generous

13Jan

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

EDUCATION

College Federal Financial Aid Will Be Easier To Apply For – And A Bit More Generous

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid – better known as FAFSA – is being simplified through the omnibus spending bill that became law in December. The FAFSA is what students must fill out to receive Pell Grants, student loans and many other types of financial aid from states and colleges. Here, Robert Kelchen, an expert on higher education policy, explains what the simplification and other changes mean for students and families. How is applying for federal student financial aid about to change? The good news is the FAFSA will go from having 108 questions to 36 questions, and most students will only have to answer a smaller set of questions about family income and household size. The not-so-good news is that this simplified form will not be available to students until October 2022 to...

Generous Unemployment Benefits Job Policies Create More Happiness For Everyone

Losing one’s job undoubtedly makes someone less happy, a feeling tens of millions of people around the world are experiencing right now. Even as the labor market recovers, as we saw in the latest U.S. employment report on Nov. 6, the number of people who have been without a job for more than 26 weeks continues to increase. Governments have implemented a wide variety of labor market policies to address the pandemic’s impact, from beefing up funding of existing unemployment policies to supplemental income programs like the US$600 checks that the U.S. sent out during part of the pandemic. While these policies are intended to alleviate the economic pain of losing one’s job, we, as happiness researchers, are more interested in how they might affect people’s well-being during the pandemic. Br...

Prejudice May Make Donors Less Generous Against People With Darker Skin

U.S. donors are inclined to give less generously to charities in developing countries when they believe those funds will help people with darker skin. That’s what I found out when I measured the implicit skin-tone bias of 750 people who completed an online survey. The donors who harbored more implicit bias against darker skin were less likely to give more than US$10 to the charity than those who were less prejudiced. How I did my work I recruited the participants through a virtual labor market known as Amazon MTurk. They were asked about their age, income and education, and other characteristics. Then I assessed their bias toward light skin or dark skin by relying on a variant of the Implicit Association Test, a common research tool for this purpose. Finally, I asked how much money they a...