If the Supreme Court strikes down or severely limits affirmative action in college admissions when it rules in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, don’t expect its decision to radically transform the landscape of U.S. college admissions. The reason? The court’s ruling will surely be influential, but as a practical matter, affirmative action is mostly irrelevant to admissions policies at thContinue Reading »

In my last blog post, I discussed how higher education is like the half-sun carved into George Washington’s chair at the National Constitution Center. I wondered whether it was dawning a new, Golden Age or fading into the twilight.

One way to ensure that higher education will continue to be a rising sun is to provide better information about how to target public subsidies through studentContinue Reading »

Recently, I was at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia looking at the half-sun carved into the back of George Washington’s armchair. According to the tour guide, during the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin wondered aloud if the design depicted the sun as rising or setting, seeing it as a metaphor for the fate of the nation. Because one cannot tell whether the image reprContinue Reading »

A few days ago a friend of mine from college sent me a link to a new study issued by PayScale. The study evaluates all colleges and universities around the country based on the return on investment (ROI) graduates realized over 30 years.  Our alma mater, Claremont McKenna, finished 11th on the list, and my friend was justifiably pleased the $120,000 it cost 15 years ago would, on average, be viContinue 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 »

An unusual organization of policy leaders has joined the chorus for higher education reform. Chief state budget officers rarely speak collectively or publicly about higher education—instead focusing on state revenue issues, adjusting budgets in light of revenue surpluses (a rare event of late) or shortfalls, and enacting a budget.

But in a recent report, these state officials spoke out oContinue Reading »

Our new study, Degrees of Value, explores the returns to investing in college and finds that much more attention should be paid in the vast ranges of outcomes that students experience.

One of my strangest experiences as a researcher is the period of time between when work on a study is finished and when it is released. For me, this timing issue greatly complicates public outreach effortsContinue Reading »

The accreditation woes of City College of San Francisco are the closest thing higher education has to a soap opera. Like any soap opera, it can be hard to jump in midstream, so here is my recap of the story so far for those of you just joining us:

We are pleased to release Degrees of Value today. This paper aims to provide information on one important aspect of college—the return on investment. While there is certainly more to a college education than the financial payoff, the fact remains that this is an increasingly dominant concern for students. More tahn 80 percent of students now cite “to be able to get a better job” as a very imporContinue Reading »

Guess which major news magazine had this cover headline last week: “Time to Scrap Affirmative Action.” (Note there is no question mark.) In past years, one might have thought it was National Review or The Weekly Standard. Not this time. The story belongs to that well known “right-wing publication,” The Economist.

The Economist’s article discusses a case before the U.S. Supreme Court on tContinue Reading »