A detailed examination of the history of college attrition rates reveals how far we have already come in our higher education aspirations, and provides some understanding of how we might tackle the challenge of now raising graduation rates.

This book explores the purposes of federal student loans, how well traditional arrangements work, and how innovations might offer guidance for rethinking the design of financial aid.

Students and families can finance higher education in three ways: grants, government-backed loans, or private loans. Contemporary research and debate typically focus on grants and federally supported loans. Meanwhile, despite its explosive growth, the private loan market remains minimally researched and poorly understood. This made sense a decade ago, when...