This edition was written by Tara Watson and Sasha Snyder.
💡 New from us: Financial aid for students without financial need and the effect of slowed immigration on population trends in U.S. metro areas
In this four-part series, Nonresident Senior Fellow Phillip Levine explores the world of merit aid, or financial aid awarded to students without financial need. He explains that colleges offer these tuition discounts to attract students to enroll: just because a student can pay full price does not mean they are willing to. Levine finds that 42.7% of colleges provide merit aid to most students (between 80% and 100%) who do not demonstrate financial need. He also proposes several policy responses to this trend, including increasing price transparency, reducing operational costs, expanding public funding for universities, and encouraging greater coordination across institutions.
A recent report by William Frey analyzes the role that immigration plays in the population growth of major metropolitan areas in the U.S. He shows that all 56 of the major metropolitan areas in the U.S. experienced declines in new immigrants over the past year (in total dropping from 2.06 million people in 2023-24 to just 969,000 last year). All but one of these areas experienced slower population growth overall, a shift from growth to decline, or an even greater population decline last year than in the previous year. Frey warns that these trends may be just the “tip of the iceberg,” as immigration numbers are projected to fall even further.
📖 What we’re reading
Will declining trust in government statistics hurt the economy?A recent article in The Economist highlights the growing difficulty government surveys face in maintaining high response rates. A decade ago, about nine in ten Americans reliably completed the Current Population Survey; today, fewer than seven in ten do. Response rates for the Consumer Expenditure Survey have also fallen sharply, from roughly 70 percent to 40 percent. In a new working paper, Nicholas Bloom, Erica Groshen, Duncan Hobbs, and Michael Strain argue that this decline carries real economic costs. Focusing on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they estimate that maintaining trust in the quality and integrity of official statistics generates about $25 in economic benefits for every $1 spent on the agency’s budget.
How do individuals’ college admissions outcomes, relative to their expectations, influence their attitudes toward affirmative action policies?Louis-Pierre Lepage, Heather Sarsons, and Michael Thaler use survey data among recent White and Asian college applicants to investigate this question. They find that those who were admitted to fewer schools than anticipated were relatively more likely to oppose affirmative action, to believe that the policy played an important role in their admissions outcomes, and to donate to an anti-affirmative action organization. This population was also found to hold more negative views about the academic qualifications of under-represented minorities. The pattern was found to hold with parents of students planning to apply to college in the 2025–26 or 2026–27 academic years: parents given disappointing news about their child’s prospects became more opposed to affirmative action.
How does the way land is divided shape economic outcomes over time? In this new study, Cory Smith examines the long-term effects of land ownership patterns in the nineteenth-century American West. He takes advantage of a natural experiment created by two government policies — the 1862 Homestead Act and railroad land grants — which distributed land in largely arbitrary ways. This allows him to isolate the effects of concentrated land ownership. Smith finds that areas where land ended up in the hands of fewer large owners saw lower investment and less intensive farming for roughly 150 years after the original land allocations. He argues that large landowners often relied on sharecropping arrangements that gave tenants little incentive to invest in improving the land, creating economic effects that persisted over generations.
📊 Top chart: Slowing immigration is driving population losses in major U.S. metro areas
This month’s top chart comes from a recent Brookings report by William Frey. Using United States Census Bureau data, Frey examines how changes in immigration flows have shaped population trends in major U.S. metropolitan areas since the pandemic. He assesses how population changes in major cities have been driven by domestic migration and immigration: many urban areas lost residents during the pandemic as people moved to suburbs or other regions but later rebounded because increased immigration offset those losses. When immigration slowed again in 2024–25, however, population growth weakened or turned negative in most major urban counties.
➡️ Worth a click
Explore this data tool from the Urban Institute to understand the changing demographics of U.S. PK–12 schools.
Follow the implementation of the Medicaid work requirements imposed by the “One Big Beautiful Bill” using this KFF tracker.
Check out this new blog post by Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine about how the decline in fertility rates is distributed across education levels.
About the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at Brookings
The Center for Economic Security and Opportunity (CESO) produces data-driven, nonpartisan analysis to address the United States’ most challenging social policy questions. In a noisy and polarized world, the Center is a trustworthy source for the information and tools policymakers need to build an economy that works for everyone.
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