Strengthening State Financial Aid Policies for Low-Income Working Adults

Explains the need to expand state financial aid programs to help the working poor enroll in college. Recommends funding new aid for working adults as well as strengthening existing aid to meet their needs, and describes recent state initiatives

Improving Student Success by Strengthening Developmental Education in Community Colleges: The Role of State Policy

Outlines the need to strengthen community college students' basic English and math skills as required for college courses in order to meet workforce needs. Describes promising approaches to improving developmental education and recommends state policies

Merit Aid and Inequality: Evidence from Baccalaureate & Beyond

This study examines the distribution of merit-based and need-based financial aid packages among a nationally representative sample of baccalaureate degree recipients. The results show that students from underrepresented race and class backgrounds are less likely to receive merit aid and that students with minimal financial need are more likely to receive merit aid. Because the majority of financial aid flows through student loan programs, shifting financial aid resources toward merit-based scholarships may increase the costs of higher education for students with high financial need. Thus, awarding financial aid regardless of student need is counterproductive to the goal of equal opportunity in postsecondary education

The Future of Private Loans: Who is Borrowing, and Why?

Examines developments in private loans within the student lending industry, characteristics of loan borrowers, and trends that might impact the growth of private loans in the future

Creating Opportunity for All: Building Pathways from Continuing Education to Credit Programs

In 2013, Achieving the Dream convened seven network colleges to form the Northeast Resiliency Consortium (NRC). Created in the wake of natural and manmade disasters, the consortium sought to develop a resilient workforce. Led by Passaic County Community College, and including Atlantic Cape Community College, Bunker Hill Community College, Capital Community College, Housatonic Community College, Kingsborough Community College, and LaGuardia Community College, the consortium was awarded $23.5 million from the US Department of Labor's Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College Career Training (TAACCCT) program. Achieving the Dream served as the consortium's convening partner and as an intermediary to support peer learning among colleges, provide technical assistance, host in-person consortium convenings, and promote promising strategies implemented by the consortium. One important challenge the NRC colleges took on was aligning continuing education and credit programs along a career pathway to meet student and labor market needs. This brief describes how the colleges made adjustments to articulate non-credit to credit credentials to ensure strong career pathways for students who start on the non-credit ramp.As a result, the colleges are now providing students with stacked credentials, ensuring prior learning and experience is accounted for within pathways, and are formally recognizing key milestones with credentials. All in all, the colleges smoothed the way for students to work toward an associate degree even if they began their studies in a non-credit program

Promoting Partnerships for Student Success: Lessons from the SSPIRE Initiative

The Student Support Partnership Integrating Resources and Education (SSPIRE) initiative aimed to increase the success of young, low-income, and academically underprepared California community college students by helping colleges strengthen their support services and better integrate these services with academic instruction. This report describes what the nine participating community colleges did to meet the goals of SSPIRE and offers lessons for other institutions drawn from MDRC's research on the initiative

Introducing the national COPD resources and outcomes project

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>We report baseline data on the organisation of COPD care in UK NHS hospitals participating in the National COPD Resources and Outcomes Project (NCROP).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We undertook an initial survey of participating hospitals in 2007, looking at organisation and performance indicators in relation to general aspects of care, provision of non-invasive ventilation (NIV), pulmonary rehabilitation, early discharge schemes, and oxygen. We compare, where possible, against the national 2003 audit.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>100 hospitals participated. These were typically larger sized Units. Many aspects of COPD care had improved since 2003. Areas for further improvement include organisation of acute care, staff training, end-of-life care, organisation of oxygen services and continuation of pulmonary rehabilitation.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Key Points: positive change occurs over time and repeated audit seems to deliver some improvement in services. It is necessary to assess interventions such as the Peer Review used in the NCROP to achieve more comprehensive and rapid change.</p

Stellar Astrophysics and Exoplanet Science with the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE)

The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) is a planned 11.25-m aperture facility with a 1.5 square degree field of view that will be fully dedicated to multi-object spectroscopy. A rebirth of the 3.6m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Maunakea, MSE will use 4332 fibers operating at three different resolving powers (R ~ 2500, 6000, 40000) across a wavelength range of 0.36-1.8mum, with dynamical fiber positioning that allows fibers to match the exposure times of individual objects. MSE will enable spectroscopic surveys with unprecedented scale and sensitivity by collecting millions of spectra per year down to limiting magnitudes of g ~ 20-24 mag, with a nominal velocity precision of ~100 m/s in high-resolution mode. This white paper describes science cases for stellar astrophysics and exoplanet science using MSE, including the discovery and atmospheric characterization of exoplanets and substellar objects, stellar physics with star clusters, asteroseismology of solar-like oscillators and opacity-driven pulsators, studies of stellar rotation, activity, and multiplicity, as well as the chemical characterization of AGB and extremely metal-poor stars.Comment: 31 pages, 11 figures; To appear as a chapter for the Detailed Science Case of the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explore

Photoproduction of K+K− meson pairs on the proton

The exclusive reaction γp→pK+K− was studied in the photon energy range 3.0–3.8  GeV and momentum transfer range 0.6&lt;−t&lt;1.3  GeV2. Data were collected with the CLAS detector at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. In this kinematic range the integrated luminosity was approximately 20  pb−1. The reaction was isolated by detecting the K+ and the proton in CLAS, and reconstructing the K− via the missing-mass technique. Moments of the dikaon decay angular distributions were extracted from the experimental data. Besides the dominant contribution of the ϕ meson in the P wave, evidence for S−P interference was found. The differential production cross sections dσ/dt for individual waves in the mass range of the ϕ resonance were extracted and compared to predictions of a Regge-inspired model. This is the first time the t-dependent cross section of the S-wave contribution to the elastic K+K− photoproduction has been measured