Why Students Should Still Pick a History Major
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the history field has seen a precipitous decline in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in American colleges. As Benjamin Schmidt, a historian at Northeastern…
Did You Know? The Biggest NC Endowments Keep Growing
A college endowment is a fund where an institution keeps its financial assets and donations and can invest that money for the college’s long-term stability. In North Carolina, the largest…
How Colleges Have Made Students Poorer and Undereducated
There is general agreement among higher education observers and reformers that tuition and fees at public universities have increased at an unsustainable pace. It’s equally uncontroversial to note that financial…
Did You Know? Student Loan Defaults Are Most Common in West Virginia, New Mexico
When students are late making a monthly payment on their federal student loans, the loan becomes delinquent. And if they don’t make any payments for 270 days, most types of…
How Colleges Can Survive the Coming Enrollment Crash
Nationwide, higher education enrollment has been trending down for several years. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 2019 was the eighth straight year of decline, with an overall drop…
A Complicated Debate: Have States Been Disinvesting in Higher Education?
“Two days. Two reports citing the same data. Two different conclusions.” That is how Rick Seltzer described the near-simultaneous release of two studies looking at state funding in Inside Higher…
Did You Know? Regret Comes with Taking Student Loans
A recent report from Payscale showed that a majority of college graduates regretted their college decision. Out of the 250,000 students surveyed, about 12 percent had some regret the major…
Did You Know? An Anti-Poverty Program Sent Funds to 33 Well-Off College Towns
“Opportunity zones,” defined by a 2017 law, are poor areas targeted by the federal government for economic investment. In a study by the Brookings Institution, researchers discovered that money intended…
Without Financial Transparency, Colleges Mislabel Research Spending as Instructional
Public colleges spend public money, but college officials are reluctant to make information about their budgets easy to understand. That aversion to transparency makes it easier to pass non-instructional expenses…
The True Cost of a PhD: Giving Up a Family for Academia
In 2012, CBS noted the bleak future that awaited PhD graduates. From 2005 to 2009, American universities graduated 100,000 new PhDs but only created 16,000 new professorships. The average PhD…