Analysis

March 23, 2023

The Supreme Court may ban race-based affirmative action for college admissions this year. But that does not mean schools will abandon their diversity goals. As administrators wait for the high court to issue its final decision in two key affirmative action cases, they are figuring out how they can continue to create the heterogenous campuses they want. It is not an easy task. In an effort to...

May 18, 2020

Our recent NEJHE piece revealed that labor market impacts of COVID-19 shutdowns have been very unequal across industries, occupations and levels of educational attainment. Job losses in the month since the beginning of the shutdowns (between mid-March and mid-April) were concentrated in industries that primarily employ individuals with lower levels of education—industries such as leisure and h...

May 12, 2020

The emphasis on humanities has swung like a pendulum through the years, particularly in the world of higher education. Many perceive it as a discipline of the elite that attempts to connect us to distant places from times long ago that are mythical, historical or hypothetical, and somehow more important than today. Simply stated, humanities has the connotative power to scare people away from i...

May 21, 2019

The federally financed GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Program) was organized two decades ago with the purpose of increasing high school completion and college enrollment among low-income students. The College Crusade of Rhode Island’s GEAR UP program was designed as a long-term effort to buttress student success by providing various kinds of educational and soci...

March 19, 2019

Across New England, the days are starting to get longer, everyone is hoping spring weather is just around the corner, and each state’s legislative session is firmly underway. While it’s still relatively early in the current sessions, at NEBHE we’re taking a first look at the major issues and trends we see emerging in the region’s legislatures related to higher education and workforce de...

February 27, 2019

Editor's Note: New England and the nation have long suffered from an underrepresentation of women and people of color in higher elected offices. In the 2018 midterms, that began to change. Below, Carolyn Morwick, director of government and community relations at NEBHE and former director of the Caucus of New England State Legislatures, takes a state-by-state look at New England elections and s...

February 27, 2019

Connecticut Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont delivered a two-year budget plan of $43.1 billion to lawmakers, emphasizing that the state’s crushing fixed costs relative to its pension funds must be addressed. To accomplish this, he proposed restructuring, refinancing the systems’ payments and slowing the rate of increase in the teachers’ pension fund and the state employee pension fund, both of ...

January 18, 2019

New England faces a concerning dip in its higher education enrollment, due in significant part to declines in the region’s birth and high school graduation rates that are both projected to continue through 2029. Despite these trends, New England’s postsecondary institutions continue to attract a large number of international students to the region, according to the 2018 Open Doors report relea...

January 15, 2019

The earnings advantages to adults with more schooling are well-documented. High school graduates typically have higher earnings than high school dropouts, and those with a bachelor’s degree have higher earnings than both groups. Furthermore, as the job content of the nation’s economy has shifted in a way that generally favors those with more schooling, these earnings gaps between those with mo...

June 12, 2018

In 2004, then-University of New England President Sandra Featherman authored a piece for NEJHE (then called Connection) headlined “Emotional Rescue” and focusing on how a new generation of troubled college students was putting a strain on campus resources. Featherman, who died in April, wrote of colleges and universities scrambling to provide additional and better support services for students...

December 11, 2017

The 2018 Guide to New England Colleges & Universities data published by Boston magazine in association with the New England Board of Higher Education provided me the opportunity to examine the schools’ prices, defined as tuition plus fees, as a function of several independent factors including those listed below. (I conducted a similar study last year.) Percentage of freshman applicant...

April 25, 2017

The Trump administration has sent mixed signals about the future of the DACA program, creating uncertainty among recipients and their families. In February, a leaked draft of an internal memo hinted that the Trump administration intends to cut the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. As of March 2017, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was continuing to review DACA applica...

February 17, 2015

As the lowest-priced higher education institutions serving the greatest share of students in New England, public institutions are a crucial access point for the region’s students who may not have other opportunities to enroll in college. Maintaining the cost of attending a public institution in New England is imperative for students, families, communities, states and the region. Yet, the pri...

September 9, 2014

A Demographer Looks at New England’s Population and the Future of Education A great many New England institutions of higher education are about to find out if demography will determine their fate because unprecedented and substantial population change is sweeping across the region. New England is demographically unique in a number of ways. With fewer than 15 million year-round residents, i...

