Richard Vedder

President Barack Obama keeps declaring war on rising college costs. In a speech at Knox College last month, he vowed to unveil an “aggressive strategy to shake up the system, tackle rising costs and improve value.” He said something similar in his 2012 State of the Union address, so I’m a little skeptical that much […]

When I first heard that David Petraeus was going to make $200,000 for teaching a course and giving a couple of lectures at the City University of New York, I was not indignant. If anything I was surprised by the controversy. Compensation of greater amounts, for lesser amounts of teaching, is routinely granted to people […]

For at least a half-century, the University of California has been considered the premier system in U.S. public higher education. The Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses always rank among the top 10 state schools, with several other UC campuses close behind. While the nomination of Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Homeland Security Department, as […]

Believe it or not, Americans used to save about one-tenth of their after-tax income. By the 1990s, that percentage had dropped to less than 5 percent, and from 2003 to 2012 the average savings rate had fallen even further. We can point to many reasons for this decline. An important unrecognized culprit is the American […]

As parents and students struggle to keep up with rising college tuition and take on greater burdens of debt, universities are being challenged to justify the ballooning athletic fees they tack on to the bill. In the 2010-11 academic year, the 227 public institutions in Division 1 of the National Collegiate Athletic Association collected more […]

For the U.S. college students who will be paying for a four-year bachelor’s degree long after graduation day, here’s some consolation: At least it didn’t take you six or eight years. College is expensive, yet unpredictably so. Some students pay little for degrees from elite private institutions, after tuition discounts and financial aid. Many of […]

The Chronicle of Higher Education tells us the median salary of public university presidents rose 4.7 percent in 2011-12 to more than $440,000 a year. This increase vastly outpaced the rate of inflation, as well as the earnings of the typical worker in the U.S. economy. Perhaps, most relevant for this community, it also surpassed […]

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union remarks on higher education earlier in the week were modest in magnitude and tepid in ambition compared with promises in previous years. In 2009, for example, he suggested the U.S. would regain the planetary lead in the proportion of young adults with bachelor’s degrees. I sensed either that […]

U.S. college presidents make no apologies for their schools’ support for research. After all, American institutions dominate global surveys of universities, and most lists put a big emphasis on research accomplishments. Of the 20 top schools for 2012 on the widely used Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings, for example, 17 are American. Colleges are “carefully […]

Parents who are desperately trying to get their children into a top school may not believe this: U.S. higher education enrollments this fall might be lower — perhaps significantly so at some institutions — than they were a year ago. Official national data won’t be published for some time. Yet state by state, enrollments appear […]