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Rather than excluding students, progressive states like New Jersey have an opportunity to lead and expand the universe of the possible on issues like free college. 

Senior Fellow Algernon Austin writes about the soaring cost of college tuition and the graduation rates of of low-income and minority students.

We’ve created our own bracket here, matching up colleges not by the number of McDonald’s High School All-Americans on their roster, but by whether or not they provide access to an affordable education and whether they are engines of upward mobility for working-class students.

With so many eventual graduates starting at community colleges, we should take a hard look at institutional aid policies, which reward incoming freshmen much more than transfer students.

New York became the first state in the country to return to a guarantee of tuition-free college for students at state public colleges and universities.

Is President Trump’s budget showing surprising mercy for today’s (and tomorrow’s) college students? Let’s check the tale of the tape.

It's time to recognize that in a world where most students must borrow for a credential, borrowers should receive the same failsafe protections on these loans as they do on any other consumer loan.

The top three economic issues for young people are debt-free public college, paid family and medical leave and a higher minimum wage (followed closely by affordable childcare). 

The tax debate undersells the impact of this current debate on working-class communities, and misses part of why the GOP tax plan is so radical.

Lawmakers, like those designing WV Invests, shouldn’t be afraid of students, and they shouldn’t be afraid of investing in them. 

States will have 2 options, neither of them good: They could preserve higher education funding at the expense of health care subsidies, or vice versa. 

To summarize, the House Republican tax plan would get rid of several incentives—from the ability to deduct student loan interest as well as tuition, to the Lifetime Learning tax credit—which provide middle-class students and borrowers with some relief at tax time. 

While some fairly valuable tax breaks for students have been kept from the chopping block, the Senate GOP’s tax bill could go a long way toward decimating funding for public colleges and universities, and community colleges in particular.

Going to college is costing more money these days for Millennials, as a result of reduced funding over time.

States are spending less money on public colleges than they did in the past. According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, adjusted for inflation, state support for public colleges and universities has fallen by about 26 percent per full-time student in the last 20 years.

Most Americans earn their bachelor's degrees at public universities, and it's easy to see why.

Adjusted for inflation, state support for each full-time public-college student declined by 26.1 percent from 1990 to 2010, forcing students and their families to shoulder more of the cost of higher education at a time when family incomes were largely stagnant, according to a report released on Monday by the think tank Demos.

I have often thought, “If education is expensive, try ignorance.”

In the past three decades, college costs have risen significantly faster than inflation and are now at roughly 25 percent of the average household's income. This isn't true just for private schools.

Tuition at public four-year colleges and universities rose 112.5 percent between 1990-1991 and 2010-2011. Here's a big part of the explanation: