By Matt Reed. A major textbook publisher has announced an all-you-can-eat subscription version of textbook purchasing. A student pays a set rate per semester, and has unlimited access to new copies of the latest books provided by that publisher. It’s being touted as a major money-saver for students, and in some cases, it probably is. More...

By Matt Reed. Thanks to Melina Patterson for highlighting this one. It’s a bill for a semester at the University of Houston in 1975. The total is $152.50. Correcting for inflation, that would be slightly over $700 now. More...

By Matt Reed. Melinda Karp’s article about colleges struggling to move from reform proposals to actual implementation struck a chord with me. I’ve been in the “why don’t they see it?” position enough times to have obsessed about this for a while. More...

By Matt Reed. The point about lost time is crucial, and often overlooked.  I’ve heard of colleges -- not naming any names -- that won’t reveal which courses a student will get credit for until after the student has committed to enroll there. From a student perspective, that’s cheating. In the colleges’ (limited) defense, though, some decisions require more research than others. More...

By Matt Reed. In college, entirely by accident, I discovered that the laundry room in my dorm made an excellent study space. Something about the white noise of the dryers provided just enough external stimulation to allow my restless self to focus, without getting distracted. I carried that into grad school, where the local laundromat became a favorite study spot. More...

By Matt Reed. Subtraction is a nasty trick. This week I did the math and realized that, a few weeks ago, I passed my ten-year anniversary as a chief academic officer at a community college: seven years at the first, three and counting at the second. Add five years as a dean at another community college before that, and it has been a while. More...

By Matt Reed. On New York's free college program, and who actually benefits. More...

By Matt Reed. The Wife and The Girl made the trip to Lidgerwood Park in Morristown, NJ, on Thursday -- about an hour and a half each way -- to take part in the Road to Change rally. It’s organized by the March For Our Lives group, including several of the survivors of the Parkland High School massacre. More...

By Matt Reed. Far more community college students transfer prior to completing the Associate’s degree than actually complete first. According to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, about 350,000 transfer before completion, compared to about 60,000 who complete first. More...

By Matt Reed. I remember raising an eyebrow when I learned that “sophistication” and “sophistry” share a root. They both refer to the Sophists, a school of thought in pre-Socratic Greece who were known for their facility with language. As I learned it, they were sometimes understood to prize the style of a statement over its actual truth; the point of language, for them, was persuasion. More...