March 10, 2014

Nearly a year ago, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. Past installments of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing: Carnegie Foundation Pr...

January 28, 2014

Following are perspectives from Stephen J. Nelson, who recently wrote his fifth book about college presidents, College Presidents Reflect: Life in and out of the Ivory Tower. Nelson is associate professor of Educational Leadership at Bridgewater State University and senior scholar in the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. NEJHE has published his thoughts on previous occasions: Tales from ...

January 13, 2014

Presidents, trustees and senior administrators at New England colleges and universities all feel the pressures: keep tuition down, be competitive academically and make sure the physical campus draws talent from a shrinking pool of traditional high school graduates and new nontraditional students. Given resource limitations, something’s got to give and, for many campuses, investment in facilities...

December 10, 2013

In the past two decades, increases in computing power and the ability to retrieve and store data, combined with the mobile and data communications revolution, have altered how we exchange information. These factors have also stimulated growth throughout the economy. However, in many rural areas of the country, the information superhighway lacks an on-ramp for people who are looking for educational...

November 18, 2013

New England will continue to experience a slow jobs recovery through 2017, according to economists speaking last week at the New England Economic Partnership (NEEP) Fall 2013 Economic Outlook Conference in Boston.The modest job growth from 2013 through 2017 will be strongest, percentage-wise, in the construction industry, fueled partly by a housing rebound, followed by professional and business se...

October 15, 2013

American college students’ worldviews affect what they value, the way they behave and potentially how they learn. We have found that today’s students are divided not dichotomously, between religious and secular, but rather among three distinct worldviews: religious, secular and spiritual. Institutions of higher education need to understand the distinctions among these three worldviews and desi...

September 3, 2013

Shifting demography, rising operating expenses, plummeting state and federal support, intensified competition, broken financial models … these are just a few of the complex challenges facing New England higher education institutions. Given these tensions, who would be surprised if college presidents in the region weren’t occasionally plagued by sleepless nights, hounded by anxious trustees, or...

August 9, 2013

We live in a knowledge-driven global society. The world has closely knitted economic, social and cultural relations that offer greater entrepreneurial and professional opportunities than ever before. Since meritocracy is considered the basis for success, institutions of higher education like to invest in high-impact practices and programs that raise the quality of academic experiences for students...

July 24, 2013

From a higher education perspective, new "Common Core" standards could improve student college-readiness levels, reduce institutional remediation rates and close education gaps in and between states. By 2014-15, many K-12 education systems should be able to adopt new state assessments after working to implement new state standards for student learning in English Language Arts and Mathematics. M...

June 10, 2013

“When both of the partners meet our standards for excellence in teaching and research, and where they can both make contributions to the curriculum, it’s a great way to both recruit and retain. ... It also brings us the greater richness of what two people bring.”—Cristle Collins Judd, Dean for Academic Affairs, Bowdoin College Though Dean Judd is referring to faculty couples, she could be...

June 3, 2013

For the past 30 years, the student debt issue has been slowly simmering. Government loans quietly edged out grants as the primary form of financial aid, while college tuitions continued their rise. All the while, we piled debt on to students without adequately preparing them to manage it. Now, student debt has come to a boil. An astonishingly high 30% of the 37 million Americans with student lo...

May 28, 2013

In April, NEJHE launched its New Directions for Higher Education series to examine emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. The first installment of the series featured Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, interviewing Anthony Bryk, president of t...

May 21, 2013

As this year began, NEJHE published the thoughtful concerns of Lasell College admissions official Christopher M. Gray about how colleges would need to address applicants who have experienced a traumatic and life-changing event such as 9/11 or the Sandy Hook mass murders. Now such events have visited Boston and so will traumatized applicants. Two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon on Monday, ...

May 6, 2013

Higher education officials have long been familiar with the concept of “summer melt,” where students who have paid a deposit to attend one college or university instead matriculate at a different institution, usually presumed to be of comparable quality. While melt may be a concern for individual institutions as they try to predict their fall enrollments, historically it has not been viewed as...

April 29, 2013

NEJHE’s New Directions for Higher Education series examines emerging issues, trends and ideas that have an impact on higher education policies, programs and practices. The convergence of forces driving change in higher education is transforming the academic enterprise—reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is and what the value of higher education is. On...

