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...
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...
Dec 18, 2019"Mike Widerspan as ED of Iowa College Aid" page
The Iowa College Aid Board of Commissioners has selected Dr. Mark Wiederspan as the agency’s new Executive Director. Current Executive Director Karen Misjak will retire January 24 after 15 years at the agency and more than 30 years in the field of...
Mark Schlissel, president of the University of Michigan, recently announced the “Go Blue Guarantee,” which pledges four years of free tuition for admitted in-state students whose families earn less than $65,000 per year. The program is based, in...
Enrolling at the University of Michigan seemed like a far-fetched dream for Devin Raymond.Despite his 3.9 high school GPA, being the president of student council, and his involvement in choir, band, musical theater and other extracurricular...
Once, she was a first-generation college student from a working-class suburb of Boston. Now, she is an internationally renowned professor of education policy with the ear of the White House. So Susan Dynarski knows that education can be...
As Congress debates reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, and with it the bipartisan FAST Act bill introduced by Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Michael Bennet (D-CO), the Ford School’s Education Policy Initiative releases a timely new...
Vast inequalities currently exist in the U.S. education system – there is little debate among experts on this issue. And while it’s the ambitious system-level reform proposals that garner widespread attention, several seemingly simple...
Causal Inference in Education Research Seminar (CIERS)
The Education Policy Initiative and the School of Education welcome Rohit Chopra, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Susan Dynarski, professor of education, public policy, and economics at the University of Michigan, to discuss the repercussions of the $1.3 trillion dollar student loan deficit on higher education and economic inequality.
Susan Dynarski, co-director of Education Policy Initiative and Professor of Public Policy, Education and Economics at the University of Michigan, will be a featured presenter at TEDx Indianapolis. The Education Policy Initiative will host a viewing party of her livestreamed presentation. Snacks and drinks provided.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In this paper, I provide an economic perspective on policy issues related to student debt in the United States. I lay out the economic rationale for government provision of student loans and summarize time trends in student borrowing. I describe the...
Borrowing for college has risen for decades, and today 7 million of these student loans are in default. Yet the cost of borrowing is far lower than the lifetime payoff to college, which is estimated to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Moreover,...
In the nearly fifty years since the adoption of the Higher Education Act of 1965, financial aid programs have grown in scale, expanded in scope, and multiplied in form. As a result, financial aid has become the norm among college enrollees. Aid now...
The application for federal student aid is longer than the tax returns filled out by the majority of US households. Research suggests that complexity in the aid process undermines its effectiveness in inducing more students into college. In 2008, an...
Each year, fourteen million households seeking federal aid for college complete a detailed questionnaire about their finances, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). At 116 questions, the FAFSA is almost as long as IRS Form 1040 and...
This study gathers and analyzes data from qualitative interviews with high school students in Michigan. These interviews ask students to describe their college decision making process and to what extent financial aid programs or interventions were effective at influencing their postsecondary decisions. The information gathered through this project provides vital insight, directly from the student perspective, on how financial aid interventions work and who they work for. Moreover, this project sheds light on the link between postsecondary inequality and student decision-making. Finally, the...
Once, she was a first-generation college student from a working-class suburb of Boston. Now, she is an internationally renowned professor of education policy with the ear of the White House.
Rohit Chopra and Susan Dynarski discuss the repercussions of the $1.3 trillion dollar student loan deficit on higher education and economic inequality. January 2016.
Roberto Rodriguez serves on the White House Domestic Policy Council as Special Assistant to the President for Education. In his talk, he discusses student loan and higher education reforms. October, 2013.
Eric Bettinger talks about the findings from a large-scale randomized experiment to see the results of students' access to information about college attendance and affordability. March, 2013.
Turner will discusses how crowd-out of Pell Grant aid varies across institutional control and selectivity and potential policies that could reduce crowd-out of need-based federal student aid. March, 2013.
Rebecca Maynard talks about why it is important to step up our use of evidence if we are to improve education outcomes, strategies for engaging stakeholders, design and evidence standards; and common evidence platforms. March, 2013.
