Armed with better data, the theory goes, students and parents will vote with their wallets, putting pressure on low-performing colleges to improve while avoiding direct government intervention.  But these provisions are not working nearly as well as intended.

Increasing postsecondary attainment will require higher levels of college retention and completion; put simply, colleges and universities will have to do a better job of serving the students that they enroll.

The number of schools ranked highly in guides such as Barron's Profiles of American Colleges is increasing, without any evidence that these schools' instructional quality is also increasing. Applicants and their families should be wary of letting these rankings serve as the main criteria in their college decisions.

For-profits may have incentives to cut corners in pursuit of profits, but this trait is the flip side of valuable characteristics: the inclination to grow rapidly, readily tap capital and talent, maximize cost effectiveness, and accommodate customer needs. Alongside nonprofit and public providers, for-profits have a crucial role to play in meeting America’s 21st century educational challenges.

Join us for a discussion with Senator Bennet and John Easton, commissioner of the Institute of Education Sciences.

A new CBO study shows that federal-government employees receive significantly higher compensation than private-sector workers with the same levels of education and experience. It confirms many of the findings of a 2011 study written by Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine and helps rebut union claims that federal workers are underpaid.

The public commonly accepts that public school teachers are "desperately underpaid," in the words of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and that raising teacher pay should be a priority of education reform. But is this true?

We cannot say for sure how much job security is worth. But we can say it is worth something more than zero and we believe that our estimates are reasonable or even conservative.