Armed with data and projections about budgets and future enrollments, Wilson College, in Pennsylvania, considers a slew of changes, including men. Among other changes, the board approved cutting tuition by $5,000, starting a high-profile loan-buyback program, creating new offerings in the health sciences and other career-oriented disciplines, and…

When it's not staging any Final Four match-ups, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the powerful governing body critics love to hate. The association's 11-year, $6-billion contract with CBS to televise the tournament has become a lightning rod for critics who say the association is all about making money off athletes. Not so,…

In this article, the author examines the issue of student debt. Despite tales of gargantuan student debt burdens for some college graduates, studies show that most students borrow sensibly, pay it back, and are better off for having gone to college. But for a vocal minority of borrowers, problems with student-loan debt are very real. About 8…

Several colleges and universities lost millions in the alleged $50-billion Ponzi scheme run by the Wall Street trader Bernard L. Madoff. The losses include institutions' endowment holdings in hedge funds that were invested with Madoff as well as hits taken by supporting foundations and donors. Several foundations that have been active in higher…

There's an old Swedish saying that "worry gives a small thing a big shadow." What started out as a subprime borrowing crisis is now casting a long shadow over the entire economy, including higher education, and everyone is, indeed, very worried--including college trustees, who fear the impact of smaller endowments, less annual giving, and…

A common type of variable-rate financing has suddenly increased the risk of bankruptcy for an unknown number of colleges, said two experts at credit-rating agencies. The threat affects mostly less-wealthy colleges that have used variable-rate bonds either to get a better price when borrowing or because they lacked bond ratings and had little other…

The federal government could take a cue from its regulation of charitable organizations in monitoring the freewheeling fiscal habits of big-time college athletics, a leading tax lawyer says. The author reports on the ideas offered by John D. Colombo, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, for monitoring big spending on college…

Eight years ago, Texas Tech University started a financial-literacy program to help its students master the basics of budgeting, saving, and not buying what they can not afford. Now, as colleges grapple with rising costs and an economic downturn, the university has found itself at the forefront of a growing effort to sharpen students' financial…

Help for colleges may be on the way in the $825-billion stimulus package being pressed by Congressional leaders. The bill that House Democrats introduced this month includes $7-billion for higher-education modernization, renovation, and repair that could kick-start projects like upgrading heating and cooling systems, fixing roofs, and doing…

The University of San Francisco School of Law is one of at least a dozen law schools in the United States where students represent small investors facing big headaches, often because their brokers were more interested in maximizing their own commissions than in giving sound advice. Supervised by law professors, teams of students file motions,…

The $787-billion economic-stimulus legislation that President Obama signed into law this week contains large sums of money for students and researchers. But the final version of the plan excludes billions of dollars that Congress had considered giving to various higher-education programs. The author's assessment is that the law, as enacted, will…

This article reports that after years of double-digit gains, college endowments are feeling the pinch from distressed financial markets. Some colleges are reporting negative rates of return for the fiscal year that just ended, and even those that performed better are wondering what the current financial crisis will mean. If the market's slide…

When the stock market plunged 778 points last week, losing almost 9% of its value in one day, higher education responded in an uncharacteristic way: It began to buckle. Colleges have often considered themselves recession-proof. However, last week's events compounded an already difficult year for many institutions, which have suffered from…

Nearly 400 colleges across the United States are about to be asked to disclose intimate financial details of their operations to the Internal Revenue Service. This article reports on a highly detailed financial questionnaire designed by the IRS for the first phase of its Colleges and Universities Compliance Project, which is part of a continuing…

Colleges are facing a growing deferred-maintenance problem, which at many public institutions adds up to repair bills in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Sometimes state legislatures have not supported those colleges at levels needed to maintain campus infrastructure. But at the same time, colleges continue to expand their campuses even as…