Background: Since 2010, there has been significant growth in the United States in the number of students with intellectual disability accessing higher education, driven by federal legislation and funding. Currently, over 340 institutions of higher education provide programs of study for students with intellectual disability. Of these programs, 134…

Recent changes to the federal student loan program will affect student loan borrowing, repayment, and debt. Payments on student loans, which were suspended during the coronavirus pandemic, restarted in October 2023. A new repayment plan introduced in August 2023 will significantly reduce interest accrual and payments for certain borrowers.…

In 2000, federally funded public adult education programs provided basic skills training and English language instruction to over 2.6 million students, or about 1.5% of the U.S. adult population. By 2021, enrollment had plummeted to under 900,000, or less than 0.4% of adults. What explains these declines? This policy brief describes the evolution…

This article compares state expenditure data to see how the operating budgets of public community colleges specifically, and public higher education institutions generally, have fared over the past 30 years. Data from the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO) have long tracked major state expenditure categories, including the…

The federal Pell Grant was designed to help low-income students pay for college. But over the past two decades, a growing share of middle-income students have become eligible for the program. This was not policymakers' explicit goal. This report examines how the program came to increasingly provide students from middle-income families with grants,…

"Student Debt and the Class of 2019" is The Institute for College Access & Success' (TICAS') fifteenth annual report on the student loan debt of recent graduates from four-year colleges, documenting changes and variation in student debt across states and colleges. This report includes federal policy recommendations to reduce debt…

In 2004 and 2005, the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education (Pell Institute), sponsored by the Council for Opportunity in Education (COE), published two editions of "Indicators of Opportunity in Higher Education." In 2015, the commitment to documenting trends in higher education equity was renewed by publishing…

With increasing frequency, U.S. presidents have orchestrated relations between federal and state governments. A defining feature of this "executive federalism" is a pragmatic willingness to both borrow from and reconstitute very different types of past federalisms. A case in point is President Barack Obama's Race to the Top (RttT)…

This report, the seventh in this series, brings together again in partnership the Pell Institute with the Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy of the University of Pennsylvania (PennAHEAD). These reports draw from multiple sources of existing data to provide, in one place, indicators that describe trends in equity in postsecondary…

We analyze changes in financial aid and student enrollment at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that occurred after the U.S. Department of Education increased the credit history requirements necessary to obtain Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students (PLUS). We use institution-level data to examine financial aid and enrollment…

The "Annual Disability Statistics Compendium" and its compliment, the "Annual Disability Statistics Supplement," are publications of statistics about people with disabilities and about the government programs which serve them. The "Compendium" and "Supplement" are designed to serve as a summary of government…

Hoping to spur dramatic school turnaround, the federal government channeled resources to the country's lowest-performing schools through School Improvement Grants (SIG). However, prior research on SIG effectiveness is limited and focuses primarily on student achievement. This study uses a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate program…

Hoping to spur dramatic school turnaround, the federal government channeled resources to the country's lowest-performing schools through School Improvement Grants (SIG). However, prior research on SIG effectiveness is limited and focuses primarily on student achievement. This study uses a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate program…

The "Annual Disability Statistics Compendium" is a publication of statistics about people with disabilities and about the government programs which serve them. It is modeled after the "Statistical Abstracts of the United States," published yearly by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The "Compendium" is designed to…

The federal government devotes roughly one-sixth of its spending to 10 major means-tested programs and tax credits, which provide cash payments or assistance in obtaining health care, food, housing, or education to people with relatively low income or few assets. Those programs and credits consist of the following: (1) Medicaid; (2) the low-income…