For those of you who read my College for $99 a Month article last August and said to yourselves, “Hey, I wonder what that would look like as a segment on Fox 5 News at 10:00,” well, ask and ye shall receive:

School cafeteria lunches catch a lot of flak from policymakers and those interested in food policy. And rightfully so. Low per-meal subsidies and a lack of on-site kitchens means most schools are generally stuck serving lunches that consist of little more than reheated unhealthy entrees and side dishes that make food sold at hot dog [...]

Intermountain Healthcare in Utah began experimenting with setting default medical procedures for certain conditions in the 1980s. First launched as a research grant to study a pulmonary disorder common in young adults, the hospital chain has since reviewed practices for 50 clinical conditions that account for more than half of Intermountain’s patients. What they’ve found [...]

While Ben provides an in-depth look at the recently released three-year cohort default rates, here’s another way to look at the numbers:
At 400 colleges, students have better odds of defaulting on their student loans than they do of graduating.
Some may argue that statements like this unfairly target schools serving low-income students, but they’re wrong. No [...]

Yesterday, the Institute for College Access and Success launched College-Insight.org, a new Web site that provides a wealth of data on individual colleges, systems, states, and sectors. It presents data on a range of topics, such as student financial aid, enrollment, degree production, and diversity. It’s definitely well worth a look.

Crossing the Finish Line, an important new book by former Princeton president William Bowen, former Macalaster College president Michael McPherson, and Matthew Chingos,  relied on two massive databases on the entering class of 1999–one on 96,000 first-time freshmen and 30,000 entering transfer students at 21 flagship universities and the other on 108,000 freshmen and 42,000 [...]

A few months ago a magazine editor sent me proofs of some upcoming higher education books, to see if I’d be interested in writing a review. One was title Wannabe U, by University of Connecticut sociologist Gaye Tuchman. That sparked my interest–my father was once a professor at UConn and I lived in Storrs until [...]

There’s been a fair amount of commentary on the Harvard column I wrote for the Chronicle last week. This critique in Harvard magazine was thoughtful, as were many of the comments under the piece on the site itself. Not all, though: For the record, I’ve never applied to or been rejected by Harvard, although if [...]