Daniel Luzer

Despite efforts to control costs through used, rented, and electronic textbooks, the material college students are forced to buy for their classes still costs way too much. According to an article by Bethany Rayle in the Defiance, Ohio Crescent-News: A new law under the Higher Education Act requires colleges to release the required book list […]

College dormitories are getting a lot nicer lately, even as colleges all over the country cry poverty. But it’s rare that they get this nice. On September 1, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, a public college, finalized a deal a buy the Seaview Resort & Golf Course (above) for $20 million. According to the […]

Yesterday R.V. Young wrote in the Pope Center’s Clarion Call that freshman composition courses—the three-credit, one semester course in writing virtually every first-year student in every American college is required to take—seems to have become crappier. As he writes, back in the good old days, almost all of those institutions, and certainly the most ambitious, […]

Student loan payments are a huge burden on many young professionals. Despite recent efforts to help reduce education debt, it’s hard for most people in the United States to remember how we got to this place. Student debt isn’t really normal, is it? But just in time for the start of the academic year Origins, […]

The Obama administration’s interest in graduating more students from college has created a new effort to get people who may have started (and dropped out of) college years ago back in education. This is something of a problem, however, if someone stopped going to college because his grades were so low. Some Pennsylvania colleges are […]

America’s for-profit colleges are working long hours to help reduce the power of the Department of Education’s new “gainful employment” rules (designed to prevent these institutions from saddling students with too much debt). According to an article by Tamar Lewin in the New York Times: In addition to making personal visits to Capitol Hill, executives […]

Apparently college students who drink during the study period for final examinations don’t do as well on the exams. This is according to a paper recently released by the National Bureau of Economic Research: Results show that drinking prior to and during final exam week causes a statistically and economically meaningful reduction in academic performance. […]

The University of Massachusetts, Amherst is the state’s flagship public university. But the school has long struggled to become a nationally-recognized, influential public school. According to an article by Tracy Jan in the Boston Globe, it’s not going so well. [For] thousands of… Bay State families choosing colleges each year, UMass Amherst, the academic flagship […]

In so much of the discussion about American universities (funding, access, college completion, student debt, etc.) one thing is generally taken for granted: American universities will continue to be the best in the world. Even people who believe that some Asian universities will one day rival the greatest American schools, the competition is still a […]

It turns out that community colleges, which often struggle for financial support, actually have rather perverse funding structures. According to an article by Joanne Jacobs at Community College Spotlight (published by Teachers College at Columbia University): [Community college] funding rewards enrollment, not success. [For instance,] Broome Community College’s three-year federal graduation rate is nearly 28 […]