At colleges and universities across the country, the class of 2013 is leaving campus with more than just a diploma in hand. The average debt of this year’s college graduates is $30,000, a number that has doubled in the past 20 years, even after adjusting for inflation, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid and FastWeb, two student-aid websites.

The problem is that while studeContinue Reading »

One of the more popular predictions about the future of higher education is that hundreds of colleges will go out of business in the next decade, victims of the current economic crisis and an unsustainable financial model.

Perhaps there will be fewer small colleges, with some closing and others merging. More than half of American colleges and universities—some 2,500 institutions—enroll fContinue Reading »

In a few weeks, it will be college commencement season at campuses across the country, and after the speeches and celebrations are over, newly minted graduates will take off for many of the same cities as they start their careers—places such as New York, San Francisco, Boston, Raleigh, Denver, and Seattle. Futurist Richard Florida calls this concentration of college graduates the “means migratiContinue Reading »

In July 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which granted land to states for the creation of agricultural colleges. The law, which created the modern-day land-grant colleges that are among the biggest brand names in higher education, celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. The institutions now enroll some 4.6 million students.

Last week, the University of Florida,Continue Reading »

For the last several months, we’ve seen the results of more than a dozen studies to remake the federal student aid system, part of the Reimagining Aid Design and Delivery project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The idea behind the effort is to seed ideas for the future of financial aid in advance of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

The reports include mContinue Reading »

Rising college tuition has been a “crisis” for much of the 15 years I have covered higher education as a journalist. But that crisis has now reached a fever pitch with President Obama dedicating parts of the last two State of the Union addresses to the issue, pricey private colleges cutting their tuition or putting in place other creative pricing models, and nearly every institution talking aboContinue Reading »

The day after President Obama’s State of the Union address, the administration released a hallmark of his higher education proposals from the night before: the College Scorecard. In the works for about a year, the online tool is meant to provide families with more information about the value and return on investment of the specific college they are considering.

The value of a college’s dContinue Reading »

The final polishes have likely been put on President Obama’s State of the Union address for tonight, but if his speechwriters still have time might I suggest an addition: we need a national conversation again about the purpose of our higher-education system.

The president has used the national stage before to focus on higher education, including last year’s State of the Union when he putContinue Reading »

The results of the annual survey of college freshmen, released this week by researchers at UCLA, confirm that the fragile economy continues to weigh heavily on the minds of today’s students. Since 2006, freshmen have listed getting a better job as the most important reason to go to college, and this year, 88 percent of them said so, an all time high.

Previously, first-year students had sContinue Reading »

Over the past fifty years, few states have been able to harness the power of higher education to drive growth and improve the quality of life for its residents quite like California.

The state set its course in 1960, by adopting a Master Plan for Higher Education that landed it on the cover of Time magazine. The plan spelled out who should be guaranteed access to which state institutionsContinue Reading »