Efforts to keep higher education affordable for all students and to promote not only access, but success--all in a climate of dwindling state appropriations and lean budgets--made the past year one of reckoning for colleges. Total outstanding student-loan debt hit the $1-trillion mark as federal officials scrambled to ease the burden on borrowers,…

The author reports on how Arizona State University (ASU) pursues transformation on a grand scale while embracing inclusiveness. Michael Crow, Arizona State University's president and idea man, is pushing the institution to innovate and still fulfill its mission to be inclusive. By itself, Arizona State University's transformation over the past…

With tax revenues beginning to rebound in most states and endowments on the rebound at many private and public institutions, colleges and universities are growing more hopeful about their financial outlook and instituting new strategies to take advantage of the opportunities. Yet as the economic recovery has slowed in the past few months,…

A college acceptance letter has long been seen as the ticket to the middle class for students from low-income families. Simply getting into college these days is not enough. Where financially needy students enroll makes a difference--sometimes a big difference--in whether they will ever earn a bachelor's degree. This article discusses graduation…

This article describes Fisk University's drive to improve its graduation and retention rates. Fisk's six-year graduation rate is more than 10 percentage points above the national average for four-year institutions. Seventy percent of Fisk alumni go on to graduate or to professional schools. No other institution produces as many black doctorates in…

The United States is falling behind other developed nations in terms of the share of its population with a college degree, and the gap will widen substantially unless the nation makes postsecondary education much more accessible, according to a report released last week by Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based research organization. If current…

This author reports that, among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. While four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year, the students who…