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…

College-provided scholarships, or tuition discounts, are in the news. The National Association of College and University Business Officers recently estimated that the average discount for full-time, first-year undergraduates at private nonprofit colleges and universities hit 50 percent in the fall of 2017. In other words, these institutions…

Philip H. Knight, co-founder of Nike, Inc., pledged $400 million to Stanford University last year (Gioia, 2016; Stanford University, 2016a). The gift will partially endow a $750 million fund intended to support 100 graduate students per year, with awards typically lasting for three years. The resulting Knight-Hennessy Scholars program will be the…

During the last twenty years or so, the number of endowed centers at many universities has increased enormously--to as many as fifty or more at a single institution. There are centers for every region (or sub-region) of the world and every ethnic/religious group (or sub-group) known to history. There are centers for the study of illness and…

In this article, the authors argue that there "is" a real fiscal problem in higher education, but it is not the huge endowment losses--20 to 30 percent--that are attracting so much publicity. Those losses play only a small role in higher education's current financial dilemma, and then only at a comparatively few colleges and universities--but they…

Economic hardship and uncertainty dominates the discussion of American higher education these days. Since about 80 percent of American students attend public institutions, much of the conversation has centered on their plummeting state aid and soaring student fees. With a hike in student fees by a third in one year, California's situation has been…