Education

Inside Higher Ed>: A luxury suite for the big football game on campus just is not the status symbol it used to be, and a number of college athletics programs are paying the price for their donors’ belt tightening. The University of Minnesota at Twin Cities, for example, debuted its new, $300 million TCF Bank […]

Here’s a good Arizona Republic entry in the is-college-worth-it-these-days subgenre. The gist is that the normal rationales for spending huge amounts on college no longer apply: The rationale for borrowing to attend college is that your bigger eventual paychecks after graduation will enable you to pay off the debt, with cash to spare. But during […]

Michelle Singletary had a solid article in yesterday’s Washington Post running down some the many efforts under way to draw attention to the student debt crisis, including a documentary and a campaign run by the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

This whole Seattle Times article from yesterday is worth reading, but this part stuck out at me: If tuition and fees had risen at the same pace as inflation over the past 30 years, today it would cost $9,900 annually to attend a private college, $2,300 to attend a public. Instead, the average tuition bill […]

(Fixed: I initially had listed Terry as a Democrat.) Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE), reacting to the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009, which was just passed in the House and which will eliminate federal subsidies to private lenders (such as, to take one completely random example, Nelnet, which, like Terry, operates out of […]

Apparently, state authorities in New Jersey have the power in certain circumstances to take action against private non-profits. And apparently, reports Inside Higher Ed, they see more than enough reason to do so in the case of Stevens Institute of Technology: Seeking the ouster of both the president and board chair at Stevens Institute of […]

From The Boston Globe: There’s going green for environmental purposes. And then there’s just plain cheap, some Boston University students say. They are crying foul this fall after the administration severely restricted the number of pages they could print for free over the university’s computer network. While the university has encouraged professors to move their […]

“Should universities and colleges include a up-front statement of [extra] expenses when advertising tuition costs to prospective and enrolled students?” Um, yes?

Over at The Chronicle, Kevin Carey, in discussing Crossing the Finish Line, points out that as the cost of college rises, graduation rates decrease—but only for poor students. There’s basically no correlation between college costs and graduation rates among rich students. And, surprise, we’re not reacting to this correctly: The findings in Crossing the Finish […]

A couple nights ago, “NBC Nightly News” ran a solid video segment on the growing importance of community colleges: Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy Not much of a silver lining, but it would be nice if the recession permanently changed the place of community colleges in the American […]