Daniel Luzer

The latest issue of the Washington Monthly is now live. Today the magazine releases its annual College Rankings. This is our answer to rankings like U.S. News & World Report, which rely on easily manipulated measures of wealth, exclusivity, and prestige to determine college quality. Instead, the Monthly rates schools based on what they are […]

While the true benefits of an Ivy League education might be somewhat overstated in popular culture, it turns out it’s good for at least one thing. According to an NPR piece by Sarah McBride: The eight Ivies have a mean average repayment rate of 74.6%, according to new data from the Department of Education. That […]

Apparently more college students are now finding it difficult to make ends meet. So they’re increasingly applying for Food Stamps. Really. According to a piece at Sacramento, California’s KCRA: A record number of college students are applying for food stamps in today’s tough economy. There are 1500 college students receiving food stamps in Sacramento Country. […]

In the summer of 1961, a twenty-two-year-old college graduate from rural Nevada packed up his young family and moved to Washington, D.C. He took a job working nights as a U.S. Capitol policeman while by day he studied for a law degree in Foggy Bottom, at a local commuter school by the name of George […]

One college student just wrote about book about how he saved money in college. In Debt-Free U: How I Paid for an Outstanding College Education Without Loans, Scholarships or Mooching Off My Parents , Zac Bissonnette writes about how he paid for college himself. In an interview with the New York Times’s Jacques Steinberg University […]

Students at Alabama’s Auburn University are suing their school. Students argue that the school’s mandatory meal plan is unfair. According to an article by Kristen Letsinger the Opelika-Auburn News: Students who live on campus must pay a minimum of $995 per semester for the dining plan. Those living off campus must pay at least $300 […]

College Guide has written before about the trouble with law schools in this economic climate: students assume huge debt to go to law school and then can’t get jobs that pay enough to service the debt once they get out. But what if there was a way to make responsible decisions about where to go […]

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity, an organization focused on college costs and “stagnant efficiency” in higher education, features a discussion in which several staffers complain about grade inflation, the supposedly unjustifiable increase in the average college GPA over time. While different colleges give very different sorts of grades and grade inflation actually may […]

Why can’t the kids leave home already? According to an article by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times, this is getting weird: It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be — on the prospects of the young men and women; on the […]

The Obama administration plans to make it easier for Americans to undertake academic and research programs in Cuba, the communist nation with which American last enjoyed diplomatic relations in 1961. According to an article by Ginger Thompson in the New York Times: The [Obama] officials said [the new policy] was meant to loosen restrictions on […]