By Raynard S. Kington. In the struggle to find ways to reduce the costs of a college education, one of the greatest challenges has been understanding the drivers of costs and their value in terms of quality and outcomes.
Leaders in higher education—those of us in the middle of the cost debates and the ones most able to take direct action at our institutions—must push harder for better data and analysis on costs, quality, and, ultimately, student outcomes. Read more...

By Jeffrey R. Brown. The financial security of a strong university endowment would seem to matter most when hard times come along—when revenues slow and core functions are in danger of being compromised. At such times, an endowment can help guard against shortsighted cost cutting that harms both near-term quality and long-run vitality. But it turns out that many universities do nothing of the sort. During the recent recession, most endowments took a beating, with the average endowment losing a quarter of its value. That decline followed years of heady growth that led endowments to grow at a far faster clip than university spending did. Read more...

By Vimal Patel. The American Historical Association and four universities will split a $1.6-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at broadening the career paths of history Ph.D.’s, officials announced on Thursday. The grant comes as graduate students in history and across the humanities face a bleak job market and as graduate programs are under pressure to improve their students’ employment prospects. The association wrote in its 2012 jobs report that less than 43 percent of new recipients of history Ph.D.’s in 2011 reported definite employment at the time they graduated, the lowest level in at least four decades. The 2013 report showed a slight increase, to 44 percent, in the proportion of new graduates reporting definite employment. Read more...

By Audrey Williams June. For the first time in at least six years, the median base salary of professors at public colleges increased at a greater rate than that of their private-college counterparts, according to an annual report released this week by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The median increase for tenured and tenure-track faculty members at public institutions in the 2014 fiscal year was 2.2 percent, compared with 2.0 percent at private colleges. Over all, the median base salary for tenured and tenure-track professors in 2014 rose 2.1 percent from the year before, the same increase as a year ago. Read more...

By Megan O'Neil. The costs of a cyberattack on the University of Maryland that was made public last month will run into the millions of dollars, according to data-security professionals who work in higher education. Such a financial and reputational wallop threatens many colleges that are vulnerable to serious data breaches, experts say. Crystal Brown, chief communications officer at Maryland, says an investigation into the theft of 309,079 student and personnel records, dating to 1998, is being led by the U.S. Secret Service. Read more...