Community colleges are subsidized through direct state and local government appropriations and through student grant programs. Every student who drops out represents an investment loss by the taxpayers in that student's uncompleted education.

Over the past two decades, the share of working age Americans collecting disability insurance payments has doubled, from 2.3 to 4.6 percent of the population aged 25 to 64, with the largest increases coming among women.

Richard Burkhauser of Cornell and Mary Daly of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, coauthors of The Declining Work and Welfare of People with Disabilities (AEI Press, September 2011), offer a "work first" approach that has the potential to shrink caseloads, curb costs, and improve the economic outlook for people with disabilities.

The rapid growth of Disability Insurance does not appear to be from a true rise in disabling illness, but rather from policies that increased the subjectivity of the disability screening process.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is implementing new rules that seek to make it easier for veterans that have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder to receive disability, but misapplied largess can undermine the recovery prospects of other veterans.

The U.S. disability system is failing--growing at an unsustainable pace for taxpayers and delivering relatively poor outcomes to those with disabilities.

This paper compares a variety of measures of fatness in terms of their ability to predict application for Social Security Disability Insurance.