Higher Education

The Choice reports (via The Chronicle) that Ithaca College found itself with too many incoming freshmen, and thus offered some students as much as $10,000 to put off school for a year. One has to imagine this expensive mistake was quite avoidable.

Jason Delisle of Higher Ed Watch notes that Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) has taken a leading role in debunking one of the latest false claims coming from the student lending industry (the end of the post notes that Delisle used to work for Gregg): By now it’s common knowledge in Washington that the proposal pending […]

Can you imagine going to a college that didn’t give you hot breakfast every morning? Me neither.

Yikes: A Republican senator stirred up a hornet’s nest on Wednesday by introducing an amendment that would cut off money for the National Science Foundation’s political-science program. Sen. Tom A. Coburn, of Oklahoma, offered the amendment when the annual appropriations bill for the Departments of Commerce and Justice and the federal science agencies, HR 2847, […]

George Leef: What’s amusing about this is that we keep hearing from the Left that America has a terrible aversion to “The Other,” meaning people who are different from the mainstream of our society. That’s mostly baloney. Few Americans care about race or personal idiosyncracies these days. But the academic Left appears to have its […]

From Inside Higher Ed: A new study suggests that the cliché of a full-time college student working a low-wage job to pay her tuition and getting lower grades than she’d have if she wasn’t working is more fiction than fact. If the student works fewer than 20 hours a week, she may, in fact, have […]

Ethan Zuckerman says “We need to rethink the whole four year college experience – this isn’t working, and it may be setting us further back as a society.” He makes a strong case: Students make bad decisions in part because they’ve got very little support. There’s roughly eight hundred students for every college admission counselors. […]

The 2009 Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings came out today, and Inside Higher Ed has a good rundown of both the results and the controversy behind them. Some of the key takeaways: * The United States and Britain continue to dominate the very top ranks with one university in Cambridge, Mass., leading the rankings […]

Speaking of Pell Grants: After three years of major increases in federal Pell grants for needy college students, President Obama aims to boost the aid further with $40 billion in funding over the next decade. But even that influx might not ensure that the grants will recover and sustain the purchasing power they once held. […]

Inside Higher Ed asks whether it’s bad news that so much Pell Grant money goes to for-profit schools. In the 2008-2009 school year, the University of Phoenix received $560 million in Pell money.