Yglesias blogged about a study that found giving a poor kid a computer has no impact one way or another on their educational outcomes. Yglesias concludes from this null finding:

I think this is an important finding because it helps shed some light on the socioeconomic disparities in educational outcomes. We know that [...]

I have a new post at Policy Shop. Excerpt:

By itself, this does not seem like a far fetched notion. Hands-on learning is valuable. I don’t think anyone would contest that. But if we are going to treat internships as an educational institution, then we have to ask ourselves whether they meet the [...]

The College Board has figures for the median debt levels of people graduating college broken down by their family’s income. The full graphic with spreadsheet is at the College Board site, but here are two of them:

The bars on the left are for graduating students with family incomes [...]

I’ve already written my piece about the latest Fed report that showed all young people are taking out less car loans and mortgages in the wake of the recession. The report showed that youth with student debt reduced their mortgage and car debt by slightly more percentage points than youth without [...]

Check out this $3,675.00 MOOC offered by a company called Barbri, complete with recorded video lectures and everything. Law graduates sign up en masse for it to study for the legal bar exam. Barbri claims to have the highest pass rate of all bar preparation services.

Someone should study its attrition rates and [...]

Let’s say I am arguing with a right-winger about implementing a universal basic income (“UBI”). They say to me “I oppose it because 1) it wont actually make the lives of the poor better and 2) I think private charity is the correct institution for this kind of thing.” The right-winger’s reasoning is clear, but [...]

Elizabeth Warren has a bill out to cut student interest rates. I am in favor of refinancing student loans, but Warren’s proposal is just downright strange, excepting its value as a public relations gimmick.

The jumping off point for Warren’s policy is an observation that the Federal Reserve operates something called the discount window. Through [...]

I enjoy the MOOC debates. It is one of the few topics that causes very smart people to make arguments that they would laugh away were someone to make them in other contexts. Being personally involved or affected by an issue will do that to you I guess. As I’ve written [...]

There is a story out there that young people are facing escalating levels of debt. The student debt crowd is specifically fond of this story. But it isn’t so.

The above graph comes from a recent Fed report that primarily set off a swarm of discussion about mortgages and car loans. More [...]

I do not pretend to know what good teaching methods are. I am not a teacher, I have no training in teaching, and I do not follow teaching methods literature. I write about education quite a bit here only because so much of our discourse around class, inequality, poverty, and related economic issues are tied [...]