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There is substantial variation in the returns to a college degree. One determinant is whether a worker's employment is "matched" with their education. With a novel education-industry crosswalk and panel data on 295,000 graduates, we provide the first estimates of an education-industry match premium leveraging within-person variation in earnings. We document which majors have the most and least matching, how earnings premia vary across fields and gender, and how premia evolve over time. With robust estimators, we show that workers in industries "matched" with their degree experience an average earnings premium of 7-11%, with variation by degree level and major.

This First Look report presents data on public elementary and secondary education revenues and expenditures at the local education agency (LEA) or school district level for fiscal year (FY) 2022. Specifically, this report includes the following types of school district finance data: (1) revenue, current expenditure, and capital outlay expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) current expenditures by function and object; (4) revenues and current expenditures per pupil; and (5) revenues and expenditures from COVID-19 Federal Assistance Funds. This First Look report focuses on education revenues and expenditures at the school district level. The finance data used in this report are from the School District Finance Survey (F-33), 2F 3 a component of the Common Core of Data (CCD). The CCD is a group of annual public elementary/secondary data collections administered by NCES. The F-33 survey consists of LEA-level finance data submitted annually to the U.S. Census Bureau (Census Bureau) by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. SEAs report financial data covering services that provide or support prekindergarten through high school for public education for a variety of types of LEAs. These LEAs include regular school districts, independent charter school districts, as well as a substantial number of administrative and operating LEAs that are unlike typical school districts (e.g., education service agencies that provide specialized education services for school districts, such as vocational and other specialized education services for school districts). The purpose of this First Look report is to introduce new data through the presentation of tables containing descriptive information. The selected findings chosen for this report demonstrate the range of information available when using F-33 data files and are not intended to emphasize any particular issue(s).

This chartbook is the 14th version to be produced for the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB). The Chartbook describes the diversity of the Appalachian Region on a host of demographic and economic measures and provides an important annual view of the area and its people. The data contained in the 2018-2022 Chartbook describe how residents in the Appalachian Region were faring before and during the COVID-19 pandemic that began in March 2020. Nearly half of the years during this time period were pre-pandemic and half were during the pandemic era. Thus, this Chartbook is a blend of these two eras. As future data releases reflect the post-pandemic era, data users will have additional insights on the long-term changes that the pandemic brought to Appalachia's social and economic dynamics. Most of the data shown here come from the 2018-2022 American Community Survey (ACS), a nationwide study collected continuously every year in every county in the United States by the U.S. Census Bureau. The ACS is designed to provide communities with reliable and timely demographic, social, economic, and housing data each year. To provide as much county-level data as possible, we use ACS 5-year data files which provide reliable estimates for geographic areas with fewer than 20,000 people. Since many counties in the Appalachian Region have fewer than 20,000 residents, these data permit comparable statistics for all 423 counties in the Region. The primary purpose of the ACS is to measure the changing characteristics of the U.S. population in a way that is continually updated. The estimates in this Chartbook, therefore, are data collected over the five-year (or 60-month) period from January 2018 through December 2022. These ACS estimates are not averages of monthly or annual values, but rather an aggregation of data collected continuously over that time period.

This report describes results from the Long-Term Impact of Early College High Schools Study--funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) (#R305A210017)--which aimed to explore the long-term impacts of early college (EC) high schools on students' academic outcomes (e.g., college enrollment, degree attainment) and workforce, financial, and later life outcomes after schooling. In this report--the second follow-up report on our initial EC impact study--we focus specifically on key questions about workforce, financial, and other life outcomes: What were the impacts of ECs on workforce, financial, and other life outcomes in the 12th to 14th years after expected high school graduation? Did the impacts of ECs vary by participant characteristics? This report describes findings which build on a previous EC impact study, which was a multisite student-level randomized controlled trial with randomization based on admission lotteries. The analyses in this report focus on individuals who originally participated in 17 admission lotteries conducted by seven ECs for three cohorts of students, and examined outcomes after formal schooling. Key takeaways include the following: (1) Participants who were admitted to an EC, regardless of whether they attended the EC, did not experience a significant effect on any of the workforce, financial, and other life outcomes measured with survey data 12 to 14 years after expected high school graduation; and (2) EC impacts on workforce, financial, and other life outcomes measured 12 to 14 years after expected high school graduation did not differ significantly by individuals' race/ethnicity, low-income status, or prior achievement. While our initial impact study and first follow-up study found that attending an EC had effects on secondary and postsecondary enrollment, and completion for participants with different background characteristics, we found that attending an EC had no impact on any of the workforce, financial, and other life outcomes that we analyzed 12 to 14 years after participants' expected high school graduation. Future studies could consider examining workforce, financial, and other life outcomes in years before the 12th to 14th year after expected high school graduation using administrative data sources (e.g., IRS or unemployment insurance records). Further research may also examine if other factors, such as EC students' college major or labor market opportunities, influence the impact of ECs on longer-term outcomes.

