How do you fund university education? In the UK, the governmentplans to introduce variable fees from 2006, to be paid back after thestudent graduates, but the debate continues worldwide. What isthe best solution, offering what people want but at a realistic price?Nicholas Barr offers his...

Universities, parents and poorer students will allbenefit under the Government’s plans for top-upfees.[...]

How best to widen university access - by abolishing fees, as the Tories suggest, or byenhancing student loans, as the government plans?[...]

Universities need cash, students need support and there are too few working-classentrants. After a two-year extension, Charles Clarke and the class of '73 are all set todeliver answers to these problems. Nicholas Barr offers a guide to how you, theexaminers, should mark their responses.[...]

[...]Nonetheless, not all the news is bad. As we describe in detail,our work on New York City’s public schools—which includesextensive research on immigrant children—and our separate work on school reform offer several reasons for optimism.First, immigrant students, who might be viewed as...

[...]In this paper, I draw on analyses that aimed todetermine whether impoverished U.S. locales varied byrace or urban/rural location in their rates and causes ofexcess mortality, and whether mortality gaps betweenimpoverished and other U.S. populations widened over thedecade from 1980 to 1990....

[...]The New York City Social Indicators Survey (SIS)project represents one effort to track the consequences ofpolicy reform and devolution for inequality and well-beingin the largest and most diverse city in the United States.The project uses a telephone survey to collect data from arepeated...

[...]This paper analyzes the current state of the educationsystem in the United States. In the course of the paper, Iwill try to point out where controversy exists, particularlyin academic discussions.[...]

[...]The main conclusion from this review is that thewidely held belief that American schools have failed—thatthey are performing worse today than they have in the past,that a high school degree is no longer valuable, and thatadditional resources yield no benefits in the current system—is...

[...]The purpose of this paper is to answer threerelated questions. First, what general facts can we learn byexamining the traditional forms of school choice in theUnited States? In particular, we need to understand thegeneral relationship between school choice and five factors:(1) student...