College affordability

Core faculty

Katherine Michelmore

Professor of Public Policy

Katherine Michelmore is a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Michelmore is a leading scholar and educator on the social safety net, education policy, labor economics, and economic demogr...

Affiliated faculty

Susan M. Dynarski

Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

[email protected]

Susan M. Dynarski is a professor at Harvard University, where she holds an appointment at the Graduate School of Education. She recently moved from the University of Michigan, where she held appointments in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Pol...

Alumni

Jordy Berne

Associate Economist, RAND

[email protected]

Jordy Berne is an Associate Economist at RAND. His research examines the drivers of economic opportunity, with a particular focus on education policy, childhood circumstances, and social safety net programs. Berne specializes in causal inference meth...

Alumni

Tamara W. Linkow

Senior Director of Education Evaluation Studies, American Institutes for Research

Tamara Linkow is a senior director at AIR. In this role, she provides direction and support across AIR’s portfolio of federal education evaluation studies. With over 15 years of experience in research and evaluation, she has led impact and descriptiv...

College Course Map

The challengeOver the last two decades, investments in digital infrastructure for statewide longitudinal data systems mean researchers now have access to longitudinal postsecondary transcript data. However, because this data was created for administr...

Publication

Michigan’s HAIL scholarship program meaningfully changes students’ college trajectory, report shows

May 19, 2021

Research for years has shown that low-income students face unique barriers to applying to colleges, let alone being able to afford tuition and living costs. To address the concern that not enough high-achieving, low-income students were applying to o...

Michigan’s HAIL scholarship program meaningfully changes students’ college trajectory, report shows

News

Dynarski’s research and advocacy for a simplified FAFSA becomes reality

Apr 23, 2021

Professor Sue Dynarski laid out the reality of pursuing higher education for many students in a 2015 NYT op-ed. “Many smart students forgo college in the mistaken belief that they cannot afford it,” she wrote. “The financial aid system, which is inte...

Susan Dynarski: University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor Lecture

Publication

Dynarski’s research shows default options key to student loan repayment

Feb 13, 2021

Susan Dynarski’s recent research, “Designed to fail: Effects of the default option and information complexity on student loan repayment,” shows the powerful effects of default options and how making an income driven repayment (IDR) plan the default o...

News

The student loan system has "layers and layers of dysfunction"

Jan 6, 2021 "The student loan system has 'layers and layers of dysfunction'" podcast

As President-elect Joe Biden mulls forgiving $10,000 in student loan debt — and leading Democrats and others on his left push for more — one of our listeners wants to know: What would that do to the economy, and is it even possible for the White Hou...

News

Low-income students lose ground

Dec 4, 2020 "Low-income students lose ground" article

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the gaps between low-income and high-income students, according to an editorial in Science magazine by Ford School professor Sue Dynarski, written with Christopher Avery of Harvard and Sarah Turner from the Unive...

News

How the federal government could make college free

Oct 13, 2020 "How the federal government could make college free" article

"Kevin Stange is quoted in a recent Market Watch article." (read more)

Two students walking on a college campus

News

Applications for financial aid lagging among Michigan low-income students

Aug 9, 2020

The economic hardship for low-income families caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may have another casualty: high school seniors accessing financial aid to attend college. Applications for federal and state financial aid for college are a leading indicat...

Stange and co-authors study cost differences across fields of study at colleges and universities

News

Why the move to online instruction won’t reduce college costs

Jul 28, 2020 "Why the move to online instruction won’t reduce college costs" article

"As COVID-19 swept across the country in March, colleges shuttered and millions of students and instructors were propelled into a world of distance education." (read more)

News

Susan Dynarski explains who struggles most with student debt

Jul 11, 2019

News coverage about student debt is piling up, just like the student debt itself. But the people who are struggling the most with student debt aren’t the ones you may expect, explains Susan Dynarski, professor of public policy, in an interview with E...

Susan Dynarski explains who struggles most with student debt

News

Dynarski testifies before House Subcommittee on Education and Labor

May 10, 2019

College access has been getting a lot of buzz, but getting more people to enroll in higher education is only the first step. Helping people graduate is proving a larger hurdle, something the House Committee on Education and Labor’s Subcommittee on Hi...

State & Hill

HAILed it - Tuition-free promise attracts low-income students to U-M

Apr 5, 2019

A research study that centered around a large maize-and-blue-striped envelope caught the attention of more than just the students it sought to target. The work launched a larger initiative at the University of Michigan and is being lauded as transfor...

HAILed it - Tuition-free promise attracts low-income students to U-M

News

It’s HAILing coverage for Susan Dynarski and team

Dec 21, 2018

Last week, Susan Dynarski, Ford School professor, and her fellow researchers released a new research study titled “Closing the Gap: The Effect of a Targeted, Tuition-Free Promise on College Choices of High-Achieving, Low-Income Students.” Since then,...

It’s HAILing coverage for Susan Dynarski and team

News

HAILed it: Tuition-free promise effectively recruits low-income students to U-M

Dec 12, 2018

ANN ARBOR—High-achieving, low-income students who received personalized commitment of financial aid are more than twice as likely to apply, be admitted to and enroll in a top-tier university, according to a new University of Michigan study. Researc...

HAILed it: Tuition-free promise effectively recruits low-income students to U-M

EPI Policy briefs

The Effectiveness of Need-Based Financial Aid: Evidence from Michigan's Tuition Incentive Program

June 1, 2026

Kevin Stange, Kelcie Ferrara-Gerson, Margaret Peterman, Nelson Oviedo, Nathan Sotherland, Nicole Wagner Lam, Marissa Thompson, Katherine Michelmore

The Michigan Tuition Incentive Program (TIP) is a first-dollar financial aid program that supports low-income students in college. TIP typically covers the cost of tuition and fees for an associate's degree at Michigan community colleges and select o...

Students working together on laptop computer

EPI Policy briefs

Michigan's Tuition Incentive Program: Understanding Take-Up

May 13, 2026

Elizabeth Burland, Jasmina Camo-Biogradlija, Xavier Fields, Megan Tompkins-Stange, Jessica Vivar

This report explores the factors that influence take-up of Michigan's Tuition Incentive Program (TIP), one of the state's largest financial aid programs that provides free community college to low-income students based on their childhood participatio...

EPI Policy briefs

Michigan’s Tuition Incentive Program: An Initial Look at Take-up

January 13, 2025

Kelcie Ferrara-Gerson, Katherine Michelmore, Nathan Sotherland, Kevin Stange, Marissa Thompson

Like many states across the country, Michigan has an ambitious goal for increasing postsecondary attainment. In 2019, Governor Whitmer announced a goal for 60% of the adult population to have a post-secondary certificate or degree by 2030. Increasing...

Photo of students sitting in a hallway cooridor

EPI Policy briefs

Increasing Economic Diversity at a Flagship University

April 1, 2021

Jasmina Camo-Biogradlija, Susan Dynarski, Katherine Michelmore, Nicole Wagner Lam, Stephanie Owen

Research shows that low-income students face unique barriers to applying to colleges. The HAIL (High Achieving Involved Leader) study at the University of Michigan (U-M) explored whether providing an early, four-year guarantee of free tuition and fee...

EPI Policy briefs

Applications for Financial Aid Lagging Among Low-Income Students

August 1, 2020

Sabrina Solanki, Kevin Stange, Orlando Sanchez Zavala, Catherine Brown

Applications for federal and state financial aid for college are a leading indicator of how many students will enroll in and complete a college degree. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and the Tuition Incentive Program (TIP), a Mi...

EPI Working papers

Closing the Gap: The Effect of a Targeted, Tuition-Free Promise on College Choices of High Achieving, Low-Income Students

December 1, 2018

Susan Dynarski, Katherine Michelmore, Stephanie Owen, CJ Labissi

Low-income students, even those with strong academic credentials, are unlikely to attend a highly selective college. With a field experiment, we test an intervention to increase enrollment of low-income students at the highly selective University of ...

The University of Michigan's Hail Scholarship

EPI Working papers

Nudges, College Enrollment, and College Persistence: Evidence from a Statewide Experiment in Michigan

May 1, 2018

Joshua Hyman

I conduct a statewide experiment in Michigan with nearly 50,000 high-achieving high school seniors. Treated students are mailed a letter encouraging them to consider college and providing them with the web address of a college information website. I ...

EPI Working papers

Getting Student Financing Right in the US: Lessons from Australia and England

March 1, 2017

Susan Dynarski, Nicholas Barr, Bruce Chapman, Lorraine Dearden

The US student loan system is currently in crisis. US graduates owe $1.3 trillion in student loans; seven million borrowers are in default and even more are in arrears. The impact on borrowers is catastrophic. We argue that this is mainly due to the ...

EPI Working papers

Price Regulation, Price Discrimination, and Equality of Opportunity in Higher Education: Evidence from Texas

December 1, 2016

Kevin Stange, Rodney Andrews

This paper assesses the importance of price regulation and price discrimination to low-income students' access to opportunities in public higher education. Following a policy change in the state of Texas that shifted tuition-setting authority away fr...

EPI Working papers

Tax Benefits for College Attendance

March 1, 2016

Susan Dynarski, Judith Scott-Clayton

National efforts to promote college enrollment are increasingly delivered through tax-based assistance, including tax credits and deductions for tuition and fees, tax-advantaged college savings plans, and student loan interest deductions. This paper ...

EPI Policy briefs

Revisiting FAFSA Simplification: Expanding Access to the IRS Data Retrieval Tool

May 15, 2015

Susan Dynarski, Mark Wiederspan

We describe how the complexity in the FAFSA hinders students’ ability to meet financial aid deadlines and examine the feasibility of using a simplified formula to determine aid eligibility.

EPI Working papers

Marginal Pricing and Student Investment in Higher Education

December 1, 2014

Steven Hemelt, Kevin Stange

This paper examines the effect of marginal price on students’ educational investments using rich administrative data on students at Michigan public universities. Marginal price refers to the amount colleges charge for each additional credit taken in ...