Topic: Higher education costs
Blog Post
April 13, 2016
Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities Facing Higher Education
New Issue Brief from William G. Bowen
Rutgers University is marking its 250th anniversary this year with, among other activities, a series of lectures on the future of higher education. Opening the series on April 7, William G. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University and president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon foundation, and now valued advisor to ITHAKA, delivered a lecture on “Issues Facing Major Research Universities at a Time of Stress AND Opportunity.” Drawing from his recently published Lesson Plan: An Agenda for Change…
Issue Brief
April 12, 2016
Issues Facing Major Research Universities at a Time of Stress AND Opportunity
This Issue Brief presents the lightly edited text of William G. Bowen’s keynote address at the Rutgers University 250th Anniversary Presidential Symposium on Higher Education, delivered in New Brunswick, NJ, on April 7, 2016. I would like to begin by acknowledging some of my many debts to Rutgers. My wife and I both have Rutgers degrees, hers an earned Master’s Degree and mine one of the “unearned” kind. Beyond that, as a close neighbor of Rutgers for many years, living…
Blog Post
April 4, 2016
Trends in College Net Price for Low-Income Students
Last week, New America’s Stephen Burd published a report showing that low-income students who receive Pell grants still face a substantial financial burden to attend college, especially at private not-for-profit institutions. Looking at the average net price—“the average amount of money that students and their families have to pay after all grant and scholarship aid is deducted from the listed price”—of low-income students attending 1,400 four-year institutions, Burd found that 94 percent of the private not-for-profit institutions he studied…
Blog Post
March 7, 2016
Helping Students Save Money With Open Educational Resources
Reducing the cost of a college education is a frequent topic in higher education circles, but often the focus is on capping the cost of tuition, or, occasionally, reducing the cost of tuition for students and their families. Some colleges and universities have been trying to find other ways to reduce costs, as well, such as offering online courses during the summer or a regular academic term, for a reduced fee, or using open educational resources (OERs) as an alternative…
Blog Post
February 23, 2016
Is Completion the Right Goal? The Public Wouldn’t Agree
The results of Ithaka S+R’s first Higher Ed Insights survey, released yesterday, provide a rich set of information about the views of a group of people deeply immersed in the sector. In full disclosure, I was one of the survey’s respondents, and the questions encouraged me to ponder and articulate my views on a number of important issues and trends, as I’m sure they did for others. One thing that struck me about the survey and its results was…
Blog Post
February 22, 2016
New Survey of Higher Ed Experts Finds Promise in Guided Pathways, Adaptive Learning
In fall 2015, Ithaka S+R invited a select group of higher education administrators and experts to join a panel of advisors. One activity of the panel, which consists of 110 members with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, is to take part in semi-annual surveys on issues of national importance in higher education. The results of these surveys will help guide Ithaka S+R’s research agenda. In addition, we will publish the results to inform the broader higher education community about the panel’s…
Research Report
February 22, 2016
Higher Ed Insights: Results of the Fall 2015 Survey
In fall 2015, Ithaka S+R invited a select group of higher education administrators and experts to join a panel of advisors. One activity of the panel, which consists of 110 members with diverse backgrounds and perspectives, is to take part in semi-annual surveys on issues of national importance in higher education. Ithaka S+R will analyze and publish the results of these surveys to inform the broader higher education community about the panel’s views on current debates, initiatives, and challenges. The…
Blog Post
February 17, 2016
An Analysis of Pell Grant Data
Earlier this year, the National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) updated its Data Center to include financial aid data for the 2013-14 academic year. Interested in how the percentage of undergraduate students who received Pell grants changed (or did not), I compared the 2013-14 data with that of previous years (2007-08 through 2012-13). The institutions included in the analysis are located in the United States and fall into one of nine sectors based on…
Blog Post
January 26, 2016
(Re)introducing the Educational Transformation Team
The new year brings a new member—our fifth—to Ithaka S+R’s Educational Transformation team. It seems like a good opportunity to (re)introduce our program’s staff, which includes three new members since July 2015. In addition to me, the director of the program, we have two senior researchers and two analysts. Our team brings together a diverse and complementary set of skills and backgrounds, enabling us to take on a range of project work focused on research, policy, and practice…
Blog Post
January 4, 2016
Moving Innovation Off Campus
When Paul LeBlanc arrived at Southern New Hampshire University in 2003, he realized that the small, private, tuition-dependent college on the banks of the Merrimack River was destined to decline right along with the downward projections for high school graduates in the state. “I studied the cards we were dealt and looked for the best ones,” he said. In one corner of campus, he found his ace in the hole: a small online operation. Over the next several years, by…
Blog Post
December 3, 2015
Idaho’s Bold Initiative
Will It Help?
