Here is what Andrew Hacker, co-author of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It , says about tenure in a recent interview in Atlantic Monthly: Here’s what happens. Academics typically don’t get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their […]
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The Education Department’s boom has finally fallen on for-profit colleges, much-criticized for their high rates of default on their students’ education loans, loans that U.S. taxpayayers have to repay when graduates of proprietary schools can’t find jobs either because the jobs don’t exist or because the training for which the students have paid doesn’t strike […]
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The letter, dated June 17 and addressed to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, made serious allegations of wrongdoing in the already controversial for-profit education sector: that representatives of career colleges were trolling for students at homeless shelters, loading education debt onto a problem-beset population with poor prospects for academic success in order to funnel federal […]
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The College Board has issued another of its reports on student loan debt, focusing this time on the 17 percent of students who graduate from four-year colleges with “high debt levels”—that is, more than $30,500 worth of education loans. The average debt load for those high -borrowing students, one out every six graduates with bachelor’s […]
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From the beginning, Frontline’s new documentary College, Inc seems tailor-made to scare the living daylights out of the series’ presumably progressive audience. Viewers are first introduced to Michael Clifford, an “educational entrepreneur” without a college degree who buys up struggling colleges and resurrects them as for-profit companies. Clifford is not only making a fortune off […]
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Jackson Toby, professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers and author of the new book, The Lowering of Higher Education in America, delivered this speech yesterday (April 7) at a luncheon in New York City. The luncheon, at the University Club, was sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University and Minding the Campus. […]
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By Daniel Bennett Thousands of students on more than a hundred college campuses joined together symbolically yesterday to protest sharp tuition hikes. The students pointed the finger at hard-pressed state and local governments. That was a mistake. State and local subsidies to public colleges and universities increased by 44% in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars during the […]
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Why do our for-profit colleges seem so disappointing? Why are they plagued by high levels of student debt, high loan-default percentages, dismal graduation rates, and third-rate reputations that lead some employers to reject their graduates automatically? Sure, back in the old days there were plenty of commercial schools whose sole raison d’etre was apparently to […]
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By Frank J. Macchiarola and Michael C. Macchiarola Why do law schools charge higher and higher tuitions that keep outrunning the cost of living? In the two decades ending in 2007, according to the American Bar Association, the cost of attending the average private law school (including tuition and fees) more than tripled–increasing from $8,911 […]
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As a regent of the University of California (UC), I voted against “fee” increases proposed by the administration as often as I voted for them, but with each vote I realized that UC was slowly moving toward the day when basic decisions would have to be made about how the university is financed, who can […]
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A recent report from Education Sector shows that about half of America’s college undergraduates go into debt these days in order to work toward their degrees. In 1993 only 32 percent of college students took out loans to pay for their educations, so these latest figures, from 2008, based on the U.S. Education Department’s National […]
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“Maximize Your 529 College Savings Plan” from the Boston Globe
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Like Caesar’s Gaul, President Obama’s plan for higher education is divided into three parts: 1) Every American should have postsecondary educational training, and within a few years we should again lead the world in the proportion of young graduates with bachelor’s degrees; 2) Federal financial assistance to pay for college should become an entitlement like […]
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In the reporting on our present economic infelicity we learn, astonishingly, that among the most extravagantly foolish investors have been America’s oldest and (so we are given to believe) wisest institutions of higher learning, including Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth. A twenty-something taking his first dip in the stock market might be expected to display irrational […]
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– The Engingeering Student Council at Columbia has advanced a measure to permit student petitions on issues. The Not only are Barack Obama and John McCain for the step, the Columbia Spectator is as well. Past polls revealed majority student support. Opposed? The faculty, the administration, and, in past forms, student government. – Richard Vedder […]
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With its $34 billion endowment growing at the rate of nearly 20 percent a year thanks to astute investments, Harvard University is probably the richest university on earth. But that didn’t stop Harvard from raising its undergraduate tuition 3.5 percent for the 2008-2009 academic year, to a record $32,557. When you figure in room, board, […]
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Despite a great flurry of activity to expand financial aid at selective colleges over the past several years, a new study by the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this gloomy bottom line: “Top Colleges Admit Fewer Low-Income Students.” As someone who has worked for more than a decade to push colleges to enroll more economically […]
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Harvard’s announcement, on December 10, that it was eliminating student loans, and otherwise increasing grant support for lower and middle income students, has set off a torrent of welcome news in the last nine days. Two days following, Yale declared that revisions to its student aid program were forthcoming. Soon, Swarthmore announced the elimination of […]
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In mid-January, a brief item appeared on an inside page of The New York Times, headlined “Student Lender Investigated.” The five sentence article noted that the New York Attorney General’s office was looking into “student loan marketing” by Sallie Mae, “the nation’s largest lender to students.” Attorney General Cuomo had requested information about “preferred lender […]
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