By Paul Fain. Low-income students who enroll for the first time at four-year public colleges and are eligible for additional grant aid -- meaning larger federal Pell Grant awards and state and other grant aid -- are significantly more likely to earn a degree and more in earnings after they graduate. More...
Additional Grant Aid Boosts Student Success and Earnings
Google's College Search Ignores Community Colleges
By Paul Fain. Beginning last year, Google added information about colleges to its search function, meaning that a search for a college now automatically pulls up data, much of it from the federal government, on the institution's selectivity, tuition, graduation rates, student loan repayment rates and expected earnings. More...
Stagnant Wage Growth for New College Graduates
By Paul Fain. Students who graduated from college in 2018 with a bachelor's degree earned an average starting salary of $50,944 per year, according to the latest version of an annual survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). More...
More Students Are Sticking With College
By Paul Fain. The national college persistence rate has increased by 2.2 percentage points during the last eight years, according to new data released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, which is able to track the progress of 97 percent of undergraduates who are enrolled at degree-granting postsecondary institutions that are eligible to receive federal financial aid. More...
Amazon to Spend $700 Million on Training, Mostly Outside College
By Paul Fain. Retail giant Amazon announced Thursday that it will spend $700 million over six years on postsecondary job training for 100,000 of its soon-to-be 300,000 workers. Most of the company's subsidized education and training programs will be offered outside traditional colleges and universities, in large part by spin-off providers created by Amazon. More...
Marlboro College to Merge With University of Bridgeport
By Paul Fain. The University of Bridgeport and Marlboro College on Thursday announced plans to merge. Marlboro, a liberal arts college in southern Vermont, enrolls just 142 students, according to federal data. The University of Bridgeport's campus is located about 140 miles away, in Connecticut. More...
Moody's: Financial Exigency Can Be Credit Positive
By Paul Fain. The University of Alaska recently declared financial exigency to help deal with the state's huge budget cut to the system. The decision has drawn attention to the relatively rare use of financial exigency in higher education, which typically is used for colleges to eliminate jobs, including those held by tenured faculty members. More...
Laureate Continues Sell-Off With Panamanian University
By Paul Fain. Laureate Education has continued its sell-off of universities, this time with the announcement last week that it is selling the Universidad Interamericana de Panamá for roughly $87 million. More...
Performance Funding and Underrepresented Student Enrollment
By Paul Fain. Roughly 35 states have enacted performance-funding formulas that tie support for public colleges to metrics like graduation rates and degree-attainment numbers. Critics worry that colleges may attempt to game the formulas by enrolling fewer students who have a lower likelihood of success. More...