Earlier this month, the White House issued a press release regarding the publication of a Department of Education report which itemized the spending that took place during 2021 from the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF)—a pot of money legislatively set aside to stave off financial crisis in Higher Education during the COVID-induced disruptions. The Biden administration claimed the spending “kept millions of college students enrolled in school.” But unfortunately, the data published in the accompanying report doesn’t provide any evidence to support such an ambitious claim.

The report does indicate most of the colleges that received HEERF resources “[kept] students enrolled who were at risk of dropping out by providing financial support.” Also, it tells us that “institutions awarded $19.5 billion to students in the form of Emergency Financial Aid Grants to 12.7 million students” with the average award amounting to approximately $1,500.

In sum, millions of students received money. And colleges believe those resources did help some students stay enrolled who wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s a far cry from the conclusions implied by the headline—that the spending from HEERF caused millions of students to stay in school.

This distinction may seem pedantic, but it’s not. It’s actually critically important and illustrates a frequent crux in policy discourse.

Many people, particularly those with leftward political leanings, have the tendency to believe that more spending will almost necessarily be better. It’s not a crazy notion, that spending and doing with good intentions will make good things happen. The problem is that it doesn’t always work that way. And when we apply rigorous methodology to examining exactly how spending does affect the outcomes we are trying to improve, we sometimes find that the spending does nothing at all.

One such example is President Obama’s signature efforts in education which pumped $7 billion into School Improvement Grants, a program intended to turn around the nation’s poorest performing schools. The premise, of course, was that with more funds these schools could fix what was broken and improve the outcomes they were delivering to students. But when the effort was evaluated, it turned out that the money didn’t do much of anything at all.  And when you consider that the money could have been spent elsewhere, it actually did harm relative to doing nothing at all.

I can’t venture a guess as to how effective the HEERF spending was in maintaining college enrollment during the COVID crisis. We won’t really know how effective—or wasteful—that spending was until an enterprising researcher finds a way to pin it down. But in the meantime, the White House should refrain from drawing unfounded conclusions and stick to the facts.

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