While much attention has been focused on how enrollment declines are putting private, nonprofit colleges out of business at an accelerating rate—at least 17 of them in 2024—public universities and colleges are facing their own existential crises.
Survey data shows that rural students prefer going to college near where they live. In some cases, they don’t have a financial choice. But there are still options for them, including going a little bit farther away to universities and colleges that offer them financial aid.
Colleges and universities, on average, are admitting a larger proportion of their applicants than they did 20 years ago, new research by the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute finds. The median acceptance rate at bachelor’s degree-granting universities and colleges was 7.6 percentage points higher in 2022 than it was in 2012, AEI found.
Confidence in higher education is slipping nationwide, in part because of the high cost of obtaining a degree and questions about whether it pays off in the workforce. Higher education experts say work-based learning programs like Drexel’s could be part of the solution
Math is a giant hurdle for most community college students pursuing welding and other career and technical degrees. Colleges are boosting pass rates by getting numbers off the whiteboard and into the workplace.
The real problem is that higher education, like society at large, is being engulfed by a deluge of righteous anger. My evidence? The nightly parade of commentators and hosts on cable news.
