Not All Graduate Degrees Pay Off
Higher education has long included graduate degrees in the United States. But over the last decade or so, the number of students seeking degrees after earning their bachelors has been…
Democrats Are Falling Out of Love With Higher Ed
For years, higher education could count on Democrats to be in its corner. But that confidence is beginning to crack. A recent Gallup and Lumina Foundation survey found that the…
From School Choice to College Choice
It’s no secret that Americans are struggling to bear the burden of student loans. Nearly 43 million Americans — one in six adults — currently have student loan debt, and…
UNC Isn’t Waiting for Raleigh
Even as North Carolina lawmakers continue budget negotiations, the UNC System has already implemented many of the cuts proposed by the NC House and Senate. While their total savings fall…
North Carolina’s Talent Gap
North Carolina enjoys a healthy, growing economy. Unemployment rates are low. Job growth is robust. And people continue to move to North Carolina at staggering rates. But new data from…
Toward a Sensible Federal Financial Aid Policy
A few weeks ago, I was one of the audience gathered in the Hillsdale College DC campus’s marvelous new but neo-classical auditorium to hear US Education Secretary Linda McMahon discuss…
Funding Should Follow Students
Two years ago, UNC-Chapel Hill introduced a new resource allocation model that ties funding more closely with student demand. This approach makes sense, aligning incentives across academic units and rewarding…
Academic Armageddon Advances
Robert Kelchen of the University of Tennessee, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently, described the most dire problem facing higher education today: “The list of institutions trimming academic…
Huge University Spending Yields Little Value
Why do public university officials do the things they do? What drives their decisions to allocate scarce resources in some ways and not others? In his recent book The University…
Student Loans: A Multi-Generational Financial Trap
When the United States began its experiment with federally backed student loans in the 1960s, no one predicted that, by the early 21st century, students would have run up over…