This brief analyzes changes the House Committee on Education and the Workforce proposed to the income-driven repayment (IDR) plans for federal student loans under the fiscal year 2025 budget reconciliation process. The bill was approved in committee in April 2025. If enacted, it would replace existing IDR plans with a new plan (the Repayment…

Differences between academic disciplines have been a well-studied theme in higher education research. But even though students' subjective study values are a key factor for successful studying, research examining their disciplinary differences in the higher education context is lacking. To address this, this study draws on expectancy-value theory,…

The ongoing crisis in teacher pension funding has led states to consider various reforms in plan design to replace the traditional benefit formulas, based on years of service and final average salary (FAS). One such design is a cash balance (CB) plan, long deployed in the private sector, and increasingly considered, but rarely yet adopted, for…

How are teacher pension benefits funded? Under traditional plans, the full cost of career teachers' benefits far exceeds the contributions designated for them. The gap between the two has three pieces, which may (with some license) be mnemonically tagged the three R's of pension funding: "redistribution," "return," and…

Early colleges are high schools that blend the high school and college experiences. They have been shown to increase college enrollment and completion; however less is known about the costs of the early college model relative to traditional high schools. We leverage randomized assignment of North Carolina students to early colleges to estimate the…

This study examines the relationship between earning dual credits and college students' scholarships and grants packages, and levels, focusing on low-income students. Using nationally representative data from the High School Longitudinal Study 2009, I used a quasi-experimental approach to reduce selection bias of DE credit-earning coupled with…

Textbook models of externalities tacitly assume that those externalities fall upon individuals "outside" of the market. In many contexts--including common undergraduate examples--externalities fall "inside" the market instead. Positive externalities associated with vaccination, for instance, accrue to other individuals who…

Low-powered mobile devices such as Raspberry Pis and tablets can be used as microservers to implement offline Learning Management Systems (LMS). Despite their potential, especially for low-income countries, such as Tanzania, no research is available detailing the affordances of these devices for supporting LMS features. This study investigated the…

As the cost of living continues to increase over time, many Americans are placing greater scrutiny on the financial choices they make. An area for such evaluation is if the outcomes of going to college continue to be worth the cost. One underrepresented group, first-generation college students (FGCS), is less likely than non-FGCS to attend and…

Using data for 2,717 journals and more than 9,000 acquisition opportunities, this study shows how journal prices vary by level of aggregation (single-journal subscription or full-text database), resource provider type (scholarly society, university press, other nonprofit organization, commercial publisher, or library vendor), and broad subject…

The annual community college tuition and fees report provides information about tuition and fees charged at each of Iowa's 15 community colleges. This report also provides trends in tuition and fees among Iowa's community colleges, sources of general operating revenue and comparisons among states and institutions. For fiscal year (FY) 2023,…

Stable housing is an important determinant of health equity (Swope & Hernández, 2019). Yet, there are few studies exploring housing insecurity in rural areas. In the current study, we examined the similarities and differences in housing insecure experiences across four rural areas in the state of Maine. We used a qualitative case study…

Higher education is often framed as a means to social mobility and increased earnings. However, the value of university education in the United States is coming under scrutiny in regard to its costs. This article examines a university education's return on investment (ROI) from attending different types of universities in the United States. Unlike…

Virtual Reality (VR) has gained more importance in the educational sector. A possibility of using VR in education can be Virtual Field Trips (VFTs). This work analyses the possibilities of creating VFTs with different software/tools, output devices, and 360° cameras in the educational sector. The preparatory work, with the recording of own 360°…

College affordability is a significant factor in student access, retention, and completion. Tuition and fee rates are a component of affordability, as is the availability of financial aid programs from federal, state, institutional and private sources, among other factors. Strategically designed approaches to college affordability can better…