BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In post-industrial America, the roles played by large nonprofits – especially its hospitals and universities – power the economic engines in many regional economies. What would cities like San Francisco, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Boston look like without their large educational and medical research complexes? Would other cities, such as Houston, Chicago,…
BY SAMANTHA PARSONS This is a guest post by Samantha Parsons, a graduate of George Mason University and co-founder of Transparent GMU. She is now a Grassroots Campaign Strategist at UnKoch My Campus. On February 9th, George Mason University students filed a lawsuit against their school and its fundraising arm, the George Mason University Foundation,…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH These lists are from an article written by Abby Jackson for Business Insider: The first chart indicates those institutions with the most currently enrolled students who are citizens of the seven predominantly Muslim nations covered by Trump’s ban: The second chart ranks the institutions by the loss of direct revenue that…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL Last week, National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and Commonfund released their report on the endowment performance of the 805 colleges and universities who responded to their survey. The outlook was fairly dismal and sheds light on the precarious foundation on which American higher education’s financial model is…
BY MARTIN KICH Frank T. Brogan, the Chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, has moved forward with a review of the finances of the 14 institutions in the system, with the goal of “reorganizing” the system—or merging or closing some of the institutions—to make it more “sustainable.” There is a considerable range…
BY MARTIN KICH Any budget number can be made to sound exorbitant if doing so serves a political purpose. But the scope of our governmental budgets, as well as the scope of our economy, has long exceeded the ability of most of us to grasp the numbers—both viscerally and intellectually—in any meaningful way. Given the…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL News reports last week that President Trump’s first budget may eliminate support for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has alarmed many of humanities supporters and scholars. But the de-funding of the NEH – or the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) — should…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Last week, I posted an item on the proposals to eliminate tenure in Iowa and Missouri. Hank Reichman subsequently posted the AAUP’s statement on those proposals. Those proposals were made by Republican members of the state legislatures. In the intervening week, the Republican governors of both states have proposed substantial cuts…