Reinventing Financial Aid: Charting a New Course to College Affordability

In this provocative volume, two experts with very different points of view address the growing concern that student loan programs are not a sustainable solution to the problem of mounting college costs. They argue that the time has come to reform the financial aid system so that it is more effective in promoting college affordability, access, and completion.

Reinventing Financial Aid provides a thorough critique of the existing financial aid system and identifies the challenges of reform. It presents a host of innovations designed to improve grant and loan programs and the processes by which students access them. Pushing past current debates, it also challenges leaders to think more boldly about policy design, examine the assumptions and incentives embedded in the current system, and lay the groundwork for a fundamental rethinking of student aid programs.

While the editors agree that bold new thinking on financial aid policy is needed, they do not aim for consensus. Instead, they have leveraged their differences to flesh out important tensions, trade-offs, and areas of common ground that emerge from innovative approaches to reform. The result is a volume that serves as a counterpoint to the incremental approach to financial aid reform that has led to record tuition levels, growing student debt, and increasing doubts about the value of a college education.

Andrew P. Kelly is a resident scholar in education policy studies and the founding director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. His research currently focuses on higher education innovation, student aid reform, information and choice in education markets, and the politics of education. Kelly has published research on a variety of topics across K–12 and higher education, including postsecondary productivity and innovation, consumer information and transparency in education, K–12 principal preparation, charter school achievement, and collective bargaining in public schools. His scholarship has appeared in the American Journal of Education, Teachers College Record, Educational Policy, Policy Studies Journal, and various edited volumes. He has also published in popular outlets like The Atlantic, National Affairs, U.S. News and World Report, and National Review, and is a regular contributor to Forbes. He is coeditor of numerous edited volumes on education policy, including Stretching the Higher Education Dollar, Getting to Graduation: The Completion Agenda in Higher Education, and Reinventing Higher Education: The Promise of Innovation. He is an editorial consultant for Phi Delta Kappan magazine, and sits on the board of BASIS DC, a public charter school in Washington, DC. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Dartmouth College and a master’s and PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he served as a National Science Foundation fellow and a graduate student instructor.

Sara Goldrick-Rab is a professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is also the founding director of the Wisconsin HOPE Lab, senior scholar at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, and an affiliate of the Center for Financial Security, Institute for Research on Poverty, the La Follette School of Public Affairs, and the Consortium for Chicago School Research. Goldrick-Rab received the William T. Grant Faculty Scholars Award in 2010 for her project “Rethinking College Choice in America,” and in 2014 she was given the Early Career Award by the American Educational Research Association. Goldrick-Rab has conducted several experimental studies on financial aid programs and written widely about the challenges facing undergraduates from low-income families. She provides technical assistance to more than a dozen foundations, think tanks, and nonprofits, and in 2013 she testified on college affordability before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Dr. Goldrick-Rab earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.