Earlier this week, Inside Higher Ed reported on the recent announcement by the state of Idaho that, beginning with the class of 2016, the state’s high school graduates would be guaranteed admission into at least some, and possibly all, of Idaho’s eight public colleges and universities. For more than 20,000 public high school graduates, admission into five of the state’s postsecondary schools would be guaranteed while the remaining three – Boise State University, Idaho State University, and University of…
Blog Post
November 16, 2015
Having the “Online Learning Discussion” with Faculty
Ithaka S+R has been working with the Council of Independent Colleges for nearly two years in creating a consortium for online learning in the humanities. We have written extensively about the project, in a previous blog post, a report on the findings after the first year of the program, and a case study in which we featured a few faculty from the project and their experiences with the program. Last week, the Council of Independent Colleges held…
Blog Post
October 29, 2015
Valencia College’s Collaborative Re-design
“Culture” is often treated as a mystery ingredient in the recipe for promoting student success. A good culture catalyzes well-designed interventions and produces positives results. A bad culture impedes the take-up or spread of practices that should otherwise work, leading to disappointment. But like airborne yeast in a sourdough, an institution either has good culture or it doesn’t. But what if culture weren’t a background condition? What if, instead, it can be designed, intentionally? And if so, how? Valencia College,…
Case Study
October 29, 2015
Collaborating for Student Success at Valencia College
In recent years, a promising conversation about change at community colleges has emerged. Employing the language of redesign and reinvention, this conversation emphasizes comprehensive, broad-sweeping reform, and calls for a reorientation of community college missions around student learning and student success. Though it is hard to disagree that improving student outcomes is desirable, the traditional enrollment and funding models for community colleges make a true institutional “reset” difficult. Understanding how institutions have successfully gone about redesigning their operations and culture…
Blog Post
October 20, 2015
Can Online Courses Make Humanities Courses More Accessible in Small, Independent Colleges?
The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, established a Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction in 2014. Twenty-one colleges that constituted the consortium agreed to develop online or hybrid courses that could be shared by all participants in the consortium and had three major goals for this project: To provide an opportunity for CIC member institutions to build their capacity for online humanities instruction and share their successes with other liberal arts colleges. To…
Blog Post
October 20, 2015
Online Learning Markets: Inter-Institutional Challenges
In my last blog post, I described some of the challenges that must be addressed in the institutional context if online learning technologies are going to have maximum impact on the way registered students at existing institutions learn and on the costs associated with that instruction. The barriers described in that post are intra-institutional in nature: faculty concerns, addressing teaching specialization, governance, and cost management. In this post, I want to address important inter-institutional challenges to a robust “business-to-business”…
Blog Post
September 21, 2015
Double Trouble
Sweet Briar College and Cooper Union
Lawrence S. Bacow, president emeritus of Tufts University and leader in residence at the Harvard Kennedy School, and William G. Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University and founding chairman of ITHAKA, have commented recently on the ill-fated interventions by state attorneys general into the operations of American colleges as they attempt to make strategic shifts to address imposing financial challenges. Today in our latest issue brief, Double Trouble: Sweet Briar College and Cooper Union, Bacow and Bowen share…
Issue Brief
September 21, 2015
Double Trouble
Sweet Briar College and Cooper Union
Sometimes, large lessons can be learned from the travails of small institutions. This is, we believe, true of the dramatic sagas of two very different private educational institutions: Sweet Briar College in Virginia and The Cooper Union in New York. The near-demise of Sweet Briar (now attempting to renew itself, but with uncertain prospects) and the struggles of Cooper Union (with big issues of both policy and governance) have much to teach us about the challenges facing both many small…
Blog Post
September 15, 2015
Online Learning Markets: Institutional Challenges
In late July I posted on the different markets that exist for technology enhanced teaching and learning in higher education. To summarize the assertion from that post: there are substantial differences between the activities and impact of courses delivered by online learning platforms directly to individuals and those delivered through institutions to students. The latter represents a “business-to-business” case that must overcome different obstacles for success than “direct-to-consumer” offerings like MOOCs. I promised in that post to highlight a…
Blog Post
August 26, 2015
Improving Instruction at Scale
In 2008, John Immerwahr described an “iron triangle” constraining colleges and universities, in which cost, quality, and access exist in an “unbreakable reciprocal relationship, such that any change in one will inevitably impact the others.” According to this logic, making a college or university more accessible or trying to increase the quality of instruction would necessarily drive up institutional costs. Conversely, reducing expenditures would inevitably make an institution less accessible and undermine the quality of the education that a…