April 8, 2013

More than three-quarters of administrators, faculty and staff at Jesuit colleges agree or strongly agree that “admitting, enrolling, and supporting undocumented students fits with the mission of the institution.” And yet 40% recently said there were no known programs or outreach to undocumented students of which they were aware. There is then an obvious disconnect between a theoretical...

March 18, 2013

NEJHE on Models that Will Change Higher Ed Forever MOOCs claim to make education accessible to everyone, but institutions offering MOOCs have yet to define best practices for accessible design. For many, universal design efforts end when course video material has been captioned. Captioning is important, but the idea that you can just caption course video and call a MOOC accessible belongs on the ...

March 11, 2013

Many students begin higher education unprepared for college-level work in mathematics and must take non-credit developmental courses. Furthermore, many are math-phobic and avoid courses, majors and careers that involve quantitative work. Yet science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields are among the few job-growth areas in the U.S. Many companies are lobbying the federal governme...

February 28, 2013

It is now a commonplace to assert that education institutions have some responsibility to contribute to the effort to remake our world so civilization will be sustainable into the future. A history of this idea would capture the many programs of environmental research and teaching that have taken place at universities and colleges, going back centuries, but would certainly also note the founding i...

February 24, 2013

Immigration reform is gathering steam. In late January, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators announced an agreement on principles for immigration reform, that may include paths for undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship. Based on earlier immigration reform proposals, these pathways to “earning” citizenship will likely include earning a postsecondary degree after a high school diploma or eq...

February 6, 2013

While schools wrestled with how to build a new athletic facility in the middle of a recession, Tufts University’s Athletics and Operations Departments worked with a Massachusetts-based developer called Stanmar Inc. to devise a creative solution to designing, building and financing a new sports and fitness center in just under 24 months.In an education environment that is experiencing rising ...

January 29, 2013

Introducing NEBHE's new Trends & Indicators ... It should go without saying that data is tricky (or is it are tricky?).Take the issue of student aid as one example. Some states have annual budgets; some have biennial. Some states report all kinds of aid in one place; others leave it to observers to patch together the hodgepodge of merit and need-based programs from the state’s gener...

January 23, 2013

When MIT approached Bunker Hill Community College (BHCC) to participate in edX, the new Harvard/MIT massive open online course (MOOC) initiative, we reacted with both interest and skepticism. What did MIT have in mind for Bunker Hill Community College? How would edX “transform the way that community college students learn” as edX President Anant Agarwal claimed, when he discussed the l...

January 21, 2013

National report looks at impact of college spending on athletics and academics For some small colleges, just the sight of the school's branded team bus traveling to road games can nail a marketing extra point. And television deals bring big bucks to major football programs. But for the most part, spending on college athletics drains money from campuses still bruised by recession and, as faculty...

January 15, 2013

Those that believe a higher education degree is becoming increasingly superfluous make reference to the fact that 19 of the top 100 chief executives in the Fortune 500 lack college degrees. In consideration of that, a recent U.S. News analysis of the Fortune 500 CEOs reports that many of those CEOs who hold academic degrees choose not to mention their degree as among their achievements in their c...

December 18, 2012

Nearly 50 years after the landmark legislation aimed to open higher education to all Americans, colleges and students face a new set of threats ... The Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) was signed into law on Nov. 8, 1965 to strengthen the educational resources of our colleges and universities and to provide financial assistance for students in postsecondary education. During reauthorization...

December 10, 2012

A number of economists, policymakers, elected officials and employers cite a “skills gap” as the reason the nation is not putting more people back to work. The problem, they reason, is that too many people have the wrong skills for today’s jobs, and colleges and universities are not doing enough to prepare people with the right skills.The idea of a skills gap is tempting to buy i...

November 28, 2012

Announcing the 2013 Guide to New England Colleges and Universities! The 2013 Guide to New England Colleges and Universities, produced by NEBHE in association with Boston magazine, lists key data for each college, such as: admissions application deadlines and acceptance rates; faculty-student ratio; enrollment totals and breakdowns for part-time, commuting, female, international and minority stude...

