By . Students who want to do master’s degrees are stymied by a lack of state finance. Paul Jump investigates how funding can be fixed. More...
Cash warning for university expansion
Public funds are hard to replace, even in the US
By Barry Glassner. ‘Going private’ is no financial panacea, say Barry Glassner and Morton Schapiro. It’s something that university leaders in the US have been familiar with for years, and as a recent article in these pages (“Student finance: the lessons we must learn from American history”, 21 August) noted, there are lessons to be learned from the American experience. More...
University finance heads want to spend despite uncertainty
Starting university: how to manage your finances
Shortening College Time to Save Cash: Stunt or Real Solution?
By Kate Rogers. With college costs continuing to outpace inflation and student debt being hailed as the next bubble of doom, some schools are coming up with creative alternatives to pare down costs.
Purdue University is just the latest college to debut a three-year degree in communications, promising savings of between $9,000 and $20,000. More...
Universities chase big defense dollars
Some of the nation’s most elite universities are deep into defense lobbying, often hiring Washington-based firms to press Congress and the Pentagon to fund their science projects. It’s all about Big Research and Big Money. Read more...
Millennials Latest College Funding Strategy
By Ashlea Ebeling. Would you rather get cash for college or a silver spoon? One of four new ads for Virginia’s 529 college savings plans debuting next month on YouTube and Facebook (and tv) is set at a baby shower. The coveted gift: a check made out to baby’s college savings account.
The ads are meant to appeal to Millennials who are new parents. It’s the generation with a savings ethos, student loan debt worries of their own, who want their kids to get off to a easier start. They’re not shy about asking friends and family for cash to help pay for their progeny’s future college costs. More...
In funding formula, don’t scrimp on community colleges
By Patricia A. Gentile. Derrick Z. Jackson got it half right — Massachusetts is not a two-tiered public higher education state (“Pricing out state university students”). It has three tiers, and they include community colleges, where the most at-risk, lowest-income, greatest-minority students receive the least amount of public support and shoulder the highest percentage of financial burden to pursue their dreams. The 15 Massachusetts community colleges enroll 57 percent of the total undergraduates in public higher education, more than UMass and state colleges and universities combined. Yet our sector only receives 25 percent of the total higher-education pie. UMass student support is three times higher per student, with public colleges and universities two times higher. More...
HESA funding and monitoring data (FAMD) 2013-14: Web facility
HESA and HEFCE strongly encourage use of the web facility, which we regard as an essential element of all institutions’ data quality processes. It will help institutions to:
- return accurate data to HESA
- verify the accuracy of the derived fields that may inform and monitor funding and student number control (SNC) allocations
- respond to data verification queries (DVQs) raised by HEFCE staff
- reduce the likelihood of selection for the FAMD reconciliation exercise for 2013-14 (selected institutions are typically subject to considerable additional work and potential funding adjustments)
- identify discrepancies between forecasts for within-year HEFCE funding returns (such as the Higher Education Students Early Statistics survey (HESES)) and the outturn position for 2013-14
- identify errors in HEFCE funding returns
- verify that the 2013-14 HEFCE-fundable full-time equivalent student numbers used in the transparent approach to costing for teaching (TRAC(T)) are suitable to inform the periodic review of the relative costs of different subjects. More...