President Obama announced in August that the Department of Education would be creating the Postsecondary Institution Rating System (PIRS), a new rating system for colleges. The Department of Education issued a request for ideas on how to design and implement the PIRS. This series of blogs posts is adapted from ...
The Obama administration took a step toward the President’s planned college ratings system on December 19, releasing a 24-page “Framework” for college ratings. In this blog post, Tom Weko asks, "Are the Department of Education's college ratings likely to become an enduring feature of the nation’s higher education landscape?" ...
Do median wages paid to bachelor’s graduates demonstrate gender differences after “controlling” for choice across high and low paying programs of study? Data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board that merges student level data with Unemployment Insurance wage data can provide an initial answer to this question. In this ...
This spotlight takes a look at the history of Title I, how the program has changed over time, and how it affects children, schools, families and education policy. Experts weigh in on the program's past and future in interviews, briefs, and blogs.
The Supreme Court recently held that UT Austin’s race-conscious admissions plan is lawful under the Equal Protection Clause. In this blog post, Ben Backes discusses what this does (and does not) mean.
The Center for Coordinated Assistance to States, or CCAS at AIR held its annual State Relations and Assistance Division (SRAD), National Training Conference on November 8–10, 2021. The conference supports SRAD, part of the OJJDP, which helps states and territories prevent and treat delinquency and improve their juvenile justice systems. ...
In his final State of the Union address, President Obama said, “We live in a time of extraordinary change… and whether we like it or not, the pace of this change will only accelerate.” In this blog post, AIR’s Peter Cookson says the key to dealing with this change is ...
In this blog post, Matthew Soldner argues that, as Congress works on reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the need for far better research and access to federal student aid data should be high on its agenda.
Displaced workers may need different kinds of supports than workers who become unemployed for other reasons. In this blog post, experts from AIR's PROMISE Center explore three of the key themes that emerged from the landscape review they conducted to identify workforce system approaches that better support displaced workers and ...
As prospective college students and their parents pore over the Department of Education’s College Navigator and College Scorecard, Andrew Gillen suggests in this blog that they pay close attention to the financial implications of their choice. Ensuring that college is affordable should be high on the list of policy priorities, ...