Snow College’s latest travel policy included new, logical restrictions. For example: Employees would be reimbursed only for for hotel stays on days that matched an event’s agenda, and they could no longer expense a first-class airline seat. The Utah college got lots of comments—about three-quarters of them negative—when the regulations were posted for a 30-day […]
In a “post-racial” and “post-feminist” America, do we still need colleges and universities that serve women? If most institutions now admit those previously excluded, isn’t the disappearance of women’s colleges and historically black colleges, oddly, a good thing? Not in my view. The recent announcement of the closing of Sweet Briar College is not a […]
Dan Darkow, age 21 and graduating this spring from Wright State University in Ohio, is president of the National Residence Hall Honorary and a resident assistant. He serves as director of disability affairs for the WSU student government, and he also happens to get around in a wheelchair due to a form of muscular dystrophy. […]
The Great Recession of 2007-08 had a profound impact on both public and private universities. In How the Financial Crisis and Great Recession Affected Higher Education (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Jeffrey R. Brown, a finance professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-editor Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford economics professor, examine universities […]
What types of people at your school are not saving for retirement? Young employees? Low-income earners? Maybe single parents with children? Several years ago, Linda Nilsen needed to know. As the executive director of benefits and compensation at Princeton University, she analyzed the non-savers—about half of the school’s 6,000 employees. To her surprise, there were […]
Early-college high schools have inspired a new wave of close collaboration between K12 and higher education as both sides recognize the benefits of better preparing students for the rigors of college life and coursework. High school graduates who’ve taken college courses and experienced campus life—and who may have collected up to two years’ worth of […]
When students at the University of Georgia returned from winter break five years ago, they inundated the campus computer network with a wave of electronic holiday gifts—smart phones, laptops, tablets, gaming consoles and mini-computers. Within a matter of days, the students had overloaded the computer system and shut it down. The information technology department quickly […]
Who would ever think that replacing simple lightbulbs could end up costing a university hundreds of thousands of dollars? Or that a piece of equipment destined for a building’s basement could nearly cause the destruction of an exterior wall, with an associated price tag in the tens of thousands of dollars, because the system was […]
Fueled by government agendas, national press and public opinion, higher education has in recent years come under increased scrutiny in the form of calls for heightened transparency and accountability. Some of the U.S. Department of Education's initiatives in response include: The College Affordability and Transparency Center, which provides searchable lists of institutions by largest and […]
The University of Vermont allows its students to identify their own gender around campus, even if it’s no gender at all. Though the policy has existed for nearly five years, it wasn’t until a February New York Times article that UVM received significant attention, says Dot Brauer, director of the LGBTQA Center@UVM. “Nothing prepared us […]
