Jesse Singal

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl plans to propose a 1 percent college-education privilege tax to council today, in a move that’s likely to set off a fight with the city’s schools of higher learning. College and university representatives met with the mayor on Wednesday and argued against the tax, which would be […]

This New York Times joblessness rate visualizer is a pretty great tool. And, while the usual caveats about causation not implying correlation apply, it also displays rather vividly how important a college degree is in the United States.

An important annual survey just came out. Inside Higher Ed reports: Although budget cuts have many educators this year worried about the quality of education students receive, an annual survey being released today suggests that institutions — large and small, public and private — can achieve significant gains. The National Survey of Student Engagement — […]

The Boston Globe brings us a story from Massachusetts that is surely also taking place nationwide: Across Massachusetts, students are flocking to two-year public colleges, which have become refuges in the recession. The schools have open enrollment for most programs, and tuitions markedly cheaper than four-year private or public institutions. Students who earn an associate’s […]

The Chronicle has up an informative piece asking a bunch of higher education experts about the goal of increasing college attendance rates. The consensus, of course, is that more people should go to college, but: Behind the rhetoric lies disagreement over a series of issues: which students are most likely to succeed in college; what […]

In the wake of The Chronicle releasing its annual survey of college tuition, which revealed that 58 private colleges charge at least $50,000 for tuition, fees, room, and board, David K. Randall of Forbes asks, “Is a private school that charges $50,000 a year worth it?” He quotes a Forbes story from 2007 that would […]

“For the better part of the last decade,” writes Travis Reindl over at Higher Ed Watch, “the higher education community has debated the question of whether public colleges and universities are on the path to privatization.” It’s a question that is growing more heated because of our current predicament: The current state fiscal meltdown, which […]

Eric Rauchway has a roundup of news pertaining to the University of California system. As you can probably imagine, it is not pretty.

Students Over Banks has a nice collection of recent editorials, blog posts, letters to the editor, and articles on SAFRA. Here. I particularly enjoyed this paragraph from a column in Eastern Michigan University’s The Eastern Echo: But why does the U.S. government give billions to private lenders every year just so these lenders can loan […]

Young America’s Foundation is a once-important, fascinatingly retrograde conservative youth organization that is, at the moment at least, hapless when it comes to getting young people interested in conservatism. I wrote the group a “letter” when I was at Campus Progress, noting that it is obsessed with socialism at a time when young people don’t […]