Posts Categorized: Financing

Multiple Pathways for All Students

Maine has been focusing on the importance of postsecondary training. As the Maine Department of Education’s Pre-K-16 Task Force noted: “To guarantee a more promising future for Maine youth and to ensure economic vitality in our state, we need to dramatically increase the number of citizens with either an associate or a baccalaureate degree.” Maine’s Skowhegan Area High School (SAHS) and...

Risk Factors: Colleges Look to Manage Threats Ranging From Fraud to Data Breaches

Recently, a former administrator at a Boston law school admitted that he used a school computer to embezzle more than $173,000. As the former controller, he accessed the school’s accounting system, creating false checks, which he deposited into his personal bank account. As part of his scheme, the former controller used the signature stamps of other employees to sign the checks without their app...

Higher Education and the Economy: The View from the Boston Fed Chief

NEBHE convened approximately 400 leaders of business, education and government at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on Nov. 7, 2011 for a conference titled “New England Works” Summit on Bridging Higher Education and the Workforce. Following are keynote remarks from Boston Fed President and CEO Eric Rosengren. To download the figures, click here. Other speakers included: Connecticut Gov...

At Babson, Educating Leaders with a New Worldview to Create Social, Environmental and Economic Opportunity

In the sea of criticism of profit-obsessed business school graduates, Jim Poss appears to be an anomaly. In 2003, Poss was watching a trash vehicle on a Boston street. The truck was idling, blocking traffic, and smoke was pouring out of the exhaust. There has to be a better way, Poss thought to himself. He took the problem back to his team at Seahorse Power Co., a company that was identifying inno...

Bootstraps: Federal Trio Programs, if Funded, Could Help Close Income Gap

I realized how poor my family was when I was a high school senior. While filling out a financial aid form to go to college, I looked at my mom’s tax return to see how much she made. I asked her if it was a mistake. It wasn’t. She made $11,000 a year to support a family of four. Today I make four times as much as my mom did mainly because of one reason. Not dogged ingenuity or self-determinatio...

Do We Have a Retention Problem … Or Do We Have a Problem About Retention?

This paper, like many being written these days, deals with the “problem” of student retention in higher education. But unlike most, this paper focuses not on the problem of retention per se but rather on how institutional leaders think about student retention, completion, and success–how the way they frame their concerns about retention can give rise to a different sort of problem. Something...

Time to Turn Attention to a Different Debt Limit: Downsize Federal Student Loan Programs

I have spent much of my working life studying and promoting student loans. As a good liberal Democrat, I spent years arguing for the expansion of the old Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) which had its roots in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. My professional life included stints working for one of the nonprofit FFELP agencies and being a co-founder of an entirely private nonprofit, ...

What Gives? Perspectives on Philanthropy and Higher Education

Late last month, NEBHE senior fellow and Massachusetts Board of Higher Education Chair Charles Desmond and I launched a series of interviews with key leaders in New England philanthropy. Our goal was to paint a picture of what philanthropies see as the key issues and challenges facing higher education and how potential funders can have the most meaningful impacts on education in New England. Our ...

DC Shuttle: College Affordability Lists, DREAM Act … and Other Higher Ed News from Washington

The Education Department released College Affordability and Transparency Lists on Thursday. The 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act requires the Education Department to produce six lists, with three examining tuition and fees and three examining each institution's average price of attendance minus grants and scholarships. The lists are also divided by type of institution (public/private, two-yea...

Physical Plant: A Review of Architecture and Academe: College Buildings in New England Before 1860

Architecture and Academe: College Buildings in New England Before 1860; Bryant F. Tolles Jr.; University Press of New England, 2011 It’s not the topic that New England’s higher education institutions generally boast about, but for many it is their most obvious attribute—the brick, stone, mullioned, porticoed and columned facades that helped set the standard for what much of coll...