Recent policy debates have focused on whether restricting for-profit institutions' access to federal student financial aid could reduce student loan defaults without restricting prospective students' access to higher education. We examine the effects of similar restrictions imposed on over 1,200...

Recent policy debates have focused on whether restricting for-profit institutions' access to federal student financial aid could reduce student loan defaults without restricting prospective students' access to higher education. We examine the effects of similar restrictions imposed on over 1,200...

A lengthy literature estimating the returns to education has largely ignored the for-profit sector. In this paper, we offer some of the first causal estimates of the earnings gains to for-profit colleges. We rely on restricted-use data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97)...