Data can be a beautiful thing. It can reveal patterns, failures and sometimes, surprises—as long as the measurements are consistent. At Prince George’s Community College that wasn’t the case. Each class was measuring different things, so campus leaders couldn’t quite see the big picture. W. Allen Richman, dean of the Office of Planning, Assessment and […]

Higher ed has become the latest target of retirement plan fee litigation. One firm in particular has filed class-action suits against dozens of universities, alleging breaches of ERISA fiduciary duties. The tactic has been used for years in business, says Eric Paley of legal consultants Nixon Peabody. When Midwest law firm Schlichter Bogard & Denton […]

As a conservative political strategy, “starving the beast” means to deprive an entity of funding to force it to reduce spending. Steve Mims’ new film, “Starving the Beast,” documents a political and philosophical shift that seeks to reframe public higher education—not as a public good for society, but as a “value proposition” to be borne by […]

Tom Snyder retired in June after nine years at the helm of Ivy Tech, the nation’s largest singly accredited community college system. Snyder’s coming from a corporate background gave him a different perspective about higher ed in general and community colleges in particular. For one, he realized the role community colleges play in serving millions […]

The Association of American Medical Colleges projects that the United States will be short nearly 95,000 doctors within the next 10 years. That shortage is projected to be most acute in Southern states. In response, private medical schools—even institutions hundreds of miles away—are looking into opening satellite locations on the campuses of public universities. Barbara […]

Need-based financial aid was supposed to give everyone an opportunity to get into college and better their lives and career prospects. But that assistance is not always applied as intended, says the third edition of New America’s “Undermining Pell” report. Nearly half of the public, four-year colleges studied now leave the most financially needy students on […]

Remember the “Flutie Effect”? That’s the claim that Boston College applications increased as a result of Doug Flutie’s last-second Hail Mary pass that won a football game against the defending champs from the University of Miami. Now we may be seeing the opposite—let’s call it the Scandal Side Effect—where a school’s bad publicity can drive […]

The numbers should unsettle enrollment professionals: College and university enrollment rates have decreased for each of the last four years and nothing indicates a reversal anytime soon. A look at recent headlines reflects this trend: Mary Baldwin College in Virginia and Notre Dame of Maryland University in Baltimore each saw a drop of 5 percent […]