Student Aid

Biden’s victory means a reboot of US higher education policy

John Aubrey Douglass
Richard Edelstein
2020

Joe Biden’s election as the next president of the United States will fundamentally alter the destructive higher education policies pursued over the past four years under Donald Trump.

The Trump administration pursued increasingly restrictive visa policies, dampening the ability and interest of international talent to come to American universities, repeatedly proposed large-scale cuts in student financial aid as well as funding for science, invoked anti-immigrant policies that affected students, and reduced restrictions on largely predatory for-profit tertiary...

Affording the Dream: Student Debt and State Need-Based Grant Aid for Public University Students by C. Eaton, S. Kulkarni, R. Birgeneau, H. Brady, and M. Hout

C. Eaton
S. Kulkarni
Robert Birgeneau
Henry Brady
Michael Hout
2017

Public research universities are a key vehicle for educational mobility. Yet rising student debt for undergraduate students has created new risks, particularly for lower income students at lower ranked universities. We find that student loan default rates reached 35 percent for low-income students at public universities with low research rankings during the Great Recession. Given these troubling loan default rates, we find encouraging evidence that a few U.S. states have adopted robust need-based grant aid programs to make college more affordable for low-income students. Such grant...

Research Report on College Food Security Led by CSHE New Director Jesse Rothstein

2024

Filling the Gap: CalFresh Eligibility Among University of California and California Community College Students by California Policy Lab (CPL).

The report estimates the number of University of California (UC) and California Community College (CCC) students who are potentially eligible to receive CalFresh benefits, and of that group, how many students received CalFresh benefits in the Fall of 2019.

According to CPL, this report is "the first of its kind to link college enrollment and financial aid application data and then compare it to CalFresh eligibility rules in...