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 »

Our first regular Higher Ed Data Central post gets a bit wonky (but don’t worry they won’t all get this deep into the weeds).

Previously, we posted a graph showing the number of highly compensated administrators per 1,000 students as compared with tuition. Over at the Pearson blog, Kristen DiCerbo suggested using a logarithmic curve instead. In fact, she even rewrote the code to add the Continue Reading »

The fourth capability of Education Sector’s new Higher Ed Data Central that we would like to highlight (see links for the first, second, and third capabilities) is the ability to combine data from different databases. For example, merging U.S. News and World Report college rankings with Department of Education IPEDS data allows us to investigate various relationships, such as the chart below shContinue Reading »

In case you missed this higher ed news nugget, the number of students worldwide enrolled in post-secondary institutions outside their home countries rose to a remarkable 4.1 million in 2010. That’s up from 2 million globally mobile students just a decade earlier, and 0.8 million as recently as 1975, according to the annual Education at a Glance report released last week by the Organization for Continue Reading »

By definition, community colleges are hyper-local institutions that aim to serve and support their local workforce. Some community colleges do that by training more welders and machinists; others produce more healthcare assistants, like dental hygienists; and still others mainly serve to funnel students to nearby four-year universities.

Given the diversity among missions, should these twContinue Reading »

Today the College Board launched a new resource, BigFuture, meant to help students make better decisions about college.  Where the government’s College Navigator provides an overwhelming dashboard of mind-numbing statistics on institutions with (seemingly) little attention paid to user-friendliness, BigFuture draws you in with savvy graphics and a heavy-hitting quote:

Your big fuContinue Reading »

Malcolm Gladwell’s new piece ($) on the US News higher education rankings is, as usual, extremely interesting and well-written, but it doesn’t really break new ground. My colleague Kevin Carey wrote about how the rankings valued prestige and money more than they did learning or engagement back in 2006. So, as per Gladwell’s main point, that the rankings are subjective, US NewsContinue Reading »

I think David Segal’s flashy and inevitably much-emailed Sunday Times piece on law school ultimately represents a missed opportunity. There’s some good stuff about rankings competition and how law schools continue to expand, charge high prices, and generate large profits even as the market for lawyers contracts. But he takes the easy way out by mis-portraying a tournament as a lotteContinue Reading »

At the Post’s College Inc. blog, Dan Devise writes about the Washington Monthly ranking of America’s best community colleges, which I created. Always nice to seem them mentioned, but this is incorrect:

Once you get past the top 10, though, many of the schools on the Washington Monthly list perform barely above the national average on most of the survey metrics. Those schools Continue Reading »