Stephanie Cellini, Jordan Matsudaira, Clare McCann

The American higher education and workforce systems have been a key driver of the nation’s economic strength and resilience over the last century. But major challenges in access, rising sticker prices, stagnating college completion, increasing student debt, and the uneven quality of educational programs have led many Americans to question its value. These challenges are amplified among first-generation students, low-income students, and students of color, raising concerns that higher education may exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, existing inequalities.

We’re launching the Postsecondary Equity and Economics Research Center (PEER) in the hopes of addressing these challenges. Our experiences working in government have shown us that researchers’ expertise often arrives too late to influence policymakers’ decisions, if at all. We believe that PEER can integrate the collective evidence-based insights and analytic capacity of academic researchers to contribute to the design of important higher education and workforce policies. To that end, we will work to build PEER into a one-stop shop: a place where policymakers can go to look for evidence from the academic literature and to enlist top scholars in partnership to inform policy design decisions with data analyses and insights. 

PEER’s research work will be led by Stephanie Cellini, a George Washington University professor who has served with the House Education and Labor Committee and in the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and Jordan Matsudaira, an American University professor who served as both Chief Economist of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama and, most recently, the Deputy Under Secretary and first-ever Chief Economist of the U.S. Education Department in the Biden Administration. Clare McCann, who has also served at the Department of Education, will direct the Center and act as a liaison to policymakers. With the goal of connecting policymakers with the best evidence possible – on a policymaking timeline – we will build an internal data center to conduct rapid analyses, grow our team of qualified researchers to support timely and actionable work in response to current policy debates, and recruit and support top economists and policy scholars to help answer key questions. We will also work to build a strong bench of up-and-coming and early-career academics and researchers by providing opportunities to learn about and engage in the policy process firsthand.

In a pilot aimed at generating evidence to inform regulatory policy over the past several years, we did just that, working with 25 researchers across the country to produce nearly two dozen reports and issue briefs on policy-relevant questions. Studies produced through the pilot included research into the impact of licensure requirements on student loan debt, the best ways to measure outcomes and hold accountable low-value programs in both undergraduate and graduate education, and the potential of Historically Black Colleges and Universities to improve the outcomes of Black students – all issues actively discussed by the Department of Education, Congress, and state legislatures across the country. With the launch of the PEER Center, we will build on this work with more capacity and a deepened focus on working collaboratively with policymakers. PEER’s work will evolve over time to be responsive to key issues under consideration, but our core projects will focus on several critical policy areas: 

How should America pay for education beyond a high school degree?
The last four years alone have seen major attempts to change the American system of higher education finance in dramatic ways. These include “front-end” proposals to lower colleges’ prices, including through free college and larger Pell Grants, as well as “back-end” proposals to lower student loan repayment, such as through debt cancellation, loan forgiveness for public-sector workers, or by reshaping income-driven student loan repayment plans.

These initiatives aim to reduce the cost of education for students and can reduce the need to borrow and the burden of debt payments after college. But how – and in what combination – should these policy tools be deployed together to find the most cost-effective way to advance goals of increased college-going, higher completion rates, and stronger student success after college? Answering these questions requires an understanding of how well students and borrowers understand the ways that these policies affect their cost of college attendance, how the incentives created by the policies affect whether and where students attend postsecondary training, how they pay for college (including whether and how much they borrow), whether they complete and the extent to which they successfully manage loan repayment, and whether they respond to incentives to work in jobs where they may qualify for lower loan payments or forgiveness. It also requires an understanding of whether and how institutions and other stakeholders respond to these programs – whether they adjust their tuition and fee structures or change their program offerings, for instance. The evidence base across these areas is too thin today; we’ll work to change that.

How can policymakers identify and increase access to high-value education and training programs? 
A college education pays off for most students, but too many students – disproportionately lower-income students and students of color – attend programs that leave them with poor labor market outcomes, or with debt levels that are too high to afford. Increasingly, policymakers on both sides of the aisle are seeking ways to promote value in postsecondary education, through transparency and accountability. 

But even with all this activity, questions about the best ways to measure value – both for catalyzing institutional improvement, and for communicating their value to students and the public – remain. In particular, there is little research on which types of metrics provide the most accurate information about program quality to guide education choices and how government should use these metrics to assess value for taxpayers and students. Existing measures of student outcomes are also narrow in scope, based on completion rates or students’ annual earnings. We’ll work to research whether existing metrics are the best possible ones for rationing eligibility for state or federal financial support, including cutting off taxpayer-funded aid for low-performing programs, and to generate new metrics able to reflect whether programs are meeting the broader public goals of educational investments, like improving social mobility or helping students to successful careers in a particular occupation. We’ll also study how to best present this information to provide actionable advice on the design and delivery of key information to students and other decision-makers.

What are the most cost-effective ways for colleges to promote student success in and beyond college?
Colleges across the country are nervously awaiting the onset of the “demographic cliff,” which promises a sharp decline in traditional college-aged students in light of falling birth rates. But colleges concerned about their enrollment may be missing an untapped way to fill their campuses: by increasing retention and graduation rates. 

From addressing academic underpreparedness, to providing better counseling and holistic supports for students, to eliminating barriers to access at high-quality institutions, colleges can help their students graduate. The enrollment crisis could present a new opportunity to broaden the use of these strategies on campuses. But there is more work to do to understand the most affordable ways for under-resourced colleges to address their students’ needs, improve the quality of their offerings, and turn around poor outcomes. The PEER Center will work to identify cost-effective, sustainable ways that institutions can improve students’ success, and to highlight the highly effective models that can really move the needle.

How should institutions, employers, and policymakers support students in navigating the labor market and managing their student debt after college?
Students enrolling in education beyond high school – whether in apprenticeships or certificate programs, or seeking two- or four-year degrees – are making important and expensive decisions that will affect the trajectory of their lives. Yet students, and the employers who hire them or help fund their education, often operate in the dark, without high-quality information about whether these programs will help them learn the skills they need and land the jobs they want. Borrowers also struggle to access information about options available to manage their student loans. 

Research can help institutions and employers by providing new information about the skills that different jobs require, which educational programs will provide students with the necessary training,  the labor market outcomes associated associated with different career opportunities, and how that matches up (or not) with the costs of their programs and their options for repaying their loans. We will pursue research that will help to ensure higher education both pays off for students and meets employers’ needs – and how policymakers can promote transparency into those critical questions so that students have better information, before they open their wallets. 

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These challenges lack simple solutions and there aren’t any quick fixes – but building toward effective solutions is critical to expanding opportunity for those who need it most. We look forward to engaging with our peers in academia, policy organizations, and in government to bring new research to bear in helping to tackle these and many other important questions in higher education today.