Daniel Luzer

State support for higher education is cyclical. When state legislatures shrink their funding for public universities it eventually comes back up again. This economic funding rule has helped many in academia put recent funding cuts in perspective. Except it turns out that funding for higher education is only cyclical in a very long-term sense. And […]

According to a study published recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research, college students who regularly binge drink (have five or more drinks in an evening) are more likely to have hazardous sex. While this is maybe not a huge surprise (sky blue, report says, right?) it’s a little more complicated. The study, “Binge […]

The May/June 2010 issue of the Washington Monthly is now live. There are a number of interesting features in this issue. Laura McGann’s “Partisan Hacks” addresses how conservatives tackle investigative journalism. Our cover story, Editor Charles Homans’ “The Wealth of Constellations,” looks at the strange future of the American space program. Regular College Guide readers […]

The PBS show Frontline will feature a program about for-profit colleges this evening. The program, “College Inc.,” seems to mostly focus on the high costs of these schools and the large debt many students assume to attend these institutions. As the press release explains: Frontline correspondent Martin Smith investigates the promise and explosive growth of […]

Recessions are hard for everyone. But the decisions made by some colleges in the current financial climate have led many to question their financial priorities. Rightly so, indicates a piece in Inside Higher Ed. According to an article by Doug Lederman: The Congressional Budget Office on Friday released a study… asserting that colleges and universities […]

Apparently the default rates on student loans, the percent of loan holders who fail to make the payments due on their accounts, are climbing. According to a short piece by Kelly Field in the Chronicle of Higher Education: The default rate climbed to 7.2 percent, from 6.7 percent. It was nearly three percentage points higher […]

Apparently some students at the University of Maine at Farmington are really, really concerned with their right to go topless. According to an article by Christopher Cousins in the Bangor Daily News: About two dozen men and women bared their torsos in downtown Farmington Friday to make the statement that if men can go shirtless, […]

New Jersey’s Seton Hall University, a 150-year Catholic school, plans to offer a political science course on gay marriage next semester. That makes some people very uncomfortable, particularly John Myers, the archbishop of Newark. According to an article by Kelly Heyboer in the Star-Ledger: “This proposed course seeks to promote as legitimate a train of […]

Apparently some for-profit colleges have taken to recruiting the homeless to apply to their institutions. According to an article by Daniel Golden in Businessweek The boom in for-profit education, driven by a political consensus that all Americans need more than a high school diploma, has intensified efforts to recruit the homeless. Such disadvantaged students are […]

What people do once they finish college is always a big question as graduation rolls around, particularly during a recession, when no one seems to have jobs. Maybe this worry is misplaced, writes University of Virginia English Professor Mark Edmundson in an op-ed in the New York Times. After graduating from Bennington College in 1974, […]