February 28, 2009 – 10:58 pm
Once again, the NY Times is doing a good job getting half of the story. Many schools are proclaiming quite publicly that they’re boosting their financial aid budget. That’s well and good even though it’s really the same thing as saying that the schools are cutting their prices to remain competitive. Rhetoric around schools is [...]
February 26, 2009 – 1:03 pm
In the final days of the Bush Administration, the Department of Education started panicking just like the Treasury Department and they went farther than Treasury ever did by effectively nationalizing the college loan business. This isn’t exactly true. What really happened is the private lenders stuck their fingers in the air and became so frightened [...]
February 25, 2009 – 9:36 pm
Want to save $40,000 on college tuition? Just go to college for three years instead of four. That’s the plan at Hartwick College. They’ll be pushing 18 credits into a semester and adding 4 more during a January term, but then you’re done after three years. I’ve become somewhat cynical about the arbitrariness of the [...]
February 25, 2009 – 12:19 pm
President Obama, perhaps one of the more educated Presidents ever, proclaims that everyone is going to have to suck it up and go back to college for one more year! Woo hoo. Break out the raccoon coats and start a diet so you can look good streaking across the football field. Wait! What? You want [...]
February 24, 2009 – 11:50 pm
According to this article from Newswatch50, the President of the SUNY Potsdam instituted a hiring freeze three months ago and “warned that salaries need to be trimmed.” So who didn’t get the memo and still slipped an extra $8,600 in the President’s pay envelope?
February 24, 2009 – 12:47 pm
Some clever nurse decided to create a new class of nurses that know even more than “nurse practioners” and then caused a great deal of trouble by calling them “Doctor Nurses”. After all, if chemistry departments can create a “doctor of chemistry” why can’t a nursing department create a “Doctor of Nursing.” Woo boy. Buried [...]
February 23, 2009 – 1:18 pm
If you want to know where your hard earned tuition dollars are going, read Tamar Lewin’s summary article that discusses many of the numbers unearthed by the Chronicle of Higher Education. There are too many seven figure salaries here to make anyone comfortable about writing a check to the university.
February 23, 2009 – 1:17 pm
The New York Times’s Tamar Lewin manages to write 1000+ words about financial aid without breaking out of the conceptual box drawn by the universities themselves. She never questions the notion that it’s not “aid” in many cases, just a way to sell loans. And she doesn’t deal with the weird philosophical incentive to spend [...]
February 21, 2009 – 12:20 pm
It’s about time that students started asking questions about the biggest challenge to their future. NYU students took over some cafeteria and demanded more transparency about the huge budget and the insane tuition. That protest and what WCBS called “intense rioting” is now over. Many folks who lived through the Vietnam protests said that they [...]
February 20, 2009 – 1:05 pm
The California tax revenues are cratering. The state is cutting meat from the budget. So what does Josh Green, a Cal student, think should be done? Protest! It’s like that moment in the movie “Animal House” when the poor Delta students are being tossed off campus and they’re sitting around with clueless looks on their [...]
February 19, 2009 – 12:59 pm
It was only a matter of time before some smart student started asking about the truckload of cash that he wanted delivered to his doorway. The homeowners are getting a boatload. Is it too much to ask for some help to the poor students? Erica Eding, a student at Flagler college, is asking the question [...]
February 18, 2009 – 12:17 pm
The Washington Post is hosting a discussion about what to do about the binge drinkers at college.We’re all for experimenting. We’re all for a good drunken party. But why should anyone spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on it? If you’re going to waste a few years of your life, well, just get a part-time [...]
February 17, 2009 – 1:21 pm
There are two ways to handle the crushing cost of college: opt for simpler campuses or come up with more creative accounting. The US is moving toward the second, no doubt pushed by college presidents who pump up a scary picture of a next generation that moves on to take its place in the work [...]
February 14, 2009 – 12:21 pm
The Baltimore Sun reports on a new economic plan from Johns Hopkins university to freeze hiring and cut off overtime. The bosses will also take a 5% pay cut. The glass at the lips of the JHU leaders, though, is still 95% full which should be good news because it can be a big glass. [...]
February 11, 2009 – 12:12 pm
There’s nothing like kicking a student when he or she is down. In this case, it’s just a little kick but the point is still the same: some colleges are giving the students their loan money in special debit cards that come with nasty fees. Peter Sachs, a reporter for the Chi Town Daily News, [...]
February 9, 2009 – 3:38 pm
I’m not sure of the details, but it seems like Chancellor University, the second oldest business institution in the country, is going to use on-line courses to cut the cost of a degree perhaps even as dramatically as their press release suggests. Read <a href=”http://au.sys-con.com/node/835504″> story here</a>. They certainly understand that the prices are too [...]
February 4, 2009 – 1:39 pm
A very direct story from the Demoines Register asks whether the University of Iowa should boost tuition by several thousands of dollars a year just so lower-income families can pay no tuition. Is that fair? How about cutting back on the fancy professors and the fancy dorms? That’s a simpler way to have your admittedly [...]
February 2, 2009 – 9:43 pm
Flat panel televisions, maid service and more are waiting for the students in Purdue’s new First Street Towers. The AP has the story here. The good news is that the prices aren’t going up for all residence halls to cover the costs– something that often happens at colleges. These come with a steeper price that [...]
February 2, 2009 – 12:33 pm
I’m not sure of the real story here, but the Rensselaer Polytechnic campus seems to be upset about the university’s $36,000 donation to ex-President Clinton’s charity. The Times Union’s Marc Parry reports that An invitation-only CGI membership offers entre into a rarefied club whose annual meeting The Economist called “an important part of the global [...]
February 2, 2009 – 12:20 pm
The Baltimore Sun produced a nice story about the pushback that the Maryland governor is getting from those college leaders about his commitment to freezing tuition. After skyrocketing during the boom years, the MD governor asked them to take a break and quit making it so expensive. The MD governor has a nice sound bite: [...]
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