This case provides a summary of a situation in which a newly appointed superintendent and his new chief financial officer of a midsized urban school district uncover a massive set of fiscal problems which had been previously hidden from the Board and most other stakeholders. How do the district's top leaders make decisions about how to address the…

The objective of the paper is to identify whether the global financial crisis in 2008 re-shaped risk management in the English universities in order to avoid future financial turbulence and manage risk in uncertain and insecure environments. The paper examined changes in the risk management mechanism of the English university system between 2008…

Background/Context: During downturns in state higher education support, state student aid becomes especially important for affordability because colleges react by increasing tuition, and other aid sources may not fully respond. From a policy perspective, states might be expected to protect aid support in response to fiscal stringency, yet this key…

In just the last 18 months, Massachusetts has seen the closure of small private liberal arts colleges Mount Ida and Newbury Colleges. The pressures on these types of institutions include technological disruption, changing student demands, and ever-escalating costs. To address this, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education (BHE) and Department…

Farzana Shain reviews two books: (1) Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines, edited by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang and George Lipsitz, 2019; and Education and Race: From Empire to Brexit, by Sally Tomlinson, 2019, Bristol, Policy. Shain begins this review by saying that we…

Viewing science education as a site of biopolitical engagement--intervention into forces that seek to define, control, and exploit life (biopower)--requires that science educators ask after how individuals and populations are governed by technologies of power. In this paper, I argue that "microanalyses," the analysis of everyday…

Purpose: Throughout the world, the dominant discourse treats "financial literacy" as both necessary and sufficient to improve the well-being of individuals and society. Findings: This essay argues that financial literacy is neither, and that promoting financial literacy is a perverse way to address the inadequate retirement funding,…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine factors related to enrollment in higher education during the 2008-2009 economic downturn. The study focused on small private colleges and universities without historic prestige, schools that are non-selective and dependent on enrollment tuition. When viewing student enrollment through a…

History teachers have frequently made recourse to character cards as a device to help young people, each assigned specific roles, to understand how different kinds of people responded in different ways to particular situations in the past. Edward FitzGerald builds on this tradition, demonstrating the value of using rich historical accounts to help…

As a result of the Great Recession, higher education in the United States suffered from the most significant financial crisis since the Great Depression (Breneman 2008; Zumeta 2010). This crisis affected all institutions of higher education since it challenged three major revenue sources: net tuition income, endowment income, and gift income…

School districts across the land are contending with rising education costs and constrained revenues. Ballooning retirement obligations and ever-growing personnel expenditures in particular are leaving many district budgets in the red. Yet state policies for assisting school districts in financial trouble are uneven and complex. Interventions are…

This paper conceptualizes the U.S. federal government's response to the "Great Recession" as a "natural experiment" whose broad emphasis on counter-cyclical spending contrasts with the tendency towards stratification within the quasi-market for academic research support. Regression results indicate that resources tended to flow…

The study we report here explored how private liberal arts colleges adapted to the Great Recession of 2007. We examined institutional changes at three private liberal arts colleges and their effects on the institutions' operations. For this multiple-case study we analyzed data from three colleges in the southeastern region of the United States;…

Observers have expressed concern about growing inequality in resources across universities. But are universities really becoming more unequal? We argue that the typical approach of examining endowment growth alone is not sensible. In line with the literature on household inequality, we focus instead on a comprehensive income measure. We find that…

This research aims to identify the effects of the economic crisis on higher education (HE) dropout rates at Lisbon School of Economics and Management (ISEG)--Universidade de Lisboa, after having controlled for individual characteristics, family background, High School and HE trajectories. Our main hypothesis is that the economic crisis induces…