The Good and the Bad for Higher Ed in the Republican Tax Proposal
On November 2, House Republican leaders unveiled their tax reform plan. A number of its provisions affect higher education. While this is only a proposal, it’s worth looking into those…
Copying Australia’s Student Loan System Won’t Save American Higher Ed
The American student loan system is a mess, weighing down more than 40 million borrowers with $1.3 trillion of debt. As a result, analysts and journalists in search of alternative…
NC State Hoops Players’ Palatial New Digs Send the Wrong Message
Athletes need a good night’s sleep to maximize their performance. But that doesn’t explain why NC State’s proposed new dormitory for basketball players will cost roughly four times as much…
Should All University Property Be Tax-Exempt?
Connecticut legislators made headlines last year when they introduced a bill to tax revenue-generating college and university property. The bill was crafted to help New Haven, where Yale University is…
An Innovative Guide Through the Higher Ed Landscape
Increasingly, the old model of earning a college degree by simply choosing a school, paying cash to cover room, board, and tuition, and graduating within four years (with summers off)…
Public Universities as Commercial Landlords: Where Do We Draw the Line?
Late last year, NC State University purchased two small office buildings on Oberlin Road, near the university’s East campus, for the price of $3.1 million. Their location, situated between NC…
How Not to Recover from a Crisis, Mizzou Edition
The University of Missouri, where I teach and which I dearly love, is in crisis. Freshman enrollment at the university’s Columbia campus (Mizzou) is down by a whopping 35% from…
The Uncertain Future of Coding Boot Camps
Students are enrolling in coding “boot camps” at record rates, with the number of graduates increasing from about 2,200 in 2013 to an estimated 23,000 in 2017. However, the booming…
Grade Inflation Just Got Respectable: The New Eligibility Rule Governing Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship
Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship is now in its twenty-fourth year of existence. Originally the brainchild of then Governor Zell Miller, since 1993 this merit-based scholarship program has distributed in excess of…
Closing the Gap at North Carolina’s Historically Black Universities
Earlier this month, the Triangle Business Journal revealed that graduates from North Carolina’s Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs) are lagging their peers in terms of median salary after graduation.…