Each year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation, I explore the impact of school closures on students' educational and labor market outcomes. The findings indicate that experiencing school closures results in disruptions in both test scores and behavior. While the drop in test scores is recovered within three years, behavioral issues persist. This study further finds decreases in post-secondary education attainment, employment, and earnings at ages 25-27. These impacts are particularly pronounced among students in secondary education, Hispanic students, and those from originally low-performing schools and economically disadvantaged families.

This First Look report introduces new data for national and state-level public elementary and secondary revenues and expenditures for fiscal year (FY) 2022. Specifically, this report includes the following school finance data: (1) revenue and expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) expenditures by function, subfunction, and object; (4) current expenditures; (5) revenues and current expenditures per pupil; (6) expenditures from Title I funds; and (7) revenues and expenditures from COVID-19 Federal Assistance Funds. The expenditure functions include instruction, support services, food services, and enterprise operations. The support services function is further broken down into seven subfunctions: instructional staff support services, pupil support services, general administration, school administration, operations and maintenance, student transportation, other support services (such as business services). Objects reported within a function or subfunction include salaries and wages, employee benefits, purchased services, supplies, and equipment. The purpose of a First Look report is to introduce new data through the presentation of tables containing descriptive information. The selected findings chosen for this report demonstrate the range of information available when using NPEFS. They do not represent all of the data and are not meant to emphasize any particular issue. While the tables in this report include data for all NPEFS respondents, the selected findings are limited to the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

This First Look report introduces new data for national and state-level public elementary and secondary revenues and expenditures for fiscal year (FY) 2022. Specifically, this report includes the following school finance data: (1) revenue and expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) expenditures by function, subfunction, and object; (4) current expenditures; (5) revenues and current expenditures per pupil; (6) expenditures from Title I funds; and (7) revenues and expenditures from COVID-19 Federal Assistance Funds. The expenditure functions include instruction, support services, food services, and enterprise operations. The support services function is further broken down into seven subfunctions: instructional staff support services, pupil support services, general administration, school administration, operations and maintenance, student transportation, other support services (such as business services).1 Objects reported within a function or subfunction include salaries and wages, employee benefits, purchased services, supplies, and equipment. The finance data used in this report are from the National Public Education Financial Survey (NPEFS), a component of the Common Core of Data (CCD). The CCD is one of NCES's primary survey programs on public elementary and secondary education in the United States. State education agencies (SEAs) in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the five other jurisdictions of American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands report these data annually to NCES. The NPEFS instructions ask SEAs to report revenues and expenditures covering prekindergarten through high school public education in regular, special, and vocational schools; charter schools; and state-run education programs (such as special education schools or education programs for incarcerated youth).

