Challenges for Regional Undergraduate Universities in “the Middle”

By Thomas Carey. Matt Read posted in the Dean Dad blog about the colleges in “The Middle”: community colleges and the public universities that are predominantly undergraduate, caught between concern about rising tuition costs and constrained state resources for higher education (and pretty much everything else). Where others see mostly crisis – including Goldie Blumenstyk, whose book American Higher Education in Crisis was the prompt for the post – Matt sees opportunity for these institutions: “If they allow themselves to be commoditized…then I foresee an ugly race to the bottom.  But with more middle and even upper middle class students feeling compelled by economics to look more closely at public options, there’s a real opportunity…”. More...