This edition was written by Tara Watson and Sasha Snyder.
💡 New from us: the student loan program under OBBBA, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and the economic impact of immigration
Currently, around 43 million student borrowers in the U.S. hold over a trillion dollars in student loan debt. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed by Congress and ratified in July 2025, will overhaul the federal student loan program. On March 19, CESO hosted an event focused on how these changes will affect borrowers and institutions of higher education. The event featured a panel of experts, as well as comments from Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) and a fireside chat with Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent. The speakers discussed the complexity of the current student loan system, especially amid the last few years of policy changes. They held different views on whether OBBBA will introduce improvements to the system, or as, Congresswoman Bonamici put it, prove to be a “dream killer.”
In conjunction with the event, CESO released a collection of previous work on student loans, including evaluations of loan limits, various income-driven repayment plans, and policy changes under Trump and Biden. Sarah Turner and Sarah Reber also published a piece on the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF). They explain how PSLF works for different types of borrowers and how the program has evolved since its conception. They highlight the unanticipated cost of the program, the complexity of how it interacts with other repayment plans, and the serious administrative problems it suffers from.
CESO Director Tara Watson released a report summarizing her recent research on the impact of immigrants on the U.S. economy. She explains how immigrants add to economic growth by participating in the labor force and contributing to consumer demand. Immigrants will also play a crucial role in mitigating the effects of an aging population by increasing the working-age population who support entitlement programs like Social Security. Watson also points to empirical evidence showing that immigrants have increased tax revenue more than they have cost the government in public benefits, creating a fiscal surplus for the U.S. government over time.
📖 What we’re reading
Does employment shift mothers’ voting behavior and political identity? In a new paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Jacob Bastian examines how employment-driven policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit and welfare reform have altered the political behavior of lower-income mothers—reducing their voter turnout and increasing their conservatism. These political shifts are more pronounced among White mothers and those living in non-metropolitan areas, and they appear to be driven by exposure to conservative workplace environments. This analysis suggests that pro-work public policies may have partially offset the broader national trend of women moving toward the Democratic Party.
What effect did pandemic-era intergovernmental grants have on public school outcomes?Jeffrey Clemens, Philip Hoxie, and Stan Veuger investigate the impact of $189.5 billion of federal COVID-19 emergency aid on U.S. school districts. They find no evidence that the additional funding improved students' test scores, but they do observe that recipient districts experienced faster school reopenings, greater enrollment retention, and better attendance rates. They provide suggestive evidence that these outcomes can be credited to changes in political engagement from parents in districts that qualified for federal funds.
How does college students’ (or their roommates’) mobile app usage affect their academic performance, physical health, and long-term career outcomes? This study by Panle Jia Barwick , Siyu Chen, Chao Fu, and Teng Li tracks the phone usage and outcomes of three first-year cohorts at a Chinese university. They find that mobile app usage is contagious; an increase in a roommate’s in-college app usage increases an individual's own usage. The authors also show that mobile app usage negatively affects both GPA and physical health. Notably, its impact on physical health is three times greater than its effect on the GPAs for required courses. Lastly, they find that an increase in an individual’s (or their roommate’s) app usage reduces wages upon graduation.
📊 Top chart: How much do retirement outcomes depend on birth-year?
This month’s top chart comes from a post by Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Fernández-Villaverde shows how retirement savings depend heavily on sequencing risk, or the order in which investment returns occur. Using 80 years of U.S. stock market data, he shows that investors with the same contributions and portfolio could end up with dramatically different savings simply due to when they started investing and when they retire. The luckiest cohort (started careers in 1954, retired 2000) accumulated nearly three times as much as the unluckiest cohort (started in 1963, retired in 2009).
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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