At their best, K-12 public school systems can be engines of social and economic mobility. Unfortunately, schools in lower-income districts -- whose students have the greatest academic needs -- often receive less funding than their counterparts in more affluent districts. Discussions about closing these funding gaps usually zoom all the way out to the state level or all the way down to the district level. But a big part of the problem lies in how funding is distributed across districts in the same metro area -- and in state policies that allow wealthy communities to raise and keep large amounts of local revenue exclusively for their own schools. "Leveling the Landscape: An Analysis of K-12 Funding Inequities Within Metro Areas" takes a closer look at the scale and sources of education funding within 123 large metro areas in 38 states, focusing on funding disparities among districts serving the same region. Key takeaways include: (1) a majority of public school students (62%) live in large metro areas with more than five districts -- a level of fragmentation that makes funding disparities more likely; (2) within fragmented metro areas, wealthy districts often generate much more local funding per student than less affluent districts; (3) state policies, despite their progressive tilt, rarely bridge this gap -- and often don't even come close; (4) in 49 of the 123 large metro areas we examined, school districts in affluent areas receive the most funding per pupil; (5) closing the state and local funding gap between districts within the metro areas we examined would cost $26 billion in additional state funding per year; and (6) more ambitious policies can greatly reduce or even eliminate funding disparities. The report also explores policy tools state leaders can use to ensure all districts within the same metro area at the very least receive similar funding per student and ideally, set the stage for even greater levels of per-pupil funding to flow to higher-needs districts.

Most Americans today need some education beyond high school to secure a well-paying job, and higher education is a key factor in social and economic mobility. But higher education is not accessible to all students. To further equalize opportunity, states must understand options for improving the way they fund higher education. America's public K-12 system has been grappling with similar funding disparities for decades -- challenges that offer important lessons for postsecondary funding. Bellwether's analysis, "Strengthening State Higher Education Funding: Lessons Learned From K-12," identifies insights and lessons from K-12 finance policy that may be instructive as states rework how they fund higher education. This report explores four topics and associated questions that are also relevant across K-12 education: (1) Equity: How can states distribute funding to students and public IHEs with the greatest needs?; (2) Adequacy: How much funding is enough to achieve the desired outcomes?; (3) Cost Sharing: How can local governments and states share the cost of public higher education?; and (4) Stability: How can public IHEs secure consistent and predictable funding?

During the COVID-19 pandemic there were many changes in arts and design alumni's paid work, creative work, income and in the skills that they needed to be successful in their careers. Given the documented impact of the pandemic on the arts and culture sector, on arts and creative workers, and on institutions of higher education, the authors turn to data from the 2022 Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) survey to understand how the impact of the pandemic was felt by people doing arts, design, or creative work as part of their job or occupational roles and the varied experiences across socio-demographic characteristics. This report focuses on providing insight into arts and design graduates whose work is--or before the pandemic was--in the arts, design, or creative realm by examining their working lives, economic lives, and the skills that they needed to attain or update during the first two years of the pandemic in the United States. In addition to presenting analyses and findings about arts and design alumni's experiences of the first year of the pandemic along these dimensions of their creative and working lives, the authors also dedicate a section of the conclusion of this report to the impressions and challenges identified by higher education arts leaders in a series of formal conversation at the beginning of 2021 to frame commentary about university preparation for resilient arts and design alumni. [Additional funding for this report was provided by the University of Illinois College of Fine and Applied Arts, the University of Illinois Investment for Growth Fund, and the Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy at The Ohio State University.]

The Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) Fund had two main purposes: (1) to ensure that colleges could continue to provide education to students in the wake of the pandemic and (2) to provide emergency financial assistance through colleges directly to students. Four years after the onset of the pandemic, this ARCC Network brief uses college financial data--including data recently released for fiscal year 2022--to look at what happened to college finances and to assess the importance of HEER funding for the financial solvency of community colleges over the course of the pandemic. The authors find that during the peak years of the pandemic (2020-2022), community colleges lost huge numbers of students: On average, colleges lost 580 full-time-equivalent (FTE) students or 15% of pre-pandemic year-on-year enrollment, whereas college enrollments typically fluctuate by +/-2% each year. The authors also find that federal HEER funding saved community colleges from massive losses in tuition revenue during the pandemic. Instead of losing revenue, HEER funding increased total revenue per college from $81 million to $84 million, covering lost tuition and offsetting new costs associated with the pandemic. HEER funding also provided $4 million in student aid per college, on average, making up for lost resources students experienced during the pandemic. The authors--who also wrote an associated blog post that includes an interactive dashboard on this topic--contend that community colleges are confronting new fiscal challenges post-pandemic. As HEER funding has ended, many community colleges are faced with a difficult fiscal outlook, with increased costs due to inflation and decreased overall enrollments relative to pre-pandemic levels. Navigating these new fiscal realities will be extremely challenging for community colleges, raising new concerns about the viability of many colleges in the post-pandemic era. [This report was written with the Accelerating Recovery in Community Colleges (ARCC) Network.]