November 6, 2012

Updated November 2012New England’s traditional public and private nonprofit colleges and universities conferred more than 201,000 degrees at all levels in 2010—or more than 6% of the U.S. total, compared with the region's less than 5% of the U.S. population. However, those traditional public and private nonprofit colleges make up an ever-smaller portion of the U.S. total, and the U.S. ...

October 24, 2012

Innovators and entrepreneurs are using technologies to make freely available the things for which universities charge significant money. MOOCs ... free online courses ... lecture podcasts ... low-cost off-the-shelf general education courses ... online tutorials ... digital collections of open learning resources ... open badges ... all are disrupting higher education's hold on knowledge, instructio...

October 3, 2012

Why is remedial or developmental education such a hot issue? Partly because it costs time and money and casts doubt on the elementary and secondary education systems that we assume will prepare students for college. The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) explored solutions to the problem at a recent forum in Kennebunkport, Maine, called “Ready for Real: Innovative Strategies for Im...

September 25, 2012

Click here for videos of BIF-8 storytellers! The Business Innovation Factory (BIF) held its eighth annual collaborative innovation summit on Sept. 19 and 20 in Providence, and the key, as always, was the art of storytelling. No themes, said summit facilitator and BIF founder and “chief catalyst” Saul Kaplan. You decide which connections you can make, he told the 400-plus attendees. Granted...

September 4, 2012

The first online course from MITx titled 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics, offered earlier this year, had more students than the entire number of living students who have graduated from the university. Indeed, that number is not far from the total of all the students enrolled there since the 19th century. MIT reports that 155,000 people registered for MITx 6.002x and of those, approximately 23,...

August 19, 2012

Updated August 2012The enigmatic term "college readiness" is increasingly used in education and policy environments across the country. While school-university partnerships, school-community initiatives and state and federal legislation have shown promise in preparing students for college study, a common definition of the term remains elusive, and many students are still underprepared for college-...

August 14, 2012

"Your students come here for four years and leave."For some time, this had been a common perception among many Rhode Islanders regarding to the state's independent colleges and universities. But that's changing.The state’s housing bubble had burst in 2006, leading to interest in developing less volatile economic sectors that would provide the stable high-end services jobs. By 2008, Rhode Isl...

July 6, 2012

Perspectives from Stephen J. Nelson, who recently authored his fourth book about college presidents, Decades of Chaos and Revolution: Showdowns for College Presidents. Nelson is associate professor of Educational Leadership at Bridgewater State University and senior scholar in the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. NEJHE published his thoughts on two previous occasions: Success and Fai...

June 25, 2012

The New England states continue to experience slow growth and slow recovery of the jobs lost in the 2008 to 2009 recession. The main reason for this is the continued weakness in global and U.S. economic conditions. The U.S. and New England economies continue to be affected by the weak European economy and sovereign debt crisis and by weakness in domestic and regional housing markets.The forecast f...

June 18, 2012

Club members receiving homework help in Burlington, Vt. Boys & Girls Clubs of America count 4,000 community-based clubs serving more than 4 million young people through membership and community outreach. They provide a safe place to spend time during non-school hours and the summer as an alternative to the streets or being home alone—a place to play, have fun and learn. Boys & ...

May 29, 2012

Polls Show: Castleton Making a DifferenceDuring the past 11 years as president at Castleton, I have suggested to all our incoming classes and current students what they need to remember: Their mission is to make a difference in their college and our wider community before they go out to make a difference in the world.We have another new initiative at Castleton, a dream in the making over the past ...

May 21, 2012

Photo: Presidents who signed the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) seen gathered in 2007. (Courtesy of Second Nature.) Preparedness. Opportunity. Innovation. These words capture the essence of higher education’s critical role in creating a healthy, just and sustainable society. Leaders in higher education are standing up to the greatest challenge o...

April 20, 2012

No sooner has the Net Price Calculator wave crashed ashore, the next wave of college-choice transparency in the form of third-party data aggregators is threatening to engulf us. A Net Value Calculator can help us recapture the high ground. Since last October, Net Price Calculators (NPCs) have become a fact of life for American colleges and universities. Some are doing the bare minimum to co...

