Here, in a nutshell, is the human toll of the student-loan mess: it is forcing many recent grads to defer marriage and having children; it is hobbling many prospective entrepreneurs that our economy badly needs and may well delay the retirement of new grads by 11 or 12 years. The total student-loan debt hit $1 trillion dollars […]
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A fascinating facet of the ongoing deflation of the higher education bubble is the scramble by law schools to adjust to their dropping enrollments. At many schools, this enrollment drop has been enormous. Applications to law schools generally are down by 18% this fall, the third year in a row of double-digit drops. Just looking at my home state […]
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Business schools and their students are confronting an unpleasant truth that law schools and their students had to learn some time ago: their degrees are not the tickets to automatic success they once seemed to be. Unlike law schools, however, business schools are actually dealing with the problem. A recent WSJ piece reports that starting salaries for recent MBA grads […]
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Conventional wisdom states that the future of higher education lies online. However, few studies tell us whether this is necessarily a good thing. Indeed, both the detractors and supporters of online education tend to rely on anecdotes rather than data. So a recent report by William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, Kelly Lack, and Thomas Nygren of […]
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A recent report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), entitled “Best Laid Plans: The Unfulfilled Promise of Public Higher Education,” explores a fair number of problems the California college system faces. However, I don’t think it covers them all. The report states openly and rightly the problems that California’s public colleges face […]
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Colleges–both on the undergrad and graduate levels–typically admit students and encourage them to take on onerous amounts of debt, without first giving those prospective students the actual data about their chances of finding work in that major field afterwards. This is just as true, by the way, for non-profit as it is for for-profit schools. […]
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The dysfunction in the American educational system–from the continuing decline in the elementary and secondary schools to the “bubble” in post-secondary education–is growing more obvious every day. However, the public often overlooks the massive community college (“CC”) system. Nationally, nearly a third–fully 30%–of all post-secondary students are in community colleges. (In California alone, over two […]
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