it's fun that the full name is the New York Knickerbockers, thereby making the Knicks' name a nickname

The death spiral of reading is one of my biggest concerns these days in education. Students don't do the reading, so we gradually assign less and less in hopes that they actually do it. Smartphones have destroyed attention spans (myself included), and with AI, all bets are off.

In a new Education Week opinion piece, Rhode Island Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green highlights how research from the Annenberg Institute helped inform the state's efforts to redesign math course pathways and strengthen college and career readiness. Check it out the article: buff.ly/QBq2Qjj

New post on the pressures squeezing American higher education open.substack.com/pub/rajivset...

Recent research from WEPC on a similar Massachusetts initiative found dramatically increased enrollment as community college was made free. Check out the policy brief below as we continue to build a fuller picture of the future of community college across the country.

A little personal news today: after more than a decade as director of @caldercenter.bsky.social, I'm stepping down. It's been amazing to get to work with terrific folks & the work will continue on lots of projects! 1/2

To the extent "Gen Z" thinks this — and such broad generalizations are often dubious — it partially reflects a relentless and misleading media narrative that in recent years has ignored the actual data here.

📢 The votes are in! EdWorkingPapers readers chose “Improving Student Attendance in the ICE Era” as the topic for our webinar on June 17. See who’s speaking and register >> brown.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

FYI, AV RFP for rigorous research on programs for higher ed part time student success www.arnoldventures.org/higher-educa... cc @joshua-goodman.com @dynarski.bsky.social

New Hampshire's Polar Caves may have the best sign-writer of all time. polarcaves.com

I have never been retroactively madder about a federal government shutdown than when I realized today that the 2025 October supplement to the CPS was never administered, eliminating a key source of data about college enrollment patterns last fall. 😡

This new paper provides economic evidence for Humboldt's ideal of uniting research and teaching. Students exposed to courses closer to the research frontier are more likely to complete their degrees, earn higher grades, attend graduate school, and achieve higher earnings later on.

"Michael Strain, the director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote...that 'if you care about giving businesses and policymakers the information they need to understand the world,' you should care about the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences division"

Not reported here: just 8% of graduates say that they wouldn't go to university if they could choose again www.kcl.ac.uk/news/public-...

If I hear another f--ng interview about how the long run learning loss which started pre-covid (esp in reading) is probably caused by social media and failure to implement Science of Reading, while totally ignoring the post-recession great disinvestment - for which we already have causal evidence...

Excellent article in The Atlantic about what's going on at NSF. Share with people in your circle--too many aren't aware!

Once again: German universities were the envy of the world before the Nazis rose to power and took an ideological wrecking ball to the entire enterprise. If you want to know how long it took for German universities to recover… they haven’t.

WEPC is hiring a Research Scientist to lead quantitative research on Connecticut's educator workforce! 📍 Boston-based (with WFH flexibility) 💰 $85–100K 🗓️ Starts Summer/Fall 2026 If we've worked together before and you're interested, feel free to reach out! #EducationPolicy #Hiring #EdResearch

ICYMI: We banned cellphones in our schools. It’s had a powerful, positive impact on students. #OPINION

#EconSky: check in on your Google Scholar page. It is not ok. Screenshot is one of three hallucinated articles I found on my profile, clearly a downstream product of someone's AI hallucinations.

Out today in the June issue of AER:I is my work with Astrid Pineda on the college impacts of charter school attendance💃🏻 www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

New research on Tennessee Promise, a statewide free community college program, finds higher enrollment, more associate's degrees, and no harm to four-year completion, from Paige Schoonover, Jonathon Attridge, Celeste K. Carruthers, and Jilleah G. Welch www.nber.org/papers/w35226

My friend @jdlahart.bsky.social gave me the opportunity to indulge one of my hobbyhorses - we talk too much about the challenges facing young college grads, and not enough about the challenges facing young people without a 4 year university degree: www.wsj.com/economy/jobs...

Cross-posting this from Twitter, because I like it: (by @littmath.bsky.social)

So an A for "advanced," B for "proficient," etc.? Interesting!