April 3, 2012

2012 is a year of interest and consequence to all of New England higher education. ...This year marks the 150th anniversary of the first Morrill Land Grant Act, named after the great Vermont senator, Justin Morrill, who was instrumental in its creation and passage. Not only is the region’s higher education community reminded of its great tradition and leadership, it is compelled by the...

March 6, 2012

Anyone who fixates on graduation rates has little understanding not only of the rich mission and value of our community colleges, but also how deeply flawed and inadequate those rates are as a principal assessment tool for the performance of community colleges.Graduation rate calculations apply to a small fraction of our entire student population (about 15%). That is because this national measure ...

February 28, 2012

Demographics in American higher education are changing dramatically. A recent study by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) reveals that 11.3 million people ages 16 to 26 (one in four) are first- and second-generation immigrants. Moreover, the report continues, between 1995 and 2010, immigrant-origin youth accounted for half of all growth in the nation’s population of young people overall. This ...

February 17, 2012

Our longstanding interest in the ways colleges and universities enrich their communities and the region will be on full display at NEBHE's April 3 conference on "Locally and Regionally Engaged: New England Colleges and Universities as Drivers of Innovation, Workforce and Economic Development." It promises to be a fascinating gathering focused not only on economic impacts such as building a competi...

February 15, 2012

President Obama's proposed FY 2013 budget would encourage community college partnerships with employers, target student aid for colleges that restrain tuition prices, and increase overall spending on U.S. Education Department programs by 2.5% to nearly $70 billion. That would be the largest percentage increase for any domestic department in the president's proposed federal budget for FY 2013, whi...

February 1, 2012

Updated February 2012 ... New England's public and private two-year and four-year colleges continue to be more expensive than the U.S. averages. The region continues to hold the dubious distinction of America’s lowest state appropriations for higher education and highest tuitions and fees for public colleges and universities. Recent data from the annual Grapevine survey by the Illinois St...

January 27, 2012

In Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s recent 2012 State of the Commonwealth address, he reported that 240,000 people were still looking for work in Massachusetts – and there were nearly 120,000 job openings. Business leaders have told the governor that job applicants don’t have the skills required. One of the actions Patrick called for in response was for better alignment between...

January 23, 2012

When I first started as interim director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies (INENAS) based at the University of Massachusetts Boston, I was given three studies that broadly identified specific needs and disparities of Native people in the region. These studies looked at demographic data provided by the U.S. Census, tribes and surveys of regional tribes and Native American non...

January 9, 2012

Maybe the classroom is where we should seek the transformation we need in higher education ... For several years now, many of us have been agonizing over the sorry state of American higher education—indeed, of our entire educational system—and for good reason: Once the U.S. had the highest college completion rates in the world, we now rank 12th among 25-35 year-olds in developed coun...

January 3, 2012

Maine has been focusing on the importance of postsecondary training. As the Maine Department of Education’s Pre-K-16 Task Force noted: “To guarantee a more promising future for Maine youth and to ensure economic vitality in our state, we need to dramatically increase the number of citizens with either an associate or a baccalaureate degree.” Maine’s Skowhegan Area High School (SAHS) and...

December 21, 2011

Updated December 2011 ... Since NEBHE began publishing tables and charts exploring “Trends & Indicators” in New England higher education more than a half-century ago, few figures have grabbed as much attention as college enrollment data. These local, state, regional and national data go beyond simple headcounts of students going to college to tell the stories of New England's chang...

November 21, 2011

Driven by external pressure for increased accountability and internal pressure for improved learning outcomes, colleges across the country have been developing and refining assessment systems for several decades. In some cases, assessment results have significant positive impact, for example, when used to enhance teaching and learning or as a lever for organizational change. In other cases, the re...

November 14, 2011

Editor’s Note: NEJHE has strived to document and improve the experiences of groups historically underserved by higher education, including ethnic and racial minorities. Academia is more tolerant than many sectors, but spending a brief time on any campus reveals that people who are “different” in any way are also underserved and underacknowledged. This article explores the particular situatio...

November 9, 2011

NEBHE convened approximately 400 leaders of business, education and government at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on Nov. 7, 2011 for a conference titled “New England Works” Summit on Bridging Higher Education and the Workforce. Following are keynote remarks from Boston Fed President and CEO Eric Rosengren. To download the figures, click here. Other speakers included: Connecticut Gov...