The Cowen Institute has conducted annual polls on perceptions of public education in New Orleans since 2007. Our polls are designed to provide insight into how parents, guardians, and the general public view New Orleans' highly decentralized K-12 public education system. Each year, we ask some new questions about the most relevant and pressing issues facing educators and families. We also repeat questions from our previous polls to assess how opinions change over time on a few key topics. We now release the poll findings in a series of briefs at the start of each year. This is the second of two briefs that will be released in 2024 with results from polling conducted in the fall of 2023. We present the data in this way to make it more accessible and understandable for the general public -- the briefs allow us to group the findings by topic, enabling us to surface trends about particular areas of the city's education system. To capture the experiences and attitudes of a wide range of parents, as we have done since 2020, we polled 1,000 public and private school parents and guardians in Orleans Parish, as well as a small number who homeschool their children.

Postsecondary education and middle-skills occupational training are viewed as important paths to higher-paying jobs and careers. Lifelong learning pathways geared toward working learners aged 25 and older also seem essential for career advancement and professional growth in the current job market. However, many learners face financial and other barriers to accessing and completing occupational training. Social Finance, Inc., a national nonprofit that creates impact-first investments, launched the UP Fund, a $50 million fund that aims to improve economic mobility by expanding access to job training programs to underserved learners and learners from low-income backgrounds. The UP Fund enables learners to enroll in short-term, sector-based occupational training programs with access to career and supportive services without paying up-front tuition costs. Learners enter into "income share agreements" (ISAs) that are intended to repay tuition costs. This is achieved by learners committing to repay a fixed percentage or amount of their income over a set term and up to a capped amount. However, this repayment obligation is contingent upon the learner's earnings meeting a minimum income threshold. The UP Fund's Career Impact Bond (CIB) model focuses on providing ISAs to learners from low-income backgrounds who might not otherwise have access to the training programs. The CIB model also emphasizes the importance of comprehensive support services to help learners achieve career success. MDRC launched a multisite, multiyear study of the UP Fund's CIB model in 2022. The study includes four training providers that enroll learners financed by the UP Fund across multiple industries. This brief provides an overview of the study, details of the UP Fund's CIB model, and early implementation findings. Initial results suggest that individuals who enrolled in a training program supported by the UP Fund learned helpful skills to find jobs in their chosen careers.

"How Clear Is Their Path? Guided Career Pathways and Community College Students" explores how prepared community college students are to meet their career goals. Over 90 percent of students responding to the 2023 Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) indicated they had chosen a career path. But many of those respondents were missing vital information about what that path would entail. This report contains data from 83,189 students across 199 community colleges who responded to CCSSE in spring 2023.

This report provides a summary of the outcomes of international students who completed their vocational education and training (VET) qualification in Australia in 2022. These students were surveyed as an additional component to the 2023 National Student Outcomes Survey. Information is presented on international onshore VET qualification completers' reasons for training and their employment outcomes, their satisfaction with training and further study outcomes. Overall, 13 594 international onshore VET qualification completers responded to the survey.

The Cowen Institute has conducted annual polls on perceptions of public education in New Orleans since 2007. Our polls are designed to provide insight into how parents, guardians, and the general public view New Orleans' highly decentralized K-12 public education system. Each year, we ask some new questions about the most relevant and pressing issues facing educators and families. We also repeat questions from our previous polls to assess how opinions change over time on a few key topics. We now release the poll findings in a series of briefs at the start of each year. This is the first of two briefs that will be released in 2024 with results from polling conducted in the fall of 2023. We present the data in this way to make it more accessible and understandable for the general public -- the briefs allow us to group the findings by topic, enabling us to surface trends about particular areas of the city's education system. This brief covers general perceptions about New Orleans K-12 public education; the second brief will delve more deeply into specific areas of education. To capture the experiences and attitudes of a wide range of parents, as we have done since 2020, we polled 1,000 public and private school parents and guardians in Orleans Parish, as well as a small number who homeschool their children.

