The first clue that something was wrong at Tidewater Community College in Virginia emerged in March 2016 when at least 15 employees discovered they could not file their tax returns. After the IRS informed the employees that their returns had already been submitted, college officials realized someone had breached the computer system. The attack began […]
Sometimes it becomes clear very early on that a facilities project—especially a solar initiative—will be complicated. At Endicott College in Massachusetts, administrators looking into solar and other renewable energy technologies discovered several of the rooftops were too small to accommodate solar installation. Planned renovations on other buildings meant solar panels would need to be removed […]
An income-share agreement (ISA) is an alternative to using student loans to finance higher education. Rather than a loan, a student agrees to pay a percentage of their future income for a set number of years back to the investor, which could be a university that funds its own ISA or a pool of investors […]
First-generation college student and recent UC Berkeley grad Ulises Serrano, an aspiring higher ed administrator, will enter graduate school this fall without any student loan debt. That’s thanks in part to the income-share agreement (ISA) used to finance the first two years of his post-secondary education at Allan Hancock College in California. For Serrano and […]
“The last thing colleges want to do is put a former student in collections,” says Harrison Wadsworth, executive director of the Coalition of Higher Education Assistance Organizations. But when internal efforts to collect tuition don’t work, it’s important to have somewhere to turn for help. At Texas Tech University, the finance office pursues unpaid balances […]
When Tyson Cooper began working in student accounts 10 years ago, debt collection on college campuses was viewed as purely business and "a necessary evil," says the director of student financial services at the University of Southern Virginia. Today, with increased attention on student success and the long-term effects of unpaid accounts, institutions need to […]
Preparing for the annual audit can be one of the most stressful times of the year for university financial leaders. Some schools compound the challenges of the audit process by not adequately preparing. In these cases, schools are still working on the accounting books and schedules when the audit is supposed to start. This poses […]
There are many ways in which higher education engages in cross-border education. The most common remains study abroad opportunities for students. In the last decade, however, colleges and universities have begun to extend their international presence to include branch campuses to better position students to enter a globally-connected workforce, improve global rankings, tap into alternative […]
Legislators, parents and students are not the only ones asking questions about the cost and quality of higher education. As educators, we don’t hesitate to ask ourselves and our universities to push for improvements. One major hurdle remains, however, as the academy does more to encourage and reward research output than it does to support […]
Eight prominent universities—including University of Pennsylvania, Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt and others—were hit with separate lawsuits in August 2016 alleging the institutions mishandled their employee retirement plans. While the institutions fight those lawsuits, experts have predicted the complaints are just the first of many to be filed against colleges and universities that sponsor 401(k) […]
