One of the most popular state policy trends in higher education has been the re-emergence of performance funding. Many states adopted this strategy during the New Accountability movement of the 1990s, but a lack of financial and political support in the early 2000s resulted in many states abandoning these initiatives . Performance funding policies regained popularity in the mid-2000s, due in large part to efforts of many influential organizations, especially the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation, National Governors Association, Complete College America, and National Conference of State Legislatures. These organizations led a national effort to draw attention to issues related to college completion and often advocated for policies that incentivized completion by linking state appropriations to institutional outputs (e.g., number of degrees awarded, student retention, transfer rates) instead of funding colleges according to the number of students enrolled (McKeown-Moak, 2013).Concerned that the United States is falling behind other countries in terms of degree completion and that colleges are not producing enough graduates to keep pace with changes in the labor market, state policymakers view performance funding as a way to align colleges with broader state policy goals. By funding colleges according to their outputs, rather than inputs, state policymakers believe that these incentives will motivate colleges to increase degree productivity. While there is no question that advocates of performance funding policies have been very 560224E PAXXX10.

This study updates and expands the literature on student loan default. By applying multilevel regression to the Beginning Postsecondary Students survey, four key findings emerge. First, attending proprietary institutions is strongly associated with default, even after accounting for students’ socioeconomic and academic backgrounds. Second, cumulative loan debt has a non-linear relationship to defaulting. Third, minoritized and students from low-income families default at disproportionately high rates; and fourth, unemployment and degree completion are strongly associated with greater default rates. These findings counter the argument that default is a “preexisting condition,” and the discussion is framed around implications for federal financial aid policy.

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When students choose where to attend college, they often stay in close proximity to home and work. Much of the college choice literature, however, does not engage with the importance of geography in shaping educational destinations. Using county and commuting zone data from various federal sources, this study finds that the number of local colleges varies along lines of race and class. Communities with large Hispanic populations and low educational attainment have the fewest alternatives nearby, while White and Asian communities tend to have more. These can result in education deserts, or places where opportunities richly available for some communities are rare (or even nonexistent) in others.