October 25, 2011

At Southern Vermont College (SVC) and at our nation’s other colleges and universities, Anatomy and Physiology I (A&PI) is the gateway course into healthcare careers. Given the country’s growing workforce development needs in this field, it is critical that our first-year students accumulate the requisite body of knowledge in the course to pass it and proceed in their healthcare programs: ...

October 5, 2011

When Jacques Pépin accepted his honorary doctorate from Boston University this past May, he made note of this truly symbolic moment. While his proposed dissertation focus on food had once been rejected by Columbia University as academically unworthy, a leading university was now granting him a doctorate for his work as a celebrated author, chef and teacher. Much has changed over the past generat...

September 30, 2011

The federal No Child Left Behind law of 2002 left it to states to establish their own academic standards and assessment systems. Those standards vary across the country in rigor and quality. Yet as former Maine Commissioner of Education Susan A. Gendron noted in March 2010: "What is different about mathematics in Maine from California? ... I don't believe there is a difference."The National Govern...

September 26, 2011

Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828; David B. Potts; Palgrave MacMillan; 2010. Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828, is, in a sense, three small books under one cover. David Potts, an academic residing in the Pacific Northwest, was originally introduced to the documents more than 40 years ago as part of a graduate-level study of the h...

September 19, 2011

Moral Problems in Higher Education, Steven Cahn, editor, Temple University Press, 2011. “Few philosophers have shown much interest in examining the moral problems …” in academe, their own bailiwick, complains Steven Cahn, a philosopher and former president of The Graduate School and University Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Cahn initiated a course in academic ethics ...

September 12, 2011

For decades. the cost of serving college students, from community colleges to Ivy League institutions, has been a barrier that has blocked access for many who want an education. With a recent massification effort aimed at producing more college graduates for the workplace, the enrollment numbers have increased and student debt load has become a real concern. Tuition costs are often perceived as th...

September 5, 2011

I realized how poor my family was when I was a high school senior. While filling out a financial aid form to go to college, I looked at my mom’s tax return to see how much she made. I asked her if it was a mistake. It wasn’t. She made $11,000 a year to support a family of four. Today I make four times as much as my mom did mainly because of one reason. Not dogged ingenuity or self-determinatio...

August 29, 2011

This paper, like many being written these days, deals with the “problem” of student retention in higher education. But unlike most, this paper focuses not on the problem of retention per se but rather on how institutional leaders think about student retention, completion, and success–how the way they frame their concerns about retention can give rise to a different sort of problem. Something...

July 25, 2011

I have spent much of my working life studying and promoting student loans. As a good liberal Democrat, I spent years arguing for the expansion of the old Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) which had its roots in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. My professional life included stints working for one of the nonprofit FFELP agencies and being a co-founder of an entirely private nonprofit, ...

July 18, 2011

Late last month, NEBHE senior fellow and Massachusetts Board of Higher Education Chair Charles Desmond and I launched a series of interviews with key leaders in New England philanthropy. Our goal was to paint a picture of what philanthropies see as the key issues and challenges facing higher education and how potential funders can have the most meaningful impacts on education in New England. Our ...

July 5, 2011

The Education Department released College Affordability and Transparency Lists on Thursday. The 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act requires the Education Department to produce six lists, with three examining tuition and fees and three examining each institution's average price of attendance minus grants and scholarships. The lists are also divided by type of institution (public/private, two-yea...

July 5, 2011

Is demography really destiny? The makeup of the population and the perceived value of education are changing. So this year following the decennial census, we're presenting our demography figures a few ways. (We also presented a set in January.) The universities of the Connecticut State University System (CSUS) attracted more than 7,000 students of color this year—a 35% increase since 200...

June 24, 2011

We invited each of the six New England governors to write articles on future challenges facing higher education in their respective states. ... The Future of Higher Education in Connecticut by Dannel P. Malloy, Governor of Connecticut Outwardly, the results appear impressive—growth in enrollments and degrees granted, expanded campuses and program offerings, and a well-known reputation ...

June 20, 2011

The New England economy continues to outperform the national economy. That is the good news. But both the region’s and nation’s economies continue to have low and staggered growth. The slow recovery from the 2008-09 recession is largely due to factors outside New England influence, including the European debt crisis, volatile energy markets and continued decline in the national housing...

