Changing Higher Ed

Student loan default and repayment rates have continued to be calculated through years of dormant collections, and some institutions could soon face single-year default rates high enough to threaten their Title IV...

Most institutions measure access at admission and affordability, then ration the experiences that actually change student outcomes to whoever finds them. The experiential learning that employers say they want gets...

Workforce readiness is usually framed as a funding and program-design problem. In some states and at some institutions, the funding and the employer willingness already exist, and what is missing is a structure on the...

Private colleges under enrollment pressure get told to diversify revenue. The venture that follows usually either fails to earn or drags the institution away from the academic identity families were paying for. In this...

Institutions recruiting adult learners are inserting them into schedules, deadline policies, and course structures designed for 19-year-olds, then treating the resulting attrition as a student problem. The barriers...

Most institutions in a crisis don't believe they're in one. The word calls up a scandal with a camera crew outside, and nothing on this week's agenda looks like that, so the answer is often no. In this episode of the...

Applications keep climbing while the class comes up short. The gap sits in the phase most institutions treat as the finish line: what happens after the acceptance letter goes out. In this episode of the Changing Higher...

The same students who say college costs too much are overwhelmingly saying it was worth it, and that contradiction is the key to the entire public confidence debate. In Gallup-Lumina polling cited in this episode, 93...

Program discontinuation is usually the fight presidents avoid. Fairleigh Dickinson University put a significant slate of program discontinuations and consolidations to a faculty referendum, and roughly 88 percent of the...

At Manhattan University, the case for the liberal arts is being made with outcomes, not nostalgia. Its graduates rank in the top 2% nationally for mid-career salaries, and The Wall Street Journal ranked the university...

Most retention systems flag struggling students through grades and attendance. By the time those indicators fire, many students are already halfway out the door. Elvee's survey of 1,050 U.S. college students shows why...

Half of college presidents worried about public trust are answering with a public relations campaign. According to the AAC&U report at the center of this episode, that is a reasonable instinct but the wrong one. Public...

When the federal government freezes research funding, leaders tend to treat it as a budget problem: a number that was cut and might later be restored. The harder truth in this conversation is that much of the damage...

Most AI conversations in higher education focus on the academic side. The administrative side gets less attention and is producing the bigger near-term financial wins for institutions willing to govern the rollout. In...

AI implementation in higher education is often framed as a technology question. California State University treated it as change management with technology as the catalyst, rolling out ChatGPT Edu to 22 universities in...