Many students take years to pay off their loans after earning degrees, but Notre Dame offers families a way to preemptively finance their children’s higher education by pre-paying future tuition bills through the Private College 529 Plan.
How do you build the Harvard University of the for-profit college sector? That’s perhaps a silly question at face value but the question reveals the challenge of manufacturing prestige and legitimacy in a higher education system that is fundamentally ordered by the former and fueled by the latter, frequently in the form of accreditation.
A common lament about higher education is that it has become more of a private good than a public one, with students as consumers and colleges as businesses focused on hawking their product. But that model won’t cut it anymore, at least not for the nation’s largest regional accreditor, which in January redefined what an institution’s philosophical bottom line should be.
The College of the Ozarks is known for its system of providing students with jobs rather than charging them tuition. Now the college is taking things a step further, and refusing to certify private student loans, which some students were still taking out, The Springfield News-Leader reported.
Salary increases for tenured and tenure-track faculty in 2012 matched the rate of inflation in 2012, but those working at private institutions fared better than the inflation rate compared to their colleagues at public schools whose pay increases failed to keep pace.
A growing number of liberal-arts colleges are supplementing their traditional glossy brochures touting ivy-covered libraries and great-books seminars with more pecuniary pitches: Buy seven semesters, get one free. Apply today, get $2,500 cash back. Free classes after four years.
In Robert Brennan’s office, on a shelf across from his desk, sits a wedge-shape chunk of green marble. Etched into the marble are two numbers: Mount St. Mary’s University’s endowment figure, $44 million on June 30, 2008, before the stock market nose dived, and $36 million a year later.