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There is overwhelming evidence that pursuing a college education provides substantial economic and non-economic benefits to students. But how much a degree is worth depends heavily on the institution a student attends. Unfortunately, value also is still influenced by a student's race, income, and gender, due to inequities in our higher education and workforce systems. Institutional leaders, federal and state policymakers, and other stakeholders all have a role to play in delivering equitable value: the economic and non-economic benefits that accrue to students, their families, their communities, and society. This report assesses economic value for students by using publicly available data to estimate the number of colleges that provide a minimum economic return for students and explores policy interventions that would increase equitable value. This analysis builds on the work of the Postsecondary Value Commission, which sought to define postsecondary value, measure postsecondary value, and develop an action agenda to expand and improve value, all while centering equity in postsecondary policymaking. The Commission focused on equitable value for Black, Latinx and/or Hispanic, Indigenous, underrepresented Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) students, students from low-income backgrounds, and women--as well as the intersectional identities within and across these groups (e.g., low-income White students and men of color). Evidence shows that the postsecondary education system currently fails to ensure that these students receive returns on their investments through equitable access, completion, affordability, and workforce outcomes. As part of its work, the Commission developed a framework that conceptualizes the economic and non-economic benefits that postsecondary education can provide to students, their families, our workforce, and society. That framework includes six economic value thresholds that measure individual outcomes and return on investment. This paper focuses on students' minimum economic return as measured by the lowest threshold.

Accurately evaluating what works -- and what doesn't -- to improve student progression through higher education requires the robust use of reliable data. States play a pivotal role in compiling and using data to empower student choice, spur continuous institutional and system improvement, and develop evidence-based solutions that promote college access and success for all students in their state. However, certain challenges have prevented states from fully leveraging education and workforce data, including difficulty matching and sharing data across agencies and states, and legal and regulatory compliance barriers. "Better Data, Better Outcomes: Promoting Evidence, Equity, and Student Success through the Framework for State Postsecondary Data Solutions" introduces a new framework that highlights the barriers to effective data use by states and identifies approaches to eliminating those barriers, with solutions at the federal, state, and regional levels. The Framework identifies opportunities to build innovative partnerships and develop messaging and advocacy strategies to champion a culture of data use. Together, approaches outlined in the Framework help states advocate for resources and promote change.

Public flagship universities are often the most selective, rigorous, and well-resourced public schools in each state, and their important status and name recognition play an important role in raising the college-going aspirations of state residents. Flagships are well-positioned to promote social and economic mobility. However, increasingly high costs of attendance, declining state investment, and inadequate and poorly-targeted financial aid policies mean that too few low-income students have meaningful access to these elite institutions. Opportunity Lost: Net Price and Equity at Public Flagship Institutions draws on data from each university's net price calculator to assess their affordability for five prototypical college students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. While state flagships promise a high-quality, affordable path to a college degree for state residents, this analysis finds that these institutions are too expensive for most aspiring and enrolled low-income college students. Key findings include: (1) Most flagships are not affordable for most students: Only six universities are affordable for students from low- or middle-income families, while students from high-income families can easily afford flagship prices in all fifty states; (2) Low-income students are asked to pay far more than they can afford: At some flagships, low-income students may need to cover over $80,000 beyond what they can afford over four years; (3) Many states and institutions provide financial aid to students who can already afford the cost of college: At 34 flagships, the state or institution provides financial aid to a typical high-income students who comes from a household earning over $167,000 per year; and (4) At the most affordable institutions, access remains a problem: Of the most affordable institutions for low-income students, many enroll very few low-income students. The report offers actionable recommendations for institutional and state leaders to promote affordability and equity at state flagship institutions. This report builds on IHEP's 2017 report, "Limited Means, Limited Options: College Remains Unaffordable for Many Americans", which assessed the affordability of over 2,000 American colleges and universities and found that only one to five percent of institutions were affordable for low-income, working-class, and middle-income students. [To view the 2017 report, "Limited Means, Limited Options: College Remains Unaffordable for Many Americans," see ED591563.]

As the higher education landscape has expanded beyond issues of access and affordability to include an emphasis on student completion and employment outcomes, accreditors can play a leadership role in advancing this important change. A shift to student success that rightfully centers in part on closing equity gaps between low-income students and students of color and their peers ensures that students from all backgrounds have a genuine opportunity to thrive in and after college. The institutions that have progressed the most have done so through concerted, systemic, and equity-minded use of data to shine a light on those areas where focus and resources are most needed. For institutions today, data-use is a prerequisite to making institutional improvement, especially in unpacking and addressing the systemic racial and economic inequities that continue to undermine justice and opportunity within our higher education system. Accreditors, who hold primary responsibility for assuring quality and continuous institutional improvement, possess enormous power in the drive to improve student success at more institutions by using data to shape their conversations with and evaluations of colleges and universities. Based on a review of accreditor materials and interviews with 10 high-level commission staff from regional, national, and programmatic accreditors, this report seeks to identify current practices, challenges, and opportunities with respect to data-use in accreditation. Three recommendations are offered for proactive steps that accreditors can take to incorporate outcomes-focused, equity-minded data into the entire review cycle to spur more evidence-driven institutional improvement: (1) Embed data-use into routine practice; (2) Emphasize equity; and (3) Increase transparency about data-use practices. In discussions with accreditors, many voiced an interest in using data, and this paper profiles promising ways that four accreditors have incorporated data into their work. Building on such examples, accreditors could embed data more thoroughly into continuous institutional improvement efforts to demonstrate their collective commitment to evidence-based decision making. A more thorough focus on data also would demonstrate to policymakers and policy experts that both accreditors and institutions are willing and able to identify and address many of the shortcomings within our higher education system.

