Campus CFO

Former District fiscal chief Michael Masch will start work next week as vice president for finance and chief financial officer of Manhattan College, a Catholic institution in New York City.

University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, based in Little Rock, has agreed to pay former CFO Melony Goodhand $312,000 over the next year to communicate with the academic medical center as it transitions to a new CFO, according to an Arkansas Times report.

A recent Moody's Investors Service report highlighted the pressures facing American colleges and universities, finding that pricing and enrollment issues have hampered their ability to earn money from tuition.

The financial services and company veteran will lead the nation's No. 2 provider of private student loans. The appointment is effective February 11, 2013.

Brandeis’ roughly $700 million endowment took a negative dip in the last fiscal year, after several years of rebuilding from losses sustained in the 2008 recession. The endowment draw rate also declined slightly.

Judy Woodruff, formerly a student, visiting professor and member of the Board of Trustees at Duke, has been elected a trustee of the Charlotte-based Duke Endowment. She has worked at CNN, NBC News and PBS—where she is currently the co-anchor and senior correspondent.

Gov. Jerry Brown's newly proposed funding increase for higher education has largely focused on state-funded public colleges saying they won't raise tuition for the 2013-2014 school year, but Brown also wants the University of California, California State University, and community college systems to rein in costs, operate more efficiently and get students to obtain their diplomas more quickly.

While higher education issues seem hidden behind state gun control and uranium mining discussions at the Capitol so far, professors from Virginia Commonwealth University and other schools are urging legislators to improve retirement benefits for public university and college employees.

At the corner of Fifth Avenue and 14th Street in Manhattan, you can see higher education's ambitions reaching to the sky. The New School's 16-story University Center nears completion at a cost of $353 million. The edifice is impressive. But would you want to hold the mortgage on it? That's what you have, in effect, if you buy a tax-exempt bond from the New School.

Washington's six public-college presidents say they will freeze tuition levels for the next two years if the Legislature will increase higher-education funding by $225 million.