In recent decades, education leaders and researchers have increasingly sought to disaggregate key higher education outcome data--graduation rates, attainment, employment, and income--by race and ethnicity in order to uncover and narrow equity gaps. The same is true, recently, for affordability, especially as it relates to the differential impact…

Rethinking the balance between federal and state responsibilities for supporting colleges and universities and making higher education accessible and affordable for students is important. There is little disagreement about the current education financing system being inadequate. The debate is about the best way to solve the problem. In this…

Understanding the funding requirements of public institutions starts with recognizing them as state assets with capacity to meet state needs, especially those that disproportionately serve underrepresented, low-income, or rural student populations and adult learners. As policy makers wrestle with resource allocation decisions under unfavorable…

At the start of the third decade of the 21st century, the United States is entering a period of unprecedented demographic shifts affecting higher education. Not only are many states already seeing fewer high-school graduates, with more facing this trend as the decade progresses, but in all but a few regions overall population growth will level and…

Recent headlines have brought attention to the effects that unfavorable demographic and fiscal conditions are having on postsecondary education institutions. Among those most acutely feeling the pressures are likely to be institutions located in rural communities that are seeing more rapid population declines and lagging median income. This…

Substantial investments by states dramatically increased the scale and scope of public colleges and universities beginning in the early 20th century and provided subsidized post-secondary opportunities across institutions ranging from community colleges to research universities. Nearly 50 years ago, economists Lee Hansen and Burton Weisbrod opened…

The partnership between the government and American research universities lies at the heart of the U.S. scientific and higher educational enterprise. This unique and historic partnership has advanced human health, enhanced national security, and produced human capital that has fueled technological innovation and economic growth, created entire new…

What happens to public colleges and universities when confidence in the value of public institutions wanes? Nothing good, to judge from two new books whose titles telegraph the tale: "The Great Mistake," by Christopher Newfield and "Austerity Blues," by Michael Fabricant and Stephen Brier. This article discusses how the authors…

As tuition levels rise, predictability is an increasingly important consideration of college financing. In this article, the authors explore contemporary policy tools intended to enhance tuition predictability. They specifically consider guaranteed tuition plans. The authors begin their discussion by considering the prevalence of guaranteed…

Due to extensive research, we now know that in spite of extraordinary success in expanding access to American higher education over the last 60 years, far too little has been done to ensure that students complete college, even when they take 50 percent more time to complete the degree than full-time attendance should require. Obstacles to success…

The concern about the United States' education attainment levels as compared with those of other countries, and the consequences of this poor showing, were given visibility by the inclusion of international statistics in the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education publication, "Measuring Up 2008." That concern was…

Previously in "Change," William Doyle has argued that higher education leaders must face up to what has been called the "new normal": decreased state funding for higher education on a per-student basis and a prediction that funding will not recover to levels seen in the past. In this article, Doyle states that we have now…

Developmental courses in English, math, and reading have an important purpose in higher education, especially in the open-access world of community colleges. These classes--also referred to as "remedial"--are intended to give less-prepared students a chance to catch up and meet the challenges of college-level coursework. However,…

Greater accountability in public higher education systems is a fact of life in the current political climate. Increasingly, one form this accountability takes is performance funding, which arises from elected officials' need for assurance that taxpayer funds are not only being invested and used properly but are resulting in desired outcomes at…

In 2004 Colorado passed legislation enacting the nation's first voucher-based approach to financing higher education, known as the College Opportunity Fund (COF). The work of an unusual coalition that included higher education leaders, generally conservative policymakers, and others, COF completely replaced the traditional approach of subsidizing…