Higher Education

David Leonhardt doesn’t buy any of the sentiments floating around that college degrees may not be worth the debt one must incur to attain them these days, and his response (written in reaction to this post on The Choice) is that this idea “flies in the face of an overwhelming amount of evidence”: In fact, […]

After a pretty good Wall Street Journal article on the huge increase in the amount of federal student loans disbursed for the 2008-09 academic year, Daniel Indiviglio argued at The Atlantic that the federal government should be more like private loan companies when it comes to deciding how much particular students should be allowed to […]

I agree with most of what James Mazol is saying here: Any recent graduate of upper-middle class origins can attest to the existence and power of [the stigma against not going to college]. For us, four-year college was never an option but mandatory; frankly, many of our parents spent unholy sums to avoid the shame […]

“Jason Becker” on the issue of colleges lying to U.S. News: One has to wonder why USNews depends on this reporting for accuracy rather than going to the Integrated Post-secondary Education Data Set (www.nces.ed.gov/ipeds), where this information already freely exists and is reported to the federal government each year. I think we’re far less likely […]

By now, I’m sure you’ve already read Kevin Carey’s great piece on the threat online college courses could end up posing to traditional, brick-and-mortar institutions of higher education. Several times, in fact. Now, Inside Higher Ed has up a story that serves as an interesting followup to Kevin’s piece, and which is also very much […]

Missed the post at the time, but Matt Yglesias summed things up quite nicely on Wednesday: The underlying issue… is that there’s very little in the way of reliable information about the quality of undergraduate education in the United States. Our major schools get to select which students they admit, which means that when you’re […]

More credulousness from U.S. News.

U.S. News & World Report has up a helpful interview with Sandy Baum, a professor of economics at Skidmore College and special consultant to the College Board, who runs down the six most important recent developments in college financial aid. The second one is pretty big: Income-based repayment for federal student loans. As of July […]

Ouch, Phi Beta Cons. Ouch.

Retention is about class.