Fight for Affordability: Outsmart Scams and Protect Your Money

Mark Huelsman is the Director of Policy & Advocacy at The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs. He also currently serves as a Senior Fellow with Protect Borrowers, a nonprofit organization fighting to build an economy where debt doesn’t limit opportunity. 

Mark is a nationally recognized expert on college affordability, the social safety net, and debt, and he has appeared on NPR, Fox News, C-SPAN, Yahoo! Finance, Al Jazeera, and Bloomberg TV. His writing and work have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Slate, Vox, Marketwatch, The Nation, The Guardian, Inside Higher Ed, the New Republic, The American Prospect, The Hill, and U.S. News and World Report.  In 2016, he was named to the Politico 50 guide to the thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics for his role in sparking a national policy conversation around debt-free college.

Previously, Mark has held roles at several public policy organizations and think tanks, including Demos, the Institute for Higher Education Policy, New America, and the Brookings Institution. A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Mark holds a B.A. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, and an Ed.M. in International Education Policy from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

Stephanie T. Nguyen is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Law and the Economy, where she advances investigative research, while building durable institutional capacity to strengthen and support state and local enforcers to understand, detect, and address harms to competition and consumers.

From 2021 to 2025, Nguyen served as Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, where she founded and led the agency’s first Office of Technology. In this role, she built and led multidisciplinary teams supporting competition and consumer protection enforcement, led landmark compelled investigative studies on generative AI investments and partnerships and on surveillance pricing, and strengthened digital investigative capacity across federal and state regulators.

Previously, Nguyen was at the U.S. Digital Service, where she designed and deployed large-scale technology systems serving millions of people, including systems that streamlined federal visa processing, expanded access to Medicare and Medicaid, and supported FAFSA-based federal student loan enrollment. She has also led investigative research as a Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab and Consumer Reports' Digital Lab, where her work exposed predatory fees in food delivery services during the pandemic, pricing disparities in automobile insurance pricing tied to education level and occupation, and abusive data practices in mental health apps. Nguyen was a Gleitsman Fellow and Scholar at Harvard's Center for Public Leadership and a graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Virginia.