SSTAR Lab Blog

By Misti Jeffers In late September, I attended the ECMC Foundation’s 2024 Career and Technical Education Leadership Collaborative (CTE LC) Convening, an annual opportunity for all past and current CTE LC Fellows (500+!) to convene for 2-3 days of community and professional development. The CTE LC, “an initiative focused on bringing together diverse perspectives and…

By Jared Colston With overall numbers of high school graduates projected to decline nationally, higher education professionals fear this  “demographic cliff” will result in a postsecondary “enrollment cliff.” Policy debates at the state level often invoke concerns around brain drain of their home state prospective college-goers, while postsecondary institutions look to attract out-of-state students to…

By Cherish Golden, Misti Jeffers, & Gresham Collom In a recent All My Relations podcast episode, when asked “Why college for Indigenous students,” Dr. Bryan Brayboy (Lumbee), stated “I’m convinced not all Native people should go to college. I’m equally convinced that everyone should have the option about whether or not they go.”  We echo…

By Nick Hillman For over three years — between March 2020 and September 2023—monthly payments on certain federal student loans were paused. The pause ended nearly a year ago, and many researchers and policy organizations want to know how the return to repayment is going for borrowers. However, getting access to high-quality data on student…

By Cherish Golden Over the last year, the SSTAR Lab has been taking an inventory of all financial aid opportunities available to Indigenous students at the state-, system-, and postsecondary institution-level. Why? Because there is currently no comprehensive and reliable resource for Indigenous students and other stakeholders to find reliable, easy-to-digest information on scholarships and grants…

By Jared Colston At the beginning of August, two members of the SSTAR Lab (myself and Amberly Dziesinski) attended the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) Conference. Initially, I went into the SHEEO conference hoping to better understand the connection between institutions, state agencies, and federal policy when it comes to creating and improving our…

By Amberly Dziesinski If you listen in to a conversation between members of the SSTAR Lab discussing financial aid policies, chances are, you’ll hear the phrase “administrative burden.” Administrative burdens are the costs associated with accessing a public benefit, from learning about the program, to proving you are eligible and complying with the requirements, to…

By Bonniejean Zitske, Associate Director, SSTAR Lab Hello! Welcome to a new blog series featuring interviews with the talented people at SSTAR Lab. Each month, I’ll interview someone different, learning what drew them to the world of higher education and what keeps them engaged and motivated. This month, I interviewed Jared Colston, our new Data…

By Amberly Dziesinski Over the past 6 months, our team has been combing through state policy documents to better understand how community colleges are funded. We aimed to identify if, and how, states fund three different enrollment types: credit-bearing, noncredit, and dual enrollment students. We are excited to share the resulting report and accompanying interactive…

By Gresham Collom, Ph.D., University of Minnesota  Oneewe (thank you – Munsee) for reading our monthly Indigenous Student Financial Aid Opportunities blog series! This is a space for us to share updates on our project, describe programs and policies we find during data collection, and reflect on interesting developments we see in the data.   We…