How Workforce Education Can Boost Earnings and Fill Jobs
Republicans and Democrats alike agree about the importance of workforce training. They’re right: Despite a recent labor-market cooling, there are still 7.7 million unfilled jobs in the United States. Unfortunately,…
Blueprint for Reform: Surviving the Demographic Cliff
Blueprint for Reform: Surviving the Demographic Cliff is a strategic guide for state legislators and university trustees addressing the challenges posed by declining college enrollments and the anticipated demographic cliff—a…
Parents Aren’t Saving Enough for College
College has long been thought necessary for success later in life, and it is often assumed to be the best pathway for recent high-school graduates. While that may have been…
Thank a Taxpayer for UNC’s Low Tuition
Earlier this month, the UNC Board of Governors began an important conversation about possible tuition increases for some in-state undergraduate students in FY 2026-27. That shouldn’t overshadow North Carolina’s remarkable…
Colleges Are Wrong to Oppose Attendance-Taking
Are the men and women who staff America’s colleges rugged individualists determined to swat away the overweening hand of the state? Or are they simply greedy? An ongoing dispute over…
The Debt-Free Four-Year Degree
A recent Gallup survey found that confidence in America’s colleges and universities has plummeted in the past decade, with only 36 percent of today’s adults expressing “a great deal” or “quite…
Faculty Salaries Are Complicated
The Coalition for Carolina recently noted that UNC-Chapel Hill has dropped out of the top-10 “average adjusted faculty salary” rankings for the 2023-24 academic year, as measured against a select…
The Imminent Student-Loan Disaster We’re Not Talking About
Legal battles over President Biden’s various schemes to forgive student debt continue. In July, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals indefinitely blocked the administration’s ultra-generous new student-loan repayment plan, which…
Graduate Enrollment Is Softening? Good.
The number of students enrolling in graduate school is steadily declining, according to a recent report by the Council of Graduate Schools. Although grad-school enrollment increased by six percent between…
College’s Value Is an Increasingly Hard Sell
The question “Is College Worth It?” provides a title for a 2024 book by Richard Ohmann and Ira Shor, a 2019 St. Louis Federal Reserve study, a 2023 New York…