Debates about the for-profit education industry and the borrowing and default patterns of their students are generating analogies between the subprime mortgage debacle and students loans. Some commentaries use the “bubble” terminology to make this comparison. Questions of whether there is a bubble in higher education that parallels the bubble in the housing market have been around for quite a while. But the earlier analogies were based on rising prices for college, as opposed to fears of loan default.

Without weighing in on the pros and cons of any particular new proposed regulations, we think it is important to clarify some of the issues. Let’s start with the loans. There are good reasons to compare the student loan market—or at least the private student loan market—to the subprime mortgage market. The private student loan market—through which any student (and frequently anyone claiming ...

The federal government contributes roughly the same share of the total revenues of elementary/secondary as  of postsecondary education in the U.S.—somewhere near 10% in the recent past, pushed at least temporarily higher (especially in elementary/secondary education) by the current economic and budgetary conditions in the nation.

Yet the ambitions of the initiatives and the rhetoric of federal involvement have traced quite different paths over the last quarter century at these different levels of the system. As David Cohen and Susan Moffitt’s important new book, The Ordeal of Equality (Harvard University Press), shows, the federal government has persistently raised the demands it places on K-12 schools and has over time moved its declared ambitions from providing funding for schools serving disadvantaged students to improving the quality, even of “transforming,” American education. As...

Our aim in posting to this blog is not to do ideological battle, but to advance the practice of grounding policy discussions in reliable evidence. It isn't always easy to resist fighting over conclusions instead of sticking to assessing the quality of evidence and argument. People like us who have devoted considerable time and energy to analyzing educational opportunities, structures, and policies have developed strong opinions about the problems we see and potential solutions. It takes quite compelling evidence to induce us to modify our positions. Moreover, it is not so easy to determine which evidence is most reliable.

For example, simple descriptions of trends may be totally turned on their heads by a small change in the starting year of a data series. The gap between the immediate college-enrollment rates of high-school graduates from the highest- and the lowest-income families has...

We have just spent almost four years leading a group of talented, thoughtful people in Rethinking Student Aid, a project that developed a set of comprehensive proposals for reform of the federal student aid system.  Now we have agreed to write a series of short blogs that will, of necessity, be written without much deliberation. It's hard to imagine two more different ways to work. We hope, however, to apply lessons learned from our long and intense project to this new and for us somewhat uncharacteristic endeavor.

Under the auspices of the College Board, with funding from the Lumina, Spencer, and Mellon Foundations, the Rethinking Student Aid Study Group commissioned research synthesizing available evidence about the effectiveness of student aid, talked with many people around the country about their perceptions of the current student aid system and ideas for change, consulted with...