June 20, 2011

On June 11, Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced that if Congress is unable to pass a comprehensive overhaul of the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law before the beginning of the 2011-12 school year, he would grant states waivers for the law's most burdensome requirements if they agreed to implement a set of reforms. While he has not fully developed the alternative plan, Secretary...

June 13, 2011

NEJHE presents exclusive articles by New England's governors on higher education in their states ... Thanks to our dedicated teachers and committed students, Massachusetts leads the nation in student achievement and classroom innovation. We’ve made education our top priority because it’s the path to a more fulfilling life, a more rewarding career and a richer society. I have personally expe...

June 9, 2011

While most in the academic community know about the attempt to rein in the for-profits, few are aware of its collateral damage. In October, the Department of Education issued its Program Integrity Rules, intended to protect federal funds especially from those for-profit institutions with high student loan default rates. Well-intentioned though this was, the DOE dropped an inadvertent bombshell: Al...

June 6, 2011

On Thursday, the Education Department released the final "gainful employment" rules for vocational schools. In order to qualify for federal financial aid, for-profit and certificate programs will be required to prepare students for gainful employment by meeting one of three requirements: the average annual student loan payment is not more than 30% of a graduate's discretionary income; the average ...

May 31, 2011

On Wednesday, the House Education and Workforce Committee advanced the first bill (H.R. 1891) in a planned series of education reform legislation. Under the bill, which was approved along party lines (23-16), $400 million in funding for over 40 education programs created under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) would be repealed. Republican supporters of the bill, sponsored by Congr...

May 9, 2011

The U.S. Education Department is going ahead with its proposed "gainful employment" rules for for-profit colleges, despite industry advocates calling on Congress and the courts to intervene. Originally scheduled to be issued last September, Education Secretary Arne Duncan delayed the regulations after receiving about 90,000 letters on the issue, most of them in opposition. The most recent version ...

May 9, 2011

In the context of the recent efforts to arrive at a federal budget, articles abound in the popular media and trade publications debating both the value of Pell Grants and their rising cost to the U.S. government. Both pros and cons of the debate hold value. Pell Grants are what enable many of our low-income families to send their children to college and, when more and more jobs require a minimum ...

April 12, 2011

Since the start of the global financial crisis a little over two years ago, many concerns have been raised on how it might affect funding to higher education and whether or not it might hasten moves toward greater cost sharing. While, globally, some steps have been taken in this direction, in most countries, hard decisions have yet to be taken on this issue. Our inaugural annual survey of global ...

March 10, 2011

New England universities performed more than $4 billion worth of research and development in 2009, but the region’s share of total R&D performed by all U.S. universities remained at 7.3%, down from more than 10% in the 1980s.The region's university research labs have been world-famous for ideas that breed companies and whole industries in fields ranging from biotechnology to photonic...

December 21, 2010

In the U.S., postsecondary education has long driven individual social mobility and collective economic prosperity. Nonetheless, the nation’s labor force includes 54 million adults who lack a college degree; of those, nearly 34 million have no college experience at all. In the 21st century, these numbers cannot sustain us. Returning to learning: Adults’ success in college is key to America’...

December 7, 2010

“About every two years someone comes up with this story. There is absolutely nothing to it—it's simply not true,” Peter Capelli, Professor, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, commenting on the Georgetown's college labor supply shortage forecast. —“Prediction of Worker Shortage Has Critics,” The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.), April 10, 2010. The recent response by Anth...

November 30, 2010

The notion of the "college labor market" as a fixed set of occupations is remarkably static. In contrast, we assume that job and skill requirements are dynamic. (This lively debate over future demand of college-educated workers will continue in our Forum.) Northeastern University economists Paul E. Harrington and Andrew M. Sum argue that in our recent report Help Wanted, we “radically over...

February 10, 2010

Incorporating cost management and productivity improvements into financing decisions ... Higher education is being challenged to increase access and degree attainment for all student groups—a tall order under any circumstances, but particularly daunting in the current economy. To do this, institutional and policy leaders will need to find ways to reduce costs and permanently reduce spending dem...