| I am unable to count the number of times that I came across an article in which an academic scholar proclaimed an impending crisis that threatened to destroy the very nature of higher education during the past sixty years. Crisis and conflict may be the first two memes of the culture of higher education scholarship. | Continue Reading
1 | One Hundred Years of “Institutional Research” “[T]he university is, in usage, precedent, and commonsense preconception, an establishment for the conservation and advancement of higher learning, devoted to a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. As such, it consists of a body of scholars and scientists, each and several of whomContinue Reading
| NYU’s Facade of Financial Support | NYU’s reluctance to help students in need of financial support is indicative of its continued culture of elitism among administrators and admissions officers. NYU is among the nation’s wealthiest universities, touting a $4.3 billion endowment. Sitting on this considerable wealth, it has been able to extend loans for its faculty to buy vacation homes, award its president with one of the highest salaries in the nation and further extend its global and local takeover through building yet another study away site and a $6 billion expansion plan to gentrify another 980,000 square feet of Greenwich Village. Despite this affluence, NYU has done little to help its low-income students.Continue Reading
| “We Need More Vigorous Debate”: A Conversation with Michael S. Roth | Institutions that want to enhance belonging and overcome the privileges wealthy students enjoy generally have hard choices to make in allocating resources. Do they devote more financial aid to bring in more low-income students, or do they provide funds to help a smaller number of low-income students truly flourish? If a selective private school has, say, 15 percent Pell-eligible students, it might set a target of increasing financial aid resources so as to enroll 25 percent of these low-income undergrads in the future. Alternatively, with more resources, it can set the goals of providing greater academic and psychological support for the cohort it already has. Most institutions find it difficult to do either, and very few can do both (although the wealthiest certainly can). [Note: If only private nonprofit institutions had such altruistic agendas for recruiting low-income and Pell-eligible students. In truth, many of these colleges recruit low-income students and Pell-eligible students to attend for a year or two so that the revenue generated from their federal grants and students loans can be reallocated to academic programs that service the wealthiest students.]Continue Reading
| A Modest Proposal (Fourth Anniversary) | Putting the woebegone, private non-profit institutions and the august members of the Forbes multi-billionaire list in the same room is a matter of institutional effectiveness, pure and simple.Continue Reading