The impact of cell phone bans will not be measured by any one study. Here's a nice review of the evidence from @jillbarshay.bsky.social at Hechinger, highlighting the variation in findings across diverse studies hechingerreport.org/global-resea...

My kid won a thing. A musical thing. 🎶🎉 namt.org/2026/05/stud...

This smart op-ed by @arielkalil.bsky.social and Derek Rury makes me think that states should assign letter grades to standardized test scores so that parents find such information more comprehensible and salient. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/o...

New working paper with Amol Singh Raswan and Chris Udry: "The Sisyphean Pursuit of Evidence for Poverty Traps." A central idea in development economics is that poverty can trap people. We went looking for the cleanest evidence. Here's what we found – and didn't.

Sure was fun believing in light-touch interventions while it lasted! Paper: www.nber.org/papers/w35230

About that job market for college grads... www.wsj.com/economy/jobs...

WEPC is hiring a Research Scientist to lead quantitative research on Connecticut's educator workforce! Boston-based, $85-100K, starts Summer/Fall 2026. Learn more below and apply by sending a letter of interest + CV to [email protected].

PS If any of you are around lower Manhattan tonight and want to get a drink after 8:30 PM, let me know!

Excited that BU PhD student Sam Nitkin and I will kick off @nber.org's Summer Institute education meeting with "Kumon Up: The Effects of Private Tutoring Centers on Student Achievement" (The causal follow-up to a descriptive paper called "Kumon In") Full program: www.nber.org/conferences/...

The Economics of Education Review has been killing it recently. The latest issue is chock full of interesting articles worth reading and citing. Kudos to the editorial team! www.sciencedirect.com/journal/econ...

Excited to give a talk today at the NY Fed and woke up early to jog toward the borough of my birth.

Amid budget challenges and concerns about effectiveness, Oregon is considering ending its free community college program and dumping the money into need-based aid that students at public and private colleges can access.

Good teachers don't just raise the achievement of students they teach. They also shape the teachers of tomorrow. Standard estimates of teacher impact ignore these intergenerational spillovers. Thread on new work led by @danilok.bsky.social. Paper: osf.io/preprints/so... 1/10

My paper on peer effects has been accepted at the Journal of Political Economy @jpolecon.bsky.social. In it, I formulate and empirically test a theory of why students influence each other's learning in school: by competing with each other. I thank the editor, referees, and data editor.

#econsky Why do so many econ reporters think the sky is falling for young college grads? Here's some perspective to help: (1/11)

The latest census data came out and MA ranked dead last in housing units permitted. We need to realize that the MBTA communities act has mostly been a failure and we need statewide standards to tackle the single biggest issue for voters in our state.

7) Real college tuition costs have been flat or declining for nearly two decades. There's an increasing disconnect between sticker prices and what people actually pay, which causes confusion on this point.

5) The college-wage premium remains near historic highs. College-educated workers, on average, are paid substantially more than non-college workers. Rigorous studies suggest that a good chunk of this premium is causal.

2) There is no indication of a meaningful decline in four-year college enrollment rates among high school grads. There has been a drop in *two-year* college enrollment from its peak circa 2010. This key distinction — between two-year vs. four-year — is often not appreciated

When I got promoted my wife said “so you’ve reached your peak.” Little did she know that some time later I would take a demotion to Chair.

Some news: www.bu.edu/wheelock/new...

The gloomy headlines about the future of American higher ed been seemingly relentless. But the discourse is missing some basic(and surprising) facts about what’s actually happening right now. Here are 10....

We are just about (or have already) hit 40K followers on this site, which has inspired me to reflect a little bit on books & social media. I (Josh) have been doing bookish social media for Porter Square Books for...15 years and counting. (I think we started on Twitter in 2011.)...

"Why doesn't the US have national health insurance?" Fascinating new paper from Alsan and Neberai out in QJE @qjeharvard.bsky.social finds: rise of private health insurance in the US was enabled by 'strategic, interest group-financed effort to shape citizen views and influence policy' #EconSky

MIT has lost 500 international grad students relative to last year. Caused directly by the White House. Closing America's doors to the very best, most brilliant people on the planet is like dropping a bomb directly on America's capacity to innovate. On the prosperity of our children's future.