The "Annual Report on People with Disabilities in America" is a companion volume to the "2024 Annual Disability Statistics Compendium." Indicators were in the following areas of interest: employment, educational attainment, health and health care, financial status and security, leisure recreation, personal relationships, and crime/safety.

The "Annual Disability Statistics Compendium," is a summary of statistics about people with disabilities and about the government programs which serve them. The Compendium, presents key overall statistics on topics including the prevalence of disability, employment among persons with disabilities, rates of participation in disability income and social insurance programs, and other statistics. It is a compilation of data from multiple sources, such as the Social Security Administration, Veterans Benefits Administration, and frequently, the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, among others. A companion "Annual Report" is available, providing graphic representations of key findings.

Using data from nearly 1.2 million Black SAT takers, we estimate the impacts of initially enrolling in an Historically Black College and University (HBCU) on educational, economic, and financial outcomes. We control for the college application portfolio and compare students with similar portfolios and levels of interest in HBCUs and non-HBCUs who ultimately make divergent enrollment decisions -- often enrolling in a four-year HBCU in lieu of a two-year college or no college. We find that students initially enrolling in HBCUs are 14.6 percentage points more likely to earn a BA degree and have 5 percent higher household income around age 30 than those who do not enroll in an HBCU. Initially enrolling in an HBCU also leads to $12,000 more in outstanding student loans around age 30. We find that some of these results are driven by an increased likelihood of completing a degree from relatively broad-access HBCUs and also relatively high-earning majors (e.g., STEM). We also explore new outcomes, such as credit scores, mortgages, bankruptcy, and neighborhood characteristics around age 30.

Despite growing attention to addressing racial, ethnic, and other inequities in many domains, limited research explores whether and how society's marginalization of people with disabilities compounds for immigrants to produce inequitable financial outcomes. When accessing education and employment, immigrants with disabilities face challenges due to their disability status, citizenship and immigration status, race, ethnicity, and language. This summary highlights key takeaways from a convening of nine experts from universities, research organizations, and community organizations knowledgeable about the intersection of immigration and disability. The goal of the meeting was to identify barriers to financial well-being among immigrants with disabilities in education and employment. Participants discussed how the Protection and Advocacy systems (P&As), which provide legal representation and advocacy for people with disabilities, can help better inform this population of their rights as disabled people and how community-based organizations (CBOs) can bridge gaps in access to education and employment supports. The summary concludes with directions for future research. [Additional funding provided by the Capital One Foundation.]

This paper studies how school spending impacts student achievement by exploiting the US interstate branching deregulation as state tax revenue shocks. Leveraging school finance data from universal school districts, our difference-in-differences estimation reveals that deregulation leads to an increase in per-pupil total revenue and expenditure. The rise in revenue is primarily attributed to higher state revenues, while the expenditure increase is more prominent in low-income school districts. Using restricted-use student assessments from the Nation's Report Card, we find that deregulation results in improved student achievement, with no distributional effects evident across students' ability, race, or free lunch status. We introduce an instrumental variables approach that accounts for dynamic treatment effects and estimate that a one-thousand-dollar increase in per-pupil spending leads to a 0.035 standard deviation improvement in student achievement.

Construction and maintenance of school facilities are big cost drivers for schools, and the quality of school facilities can make a difference in student learning and health. Notably, school building construction is the second-highest capital expenditure of state and local funds, trailing only investments in infrastructure like roads. Ensuring access to safe, modern learning environments for all students is a critical and often overlooked aspect of school funding policy at the state level. A 2021 analysis estimates an annual shortfall of $85 billion in school facilities funding and recommends districts nearly double their spending on maintenance, operations, and capital construction. This brief discusses: (1) the importance of school facilities for student equity; (2) local roles in capital funding; (3) states' differing approaches to facilities funding; and (4) funding charter school facilities.

