The widespread discussion about the market for law graduates ignores an essential fact: it's not a single market at all. Employment opportunities vary dramatically across schools, yet tuition prices fail to reflect those differences. As a consequence, many schools with the worst placement rates...

A college degree is often viewed as a key step toward better employment and higher earnings. Many community college students, however, never graduate and cannot reap the financial benefits associated with a college degree. Although existing research suggests that financial aid interventions can...

There is ample concern that college students are making ill-informed student loan decisions with potentially negative consequences to themselves and the broader economy. This paper reports the results of a randomized field experiment in which college students are provided salient information...

A sample by Iuliano (2012) estimates 169,774 student debtors filed bankruptcy in 2007 but only 213 debtors (0.13%) also filed a costly Adversary Proceeding attempting to prove that repayment of educational debt would impose undue hardship. In 50% of these undue hardship cases student debtors...

Designing an effective framework for financing higher education is a major issue facing policymakers in developed and developing countries. While we have a good understanding of how college financing options affect students college outcomes in developed countries, less is known about the impact...

High-stakes testing pressures schools to raise test scores, but schools respond to pressure in different ways. Some responses produce real, broad increases in learning, but other responses merely inflate average scores by narrowing instruction around tested skills and narrowing testing to...

Income contingent loans (ICLs) are a financial tool that optimizes the transactional efficiencies involved in the government monopoly in taxing personal income. It protects the borrowers against periods of low income, as instalments vary according to fluctuations in their incomes over the...

We quantify the effect of school voucher spending on initial earnings. We use administrative data on the monetary resources received by schools from a targeted voucher program implemented in Chile. We merge this dataset with education and labor market administrative records for the universe of...

Die akademische Qualität der Lehre lässt sich nur schwer messen. Dagegen ist es relativ einfach, die späteren Einkommenszuwächse durch ein Studium zu bestimmen. Das ist für private wie staatliche Allokationsentscheidungen wichtig, etwa ob jemand aus finanziellen Gründen studieren soll, was...

This paper uses new administrative data with detailed borrower information and lengthy repayment histories from the Canada Student Loans Program (CSLP) to mea- sure rates of return on undergraduate student loans. We document substantial heterogeneity in returns based on information available at...