Higher Ed News
May 26, 2011
Pew Survey of College Presidents Highlights Divergent Views from General Public
Along with its survey of the general public, the Pew Center recently published a survey of 1,055 two- and four-year, public, private and for-profit college presidents, concerning the quality, accessibility, and affordability of higher education. The two surveys were conducted around the same time and asked similar questions. However, there were notable differences between the…
May 18, 2011
Recent Pew Survey on College Affordability and Quality Released
The Pew Research Center recently conducted a large telephone survey of 2,142 Americans to gauge opinions about higher education quality, affordability, and importance. While many respondents reported anxiety about affordability, most valued a college education highly and reported a belief that it would provide career benefits in the future. Some of the key findings of…
May 12, 2011
Update on Upheaval in Texas Higher Ed
Two major developments have unfolded in the days since we posted about recent controversies gripping public higher education in Texas: The UT system released a massive file of faculty ‘productivity’ data that was compiled at the request of a Task Force created by the Regents and subsequently subject to an open records request from a…
May 11, 2011
Legislature Authorizes Tuition Setting for WA Institutions
As of today, House Bill 1795 has passed both the Washington State House and Senate by wide margins and is on its way to the Governor. As outlined in our previous post, this bill gives Washington’s four year public institutions the ability to set resident undergraduate tuition rates, alongside new financial aid and accountability requirements,…
May 9, 2011
Tuition Setting
Friday, the Seattle Times published an article about a potential agreement between lawmakers to, given several years of steep funding cuts, allow Washington’s universities to set undergraduate resident tuition rates for a limited number of years and with new financial aid and accountability requirements. News of this agreement comes as the Legislature is in the…
May 5, 2011
Momentum Building to Reign in For-Profits
It was speculated that Republican gains in Congress last November could stall the Senate’s aggressive investigation of the for-profit higher education industry and sweeping new Department of Education regulations that are set to go into effect July 1. While bipartisan action in the House did attempt to block some of the regulations, particularly the controversial…
May 4, 2011
Turmoil in Texas Over Higher Ed Reforms
Recent higher education reform efforts in Texas, developed by the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) and championed by Governor Rick Perry, have many wondering how much damage might be done to one of the country’s largest and best public university systems. The ‘solutions‘ proposed by TPPF, and marketed heavily by board member…
April 28, 2011
Encouraging News About Educational Attainment
The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported new, encouraging numbers about educational attainment in the United States for the 2010 Census year. According to the report, the percentage of people 25 and older who held a bachelor’s degree or higher increased to 30 percent in 2010 from 26 percent in 2000. Additionally, the percentage earning a…
April 19, 2011
UC System Boosts Nonresident Enrollment
Last year, the UC Board of Regents increased the system-wide cap on nonresident undergraduate enrollment from 6 percent to 10 percent based on final recommendations from the University of California Commission on the Future. Newly released 2011 UC freshman admissions statistics for all nine campuses show how aggressively UC has moved to increase nonresident enrollment…
Bleak Future for State Budgets Through 2060?
A new GAO (Government Accountability Office) report released last week provides an update to an ongoing assessment of State and Local Government fiscal health. The GAO has been publishing fiscal simulations for the state and local public sector (in aggregate) since 2007, and their modeling has consistently shown structural problems facing state budgets into the…
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