Property taxes are the most common mechanism to generate local revenue for public school systems but are also a long-standing source of inequity. Policymakers and advocates should be aware of the challenges created by local funding mechanisms in their states and consider potential policy solutions to produce more equitable education funding. This brief covers: (1) How Property Taxes Fund Schools; (2) How Property Taxes Produce Education Finance Inequities; and (3) Making Local School Funding More Equitable.

This report presents data on public elementary and secondary education revenues and expenditures at the local education agency (LEA) or school district level for fiscal year (FY) 2021. Specifically, this report includes the following types of school district finance data: (1) revenue, current expenditure, and capital outlay expenditure totals; (2) revenues by source; (3) current expenditures by function and object; and (4) revenues and current expenditures per pupil. The finance data used in this report are from the School District Finance Survey (F-33), a component of the Common Core of Data (CCD). The CCD is the primary National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) database on public elementary and secondary education in the United States. The F-33 survey consists of LEA-level finance data submitted annually to the U.S. Census Bureau (Census Bureau) by state education agencies (SEAs) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. [For "Revenues and Expenditures for Public Elementary and Secondary School Districts: FY 20. Finance Tables. NCES 2022-303," see ED624445.]

Food insecurity is widespread among college students in the United States. Food benefits delivered through the CalFresh program, California's version of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), can reduce hunger by helping students pay for groceries, but may not reach all eligible students. To date, higher education systems have lacked good estimates of the share of their students who are eligible for CalFresh and the share who actually receive benefits. To address this information gap, the California Policy Lab (CPL) partnered with the California Community College (CCC) Chancellor's Office, the University of California Office of the President (UCOP), the California Department of Social Services (CDSS), and the California Student Aid Commission (CSAC) to build a linked database of student-level administrative data on college enrollment, financial aid, and CalFresh participation. This database covers all students enrolled at CCC or UC campuses from academic years 2010-11 through 2021-22, along with corresponding FAFSA submissions and CalFresh participation. Using these data, we are able to measure how many college students are likely eligible for CalFresh, and of those how many participate. CalFresh eligibility does not perfectly overlap with student need. Some students who are food insecure may not be eligible for benefits, while some eligible students may not be in great need. This in part reflects the rules of the program, which are designed to capture need but do not always do so perfectly. We attempt to measure eligibility according to the actual rules. Our estimates complement other work that uses survey data to measure students' basic needs (California Community Colleges League, 2022). We estimate that in Fall 2019, on the eve of the COVID pandemic, 16% of California community college students (256,000 students), 31% of UC undergraduate students (69,000 students), and 6% of UC graduate students (3,000 students) were likely eligible for CalFresh benefits. However, the majority of these students did not receive benefits -- only 30% of eligible community college students, 22% of eligible UC undergraduates, and 29% of eligible UC graduate students were actually enrolled in CalFresh. We emphasize that our eligibility determinations are estimates based on information available in existing data, which imperfectly capture some elements of the CalFresh eligibility determination process. They may somewhat overstate or understate student eligibility. However, extensive investigation led us to conclude that the errors are likely not large and that our estimates are a good approximation of the share of students who would be found eligible under individualized determinations. As we discuss below, the higher eligibility rate among UC undergraduates as compared to CCC students reflects program rules that make it easier for UC students to qualify than for CCC students with similar resources. We also find differences in eligibility across groups of students within each segment, reflecting both variation in need and program rules. Among both CCC and UC students, Black and Hispanic students, for example, are more likely to be eligible than are White or Asian American students, and students receiving federal, state, or institutional financial aid are much more likely to be eligible than are students not receiving aid. Benefits receipt generally mirrors this, although there are differences across groups in the share of eligible students who receive benefits. The take-up rate, which is the share of eligible students who participate in CalFresh, is higher for Black students (and, at the UC but not at CCCs, Hispanic students) than for White students, and for students on financial aid than for students who are not. Our report indicates there is much room to improve CalFresh participation among eligible students. Through detailed analyses of the paths to eligibility and of variation in participation rates, we hope to shed light on opportunities for policymakers, higher education administrators, community-based organizations, student groups, and advocates to better connect eligible students to benefits. [Additional support was provided by the Woven Foundation.]