Higher Education

Historically, most people, no matter their income, graduated from college with no debt. This was the reason a college degree used to be such a prime mover in terms of social mobility. You graduated from college, you got a job, you made money. But now people so often assume debt to go to college that […]

Virtually everywhere in the world people tend to be more educated than their parents. This is no longer true in the United States. A report by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities indicates that the U.S. is one of only two nations on Earth in which people aged 25 to 34 have lower […]

According to an article in Folsom, California’s News Blaze, community college students spend too much time working to earn money, leaving them with little time for academics and ruining their chances of successfully completing school. This conclusion came from a report about college students and work done by California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG). The […]

Does financial aid work? This is not a question about whether or not financial aid helps students afford college. The question is about whether or not financial aid improves academic achievement. Does it actually make students work harder and earn better grades? Despite a vast increase in the amount of financial aid offered in recent […]

Raymond M. Di Pasquale, the president of the Community College of Rhode Island, has accepted a position as acting commissioner of the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education. The Board of Governors runs three Rhode Island institutions: the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College, and, well, the Community College of Rhode Island. […]

In the last twenty years or so the college completion rate in the U.S. has gone down. Some 50.5 percent of 1972 high school graduates finished college; less than 46 percent of the class of 1992 graduated from college. According to Inside Higher Ed, colleges often blame this apparent completion decline on high schools, arguing […]

So now the University of Phoenix, the gigantic, for-profit behemoth of higher education, is embracing accountability. For the last two years, the school has released an annual progress report. The progress report is self-serving. This is normal; universities and companies release flattering annual reports. But Doug Lederman writes at Inside Higher Ed that Phoenix’s decision […]

Recently the College Guide ran a piece on the potential for journalism and higher education to work together. Apparently it is happening already. According to an article in the Miami Herald students at the University of Florida are now launching their own online publication to cover the news in Gainesville: “We want to create something […]

In the decades following the widespread admission of women into virtually all schools, many schools, particularly small, liberal arts schools have come to deal with an odd gender imbalance. There are too many women in college. Or, at any rate, there are more women in college than many college administrators would like. An article in […]

So often when policymakers talk about college, the focus is on getting people into college, not so much on whether or not they actually finish. In part that is because it is often difficult to figure out who finishes. While community college is so often the focus of discussions about minority college access and closing […]