BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the abstract describing a report issued this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Do School Spending Cuts Matter? Evidence from the Great Recession,” by C. Kirabo Jackson, Cora Wigger, Heyu Xiong (bold face added): Audits of public school budgets routinely find evidence of waste. Also, recent evidence…
BY HANK REICHMAN Faculty members in other states may be excused for expressing some jealousy of California’s economic and political success since Jerry Brown was elected governor nearly eight years ago. While Republican-led states like Kansas, Iowa, or Wisconsin continue to suffer slow growth and calamitous budget shortfalls and cuts, under Brown and a Democratic…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Swirling around the debates over the high sticker price of higher education is a deeper conversation about the broken financial model that most colleges and universities continue to use to pay their bills. While the largest universities have more options based on the scale of their endowment, fundraising prowess, and research…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Every solution offered by a college or university faces a pending crisis in a different way. Wealthy institutions have the resources to weather challenges by kicking the can down the road, often for decades. That’s why it is significant that Harvard University last week issued a warning about its financial constraints…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In an article for University Business magazine, Jodi Helmer addresses the question “Is early college working?” She provides the following broad statistics: In 2002, 1.2 million students were earning college credits while still in high school. A decade later, the number of those participating in dual enrollment courses had almost doubled,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Opponent Testimony for H.B. 66 Submitted By Dr. Amy Thompson, Professor of Public Health Chairman Duffy, Vice Chairman Antani, Ranking Member Sweeney, Members of the House Higher Education and Workforce Development Committee, my name is Dr. Amy Thompson. For identification purposes, I am a tenured Professor of Public Health and the…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL As reported last week by Ashley A. Smith in Inside Higher Education, one of the most interesting developments in higher education is how the growing concern over high tuition sticker prices is playing out in state and national politics. Much of the discussion is a good-hearted effort to make college more…
BY HANK REICHMAN In January a wide variety of academic and labor organizations, including the California conference of the AAUP and the California Faculty Association (CFA), released a report, “The $48 fix: Reclaiming California’s Master Plan for Higher Education,” which demonstrated that tuition could be eliminated at the University of California (UC) and the California…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Scott Jaschik recently interpreted the findings from the 2017 Survey of Admission Directors, sponsored by Inside Higher Education and Gallup and drawn from a sample of 453 admission directors. While the full discussion of these findings is too complex for this space, the general conclusions, especially those specific to enrollment patterns,…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The following is reposted with permission from the Remaking the University blog. Michael Meranze is professor of history at UCLA. He co-authors Remaking the University with Christopher Newfield, professor of english at UC, Santa Barbara. The farce that was MiloFest has now frittered away into failure. Of course, that will not be…