Given all the attention that adjunctification and administrative bloat have been getting recently, we’ll explore university staffing this week. For now, we’re looking at full time staff for colleges that have data going back to 1987-1988. This includes the total number of “faculty”, “professional” staff, and “executive, administrative, and managerial”* staff over time.* Surprisingly only 266 (oContinue Reading »

Education Sector is pleased to unveil Higher Ed Data Central, a new analytical tool for higher education. We think it can help deepen our understanding of higher education by allowing us to combine, organize, and analyze data from a variety of sources (such as the Department of Education’s IPEDS and DAS, USNWR, and other ED data). For the rest of this week, we’ll be highlighting several of the Continue Reading »

It seems like tuition “freeze” proposals are gaining popularity again. We’ve been down this road before. Several states froze tuition in the early 1990s (Virginia, California, Washington, etc.) and they failed, in the long run, to make higher education affordable. These gimmicks fail to increase state investment in higher education and they don’t prevent larger-than-average tuition increases afContinue Reading »

The present for-profit higher education industry is largely an artifact of federal financial aid policy. Students have the right to sign over their federal grant and loan dollars to any accredited college, and if you look at how much the big publicly-traded for-profits charge, you’ll see a tight distribution of price points that not coincidentally track closely with the maximum amount of Continue Reading »

Did the lobbyists at the American Council on Education (ACE) sleep through the hearings that Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa have held on the for-profit higher education industry over the past two years? Were they too busy snoozing to notice all of the scandals embroiling the sector that have exposed the wholesale failure of federal and state regulators and accreditors to safeguard the federal student Continue Reading »

America’s college completion agenda is more urgent than ever.  As Degreeless in Debt found, rising college prices are putting more students between a rock and a hard place: the things they do to avoid borrowing too much – like delaying enrollment, enrolling part-time, or working full-time – also make it much harder for them to complete their degrees.   While controlling costs and expandContinue Reading »

Today marks the first day of Student Debt Week of Action. This makes Degreeless in Debt: What Happens to Borrowers Who Drop Out even timelier as I investigated what happens to a growing class of students who drop out of college, but have loans to repay.  Unlike their degree-holding peers, those who drop out are more likely to be unemployed and earn less money, making it harder for them to pay bContinue Reading »

If itinerant football coach and short-time television analyst Urban Meyer wasn’t already a member of the 1 percent, he became one in a hurry when he signed a contract worth a minimum of $26.65 million over six years to coach at Ohio State. On top of that, he could earn as much as $600,000 in bonuses each year and will also receive a fully paid golf club membership, 50 hours of private jContinue Reading »

As Jon Chait notes($), movement conservatives see the Obama administration’s proposal to regulate government funding of for-profit colleges as yet another step down the road to serfdom:

“It’s hard not to conclude that the real driving political force here is hostility to private education companies,” concludes The Wall Street Journaleditorial page. “No wonder the U.S. economy isn’tContinue Reading »

Over the last 12-18 months I’ve received probably a dozen unsolicited phone calls that go something like this: “Hi, I’m such-and-such working for XYZ Global Investment Advisors and we were wondering if you’d be willing to talk to some of our clients about the current federal regulatory environment involving for-profit higher education. The way it works is, you would sit Continue Reading »