In 2015, Lumina Foundation introduced the Rule of Ten, a new method for assessing college affordability for students in the U.S. The rule rests on the assumption that an "affordable" cost for college should not exceed the total of: (1) what a student and his family can save by putting away 10% of their income for the 10 years before enrollment; and (2) a student's earnings, working 10 hours per week while in college. In 2017, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research published a report comparing actual student expenses in 2011-12, based on data from the U.S. Department of Education's National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey (NPSAS), with those recommended by the Rule of Ten. This paper updates the earlier analysis with the most recent NPSAS data. In 2015-16, students from the wealthiest households continued to attend the priciest institutions and continued to take on the most debt. This suggests that many students prefer higher short-run costs in exchange for higher expected long-run returns (often in the form of better-paying jobs). Thus, efforts to assess college affordability that ignore long-run returns and focus exclusively on short-run costs paint an incomplete picture of the value delivered to students.

The nation's linguistic diversity is growing steadily, particularly among the youngest children. A growing body of research shows that these children are most successful when they participate in bilingual instructional programs (such as dual immersion, transitional bilingual and other models). But as good as instructional language diversity might be for DLLs, scaling up multilingual instructional programs is no simple matter. To expand access to these programs, schools need more multilingual teachers. This brief, the first in a series of publications from New America's Dual Language Learners National Work Group summarizes policies related to these challenges and existing research on paraprofessionals.

Imagine students attending colleges and universities around the country having their financial needs met without the use of federal loans, Pell Grants, and higher education tax credits. In "Starting from Scratch: A New Federal and State Partnership in Higher Education," New America's Higher Education Policy Program shares its vision for redesigning the federal and state financing of higher education. For too many families, paying for college has become an obstacle to financial stability, rather than the pathway to opportunity. Presidential platforms promise free or debt-free college, but these plans are built atop the existing, broken system of financing higher education. The Higher Education Policy Program's plan would scrap this foundation, and create a new federal and state partnership that would produce more affordable, socioeconomically diverse college campuses--rewarding schools that keep tuition affordable for low-income students with more funding, not less. "We can't solve the nation's student loan crisis by tinkering around the edges. The only way to halt the explosion of borrowing is to stop lending so much money, by replacing debt with a federal-state financial partnership that actually works. State governments have been getting a free ride for decades, with students and families bearing the consequences. Any plan that sustains the current system is a plan for financial misery that students don't deserve," said Kevin Carey, Education Policy Program Director and one of the report's authors. The proposal would achieve this by: Changing the allocation of federal higher education funding from a voucher program to a formula-funded grant program, eliminating federal loans, Pell Grants, and tuition tax credits altogether; Lowering the overall costs for students to eliminate unmet need for living expenses such as room and board, transportation, and child care costs as well as tuition; Holding colleges accountable for student outcomes; and Halting state disinvestment by encouraging states to invest in both public and private higher education. The Higher Education Policy Program's plan also includes a set of outcomes-based accountability metrics designed to ensure that public dollars are well targeted and meet the needs of students for a high-quality, affordable education that leads to success after college. The report includes an appendix: "Calculating the Costs of Our Proposal."

Public universities typically charge students less than the full cost of education, using funds from state and local government and other sources to cover the difference. This indirect subsidy is one of the largest forms of aid in America's higher education system but is less understood in the policy community than grants and loans, which are provided directly to students in visible amounts, making them easier to analyze. Researchers and journalists aim to understand these indirect subsidies through proxies such as per-student spending, or per-student state appropriations. These simple analyses have led many to conclude that indirect subsidies at public universities favor students from affluent families. However, neither of these measures provides accurate information about the subsidy a student receives because they do not account for the tuition that students pay. Combining data from multiple sources allows us to explore the relationship between university spending on education and what their students pay in tuition, more accurately estimating the average subsidies that students at public four-year universities receive. We use these estimates to examine how subsidies differ by family income and find that subsidies for education expenditures actually decline on average as student and family incomes increase. This finding stems from two key trends that are often overlooked. First, selective state universities are not enrolling primarily high-income students--a key part of the claims critics make. In fact, low-income students are well represented at public four-year universities. Even at the most elite state universities they make up about 25 percent of the student body. Second, low-income students tend to pay lower tuition than their high-income peers, even at the same type of universities, because they receive tuition discounts and grant aid from their school. That increases the public subsidy they receive relative to their peers, even before accounting for federal grants and other direct aid. At the same time, high-income students are much more likely to attend an out-of-state school, where tuition can be as much as three times the in-state rate, effectively bringing their public subsidy to zero. One appendix is included: Methodology and Data Sources.