Daniel Luzer

A recent report from Public Agenda, With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them: Myths and Realities About Why So Many Students Fail to Finish College, looks at college dropouts. Without being overly simplistic here, the report indicates that students do not, as a rule, drop out of college because college is too hard. Students drop […]

Apparently students at Fort Hays State University will receive $5 for every credit in which they earn a C or better. According to an article in the school paper: The money for the Tuition Incentive Program comes from federal money appropriated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Kansas received $39.9 million for higher education. […]

Michigan Lt. Gov. John Cherry proposed refunding the recently eliminated Michigan Promise scholarship program through a tax on bottled water companies. Cherry said a tax of 10 cents a bottle could generate $118 million per year. But University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman essentially rejected the idea: “Financial aid in the state of Michigan […]

Tara Lemmey, CEO of LENS Ventures, a sort of technology consulting firm, argues in the Huffington Post that it’s time to rethink higher education: From the UC student protests over fee hikes, to community colleges holding midnight classes due to increased demand, to repeated warnings from business and policy leaders that we are not graduating […]

Since college has become so frighteningly expensive, many consider that the solution might be to just lop off a year and offer a bachelor’s degree in three years. An article in yesterday’s Republican (Massachusetts) explains: Who says college has to be a four (or more) year experience? The drive for more colleges to offer the […]

Time had a piece earlier this week about whether a college degree has less value now. As the article explains: The devaluation of a college degree is no secret on campus. An annual survey by the Higher Education Research Institute has long asked freshmen what they think their highest academic degree will be. In 1972, […]

The situation regarding many colleges’ endowments may not be quite as bad as expected. Despite dramatically bad news about many endowments (Stanford University, for instance, had 26 percent investment decline this year) things are looking up. Relatively. A survey of college finances indicates that college endowments decreased 19 percent in 2009. This would ordinarily be […]

A proposal by the U.S. Department of Education aimed to prevent for-profit colleges from overcharging on tuition is running into trouble. From Inside Higher Ed: Included in the department’s first draft of revised rules to guard against the abuse of federal financial aid funds, the proposal suggests two possible methods aimed at ensuring that students […]

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting piece today about the continuing funding troubles at the University of California. Earlier this week the school’s president, Mark Yudof, went to the state legislature to try and convince the body that his school needed more money from the state. From the LA Times article: The state university, […]

In addition to helping students get the scores they need to get into college, Princeton Review now also owns a college. Yesterday the standardized test preparation company concluded its takeover of Penn Foster Education Group, a for-profit online career school based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Princeton Review paid $170 million in cash for Penn Foster, which […]