By Matt Reed. The Girl graduated the 8th grade, which was exciting enough on its own. It’s the end of middle school. Where we live, several middle schools feed into a regional high school, and students also have options of various specialized high schools, so the transition to high school is more than just everyone switching from one building to another. More...

By Matt Reed. The questions to ask about enrollment. More...

By Matt Reed. The Girl’s softball season just ended. I enjoy the games, mostly, but I have to admit some paternal guilt that she inherited my skill at hitting. And truth be told, I’m not above rooting for the occasional rainout. More...

By Matt Reed. Longtime readers know that I’m a fan of C.K. Gunsalus.  Her “College Administrator’s Survival Guide” is one of the most useful and realistic I’ve ever read on the subject. So it should come as no surprise that her latest piece in IHE, along with Nicholas Burbules and Robert Easter, struck a chord. It’s about dysfunctional academic departments. More...

By Matt Reed. A friend in grad school once commented that she and I followed the Supreme Court the same way that normal people follow baseball.  So yes, I’ve been mulling over the Janus v AFSCME case for months. Longer, in fact, if you count the version that didn’t get decided when Scalia died. More...

By Matt Reed. Last week was the annual family summer vacation, so I didn’t pay as much attention to the academic interwebs as I usually do. But even in the midst of painfully rediscovering why folks of Scandinavian heritage need lead-apron-strength sunscreen, I couldn’t resist @Mantia’s tweet asking people to name something that’s obvious to people in your industry or field, but mostly unknown outside it. More...

By Matt Reed. The state just passed a law capping the number of credits for an associate degree at 60, down from 66, effective in Fall of 2019. (It includes some very limited exceptions for programs with external accreditations, like certain allied health programs, but that’s all.) The idea, I assume, is to reduce the cost for students and make it likelier that students will complete degrees in a timely way. Which is great, as far as it goes. More...

By Matt Reed. Academic interwebs are full of articles about the “two-body problem.” (My own most recent contribution to the genre is here.) The two-body problem refers to the dilemma that couples face when opportunities don’t come in pairs. When one member of the couple gets a good offer in a desirable location and the other doesn’t, they have an awful choice to make. More...

By Matt Reed. Can a college get better and smaller at the same time. More...

By Matt Reed. You know that feeling when you read a well-meaning book on a great topic, you’re rooting for it, and it just doesn’t quite work? I had that with Alissa Quart’s “Squeezed.” It’s an examination of the increasing difficulty involved in living a “middle class” life in America. More...