Higher Education

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 on higContinue Reading »

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the Perkins Loan program “provides lowinterest [sic] loans to help needy students finance the costs of postsecondary education.” Pell grants target needy students as well, so the chart below shows the number of students receiving Perkins loans and the number of students receiving Pell grants at a sample of colleges.

The blue line shows hoContinue 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 efforts likeContinue 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:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released the May 2013 baseline cost estimates for the Pell grant and student loan programs. One of the things that jumped out at me was that for 2013 and 2014, the government estimates that it will make more money on student loans than it spends on Pell grants.

Indeed, if the CBO is right, then student loans are now a profit center for the goContinue 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 »

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the Perkins Loan program “provides lowinterest [sic] loans to help needy students finance the costs of postsecondary education.” Pell grants target needy students as well, so the chart below shows the number of students receiving Perkins loans and the number of students receiving Pell grants at a sample of colleges.

The blue line shoContinue 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 »

A paper released recently by the Community College Research Center reminds the champions of MOOCs and other online initiatives of one very important detail: Not all students prefer an online education; many higher education students still want in-person discussions and on-the-spot feedback.

But that’s not to say it will stay that way.

The CCRC paper is based on a small survey of cContinue Reading »

The bad news continues for Erie, Pa.

I wrote about this lakeside city last year, detailing failed efforts to establish a community college in the town formerly known for its manufacturing prowess. While a lot of those industrial jobs moved abroad, the ones that are left are more technical, requiring credentials and training beyond high school. Without a community college, Erie workers onContinue Reading »

Deep Springs College has intrigued me ever since I first read about the singular institution in a mass-mailing sent to me as a high school student. The tiny, all-male, two-year college is located on a cattle ranch and alfalfa farm in an isolated valley in California’s high desert. The 26 hand-picked students at Deep Springs study great books, work on the ranch, and govern the institution to a sContinue Reading »

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 »

A paper released recently by the Community College Research Center reminds the champions of MOOCs and other online initiatives of one very important detail: Not all students prefer an online education; many higher education students still want in-person discussions and on-the-spot feedback.

But that’s not to say it will stay that way.

The CCRC paper is based on a small survey of cContinue Reading »

Officials at eCore, the University System of Georgia’s online curriculum, collect heaps of student data every year: individual course completion rates, withdrawal rates, and even the number of those identified as at-risk each semester.

Every day, Melanie Clay, dean of eCore, says she looks at the dropout rate and compares it to the rate at the same time last year. “If it’s not going in tContinue Reading »

Online learning has become a permanent fixture of our system of higher education. Yet, public colleges and universities, which educate the vast majority of college students, have been visibly slow to embrace it.  Many of these institutions were founded with a mission to serve their citizens, including those unable to attend in residence. Yet even as the technological means to achieve this goal Continue Reading »