specific to this project focused on student voting

Either way, I expect it to make colleges more hesitant to share data with researchers

ED Releases Recommendations to Reimagine IES The Education Department has released recommendations on “reimagining” the Institute of Education Sciences, the central federal education data collection and research funding agency, which the Trump a...

ED Releases Recommendations to Reimagine IES
www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

"Heroes of American Education" being honored on the ED building:

Benjamin Franklin
Martin Luther King
Ann Sullivan
Booker T. Washington
Catharine Beecher
Charlie Kirk

I don't think I've shared on here yet that I am leading an RCT of a program that helps borrowers manage loan repayment and avoid delinquency and default

The first report, with estimated impacts on enrollment in IDR and delinquency, is set to come out in 2027

www.mdrc.org/work/project...

Dozens of my former colleagues lost their careers because of DOGE in order to "reduce wasteful government spending"

Data from 25+ of MDRC’s Postsecondary RCTs Available via ICPSR The Higher Education Randomized Controlled Trial’s (THE-RCT) restricted access file is available at ICPSR, includes de-identified data from 25+ postsecondary RCTs.

This is a fantastic resource for students looking for a paper topic

25 RCTs, with documentation and data

Thank you, @mdrc-news.bsky.social!

www.cos.io/blog/data-fr...

Thinking of running an RCT in postsecondary education?

MDRC has created a fantastic set of resources to help you in projecting minimum effect sizes, randomizing, and processing data

Proud to have helped advise this project!

www.mdrc.org/the-rct

Freezing tuition revenue is a great way to get colleges to serve fewer students

Make that three weeks

MDRC has over two decades of experience conducting randomized controlled trials in higher education

And, for some reason, we've decided to give away all our resources and best practices to help other researchers conduct high-quality, efficient RCTs

Check out the website soft launch:

How does one square the claim that "new grad loan limits aren't cutting access" with this research?

www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/FRBP...

An Earnings Test for Higher Education Risks Diverting Students from Some Meaningful Careers Without a comprehensive assessment of an undergraduate program’s academic, personal, and societal value, policymakers risk implementing approaches that disco…

This is a good, concise accounting from @urbaninstitute.bsky.social of the issues with earnings tests for postsecondary degrees

E.g., failing to account for differences in employer benefits, student characteristics, non-financial benefits, and societal benefits

www.urban.org/urban-wire/e...

Norman Rockwell's Freedom of Speech painting

A single missing elderly woman, while sad, should not be the entire A block on every news program for two weeks

Congress, Courts Stymie Trump’s Effort to Cap Research Costs One year after the Trump administration tried to cap reimbursements for indirect research costs, federal agencies have halted their plans.

Science is winning

www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

Lawmakers maintain support for Institute of Education Sciences in latest federal funding package The latest federal funding package bodes well for our nation’s federal education data and research infrastructure. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the backbone of education research, evalua...

Lots of news in the world, so I'm grateful to see this IHEP post about how Congress quietly repudiated the damage the president want to do to education research in the new appropriations package. www.ihep.org/lawmakers-ma...

It will be interesting to see if this changes in future years. For example, now that Ivy Plus colleges see they fell short of racial diversity goals, do they increase the amount of weight they place on income in admissions decisions?

Paper here:

edworkingpapers.com/sites/defaul...

Four graphs showing college enrollment for four groups of students: low-income URM, low-income non-URM, high-income URM, and high-income non-URM. Each graph has a line for different types of colleges based on selectivity. The URM graphs show their enrollment at Ivy Plus colleges decreased after SCOTUS struck down affirmative action. The low-income non-URM graph shows their enrollment increased at Ivy Plus colleges, particularly for students with SAT scores above 1400. There is little change in enrollment patterns for high-income non-URM students.

New study shows after SCOTUS struck down affirmative action the number of underrepresented minority (URM) students enrolling in Ivy Plus colleges decreased by ~450

The number of low-income non-URM students increased by ~120, suggesting these colleges placed more weight on income in absence of race

The US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government every year from 1994 to 2023.

The Cato study provides the first-ever 30-year analysis of the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets.

https://ow.ly/jy8a50Y8kM3

State funding for public higher ed went up by approximately 0.7% in FY26, the fourteenth consecutive increase but below the rate of inflation this time. Eight states cut funding by at least five percent, setting off warnings going forward.

shef.sheeo.org/wp-content/u...

Except the professional degree designation *is* about value--just in a ham-handed way

Policymakers allowed students in professional programs to go into more debt because those programs are perceived to generally be more valuable

It's relatively easy to communicate to the public "X is broken." It's harder to communicate "X is broken in this particular way, and here's how to fix it."

Only communicating the former can pave the way for people to implement reforms that might have nothing to do with the way X is broken

FWIW I would consider the jury still out on a potential earnings effect at only six years after high school graduation

I have recently come to terms with the fact my job is now ~40% bugging people until they do the things I need them to do

New RCT findings from MDRC on the long-term effects of NYC's Small Schools of Choice--high schools with 100 students/grade that emphasize personalized student-teacher relationships:

-10pp increase in college enrollment after HS (53% vs 43%)
-3pp increase in bachelor degree attainment (15% vs 12%)

Two-thirds of the US population!

State universities would be liable for part of defaulted student loans under House bill • Iowa Capital Dispatch Universities would be liable for portions of defaulted student loans under a bill that advanced out of an Iowa House subcommittee.

The Iowa Legislature is considering a bill to require its universities to pay 25% of students' defaulted loans

Risk-sharing is not a new idea, but enacting it at the state level creates an odd dynamic of effectively sending state dollars to the federal gov't

iowacapitaldispatch.com/briefs/state...

Sounds like staffing cuts at ED are preventing it from fulfilling its legal obligations

Glad to see many people recommended better peer review quality control for IES proposals

I could tell you some real horror stories...