By Liz Reisberg. There has been a rash of articles in the press about the ways we might measure the effectiveness of a university education, often judging the success of higher education by the employment results of graduates.  There have been several articles about the failure of higher education in China to guarantee jobs to graduates.  The Voluntary Institutional Metrics Project also emphasizes post-graduate employment among the items (below) to be evaluated that include. Read more...

A tentative deal reached late Wednesday night to tie interest rates on federal student loans to the market seemed ready to collapse late Thursday, after the Congressional Budget Office estimated the compromise's costs at $22 billion over 10 years, The New York Times reported. The proposal worked out in Wednesday's compromise would tie interest rates on subsidized undergraduate Stafford loans to the yield on 10-year Treasury bills plus 1.8 percentage points (with rates for graduate and PLUS loans would be slightly higher), and the rates for all loans would be capped. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. Hardly a day goes by without some author or commentator predicting that the end is nigh for higher education, or significant portions of it. Such predictions understandably grate on many administrators and professors. But what do those with the closest eyes on their own institutions' bottom lines -- chief college and university business officers -- think? Turns out they're not particularly upbeat, either -- about their own colleges' futures or the higher education landscape more generally. In a new survey by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup, barely a quarter of campus chief financial officers (27 percent) express strong confidence in the viability of their institution's financial model over five years, and that number drops in half (to 13 percent) when they are asked to look out over a 10-year horizon. Read more...