Search

Describes the role of Exxon Mobil in the new Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford University. Questions about the university's independence from the corporation and real impact on the environment are explored. (SLD)

A special package of articles explores the push toward electronic textbooks and libraries, the businesses behind the drive, and the fears of many academics about the trend. (EV)

Describes the growth of Argosy Education Group Inc., the nation's largest for-profit provider of doctoral programs, especially doctorates in clinical psychology, through its 10-campus chain of American Schools of Professional Psychology, as well as doctorates in education and business through the University of Sarasota (Florida). Critics focus on the institutions' high faculty-to-student ratios. (DB)

The success of Great Britain's Open University has become a model for distance education in the United States. The Open University is nonselective in admissions and designs its courses for part-time students and working adults. It plans to begin enrolling American students in a new sister institution, the United States Open University. (MSE)

Architect Adam Gross, in working with campus planning for 15 years, has developed strong notions about what makes a campus appealing and how institutions should pursue fundraising and financing. He takes a holistic approach, which looks at buildings in relation to one another and to the surrounding spaces, and prefers green spaces to asphalt. (MSE)

Backers of Western Governors University hope it will revolutionize the ways colleges compete for students, professors teach, and education is measured, and believe the virtual university can help contain the costs of educating growing numbers of students in the 16 participating states. However, the administration faces challenges in areas of accreditation, faculty, eligibility for student aid, and curriculum. (MSE)

For each of the 50 states, the outlook for higher education in the state legislature in 1992 is outlined. Information includes the date of the legislative session, budget request for higher education, prospects for the request, nonbudget issues likely to be considered, and issues specific to private colleges. (MSE)

The Justice Department restated and clarified its position in a landmark higher education desegregation case to be heard in the Supreme Court, providing a substantial boost to Black-college supporters. The new brief explicitly affirms federal government support for historically Black colleges, calling them a vital component of U.S. higher education. (MSE)

Describes how for-profit education companies are taking their turf battle overseas by buying colleges and creating networks with local partners. (EV)

Describes the efforts of a young investor who travels the country in search of university-based companies. (EV)

Discusses how Kaplan, the test-preparation company, has purchased 41 for-profit higher education institutions in less than two years, thereby becoming an industry player. (EV)

Describes how, with interest rates at their lowest in decades, many colleges are rushing to refinance their debt. (EV)

Describes how, after a 6-year hiatus, John R. Silber is in charge of Boston University again, and just as outspoken about what he expects from every constituency on the campus. (EV)

Uses the University of Michigan and three other colleges (University of Maryland--Baltimore County, Brigham Young University, and Washington University) to illustrate the varied approaches to capitalizing financially on campus research by deciding what constitutes success. Includes a "tech-transfer scorecard" listing the highest-ranking institutions in various measures of technology transfer. (EV)

Explains how for Michael M. Crow, executive vice provost at Columbia University, knowledge is a form of venture capital. This means pushing Columbia beyond the usual role of creating knowledge and disseminating it in traditional manners, and instead taking the knowledge, incubating it, and projecting it using tools like the Internet. (SM)

Describes how Apple's latest laptop computer, the IBook, may have many admirers, but that few believe the company will ever regain prominence in higher education. Issues include increased competition from other computer vendors and software availability (EV)

Reports that critics are asking questions about conflicts of interest in GATE (Global Alliance for Transnational Education), an international education watchdog organization. Claims of independent international accreditation may be compromised by the intertwining of the sole owner's corporate interests with GATE's organizational structure. Defenders support GATE's integrity and urge a wait-and-see attitude. (DB)

Known primarily for its tutoring and testing of grade-school and high-school students, for-profit Sylvan Learning Systems has developed interests in distance education, teacher education, English-language training, and college-level study outside the United States. The company is consciously stepping up its presence in areas associated with higher education, claiming it aims at cooperation, not competition. (MSE)

The new president of American InterContinental University bought the for-profit institution and plans to distinguish it from others by offering students fast-paced programs providing "good return" on tuition investment. The growth strategy is built on the concept of "power campuses": new branches specializing in business degrees and an intensive, technology-oriented curriculum taught in corporate- like settings. (MSE)

Stanford University (California) and the Yamaha Corporation have agreed to pool over 400 patents and patent applications, most involving sound synthesis, and to license them as a package along with rights to the trademark, and share the royalties. The deal builds on a 23-year relationship between Stanford and Yamaha, one which is both fruitful and controversial for the university. (MSE)

Johns Hopkins University (Maryland) is challenging the rights of a biotechnology company to infringe on the university's patents on an invention; the company is challenging the patents' validity. The case is seen as representative of issues concerning technology transfer in which universities, government funding, and private industry interact. The 16-year battle over patent rights in this case is chronicled. (MSE)

In his first book, "Acts of Faith," Eboo Patel describes his early encounters with interfaith events in the late 1990s. He was not impressed. "They were excruciatingly boring," he writes. Why so much talk and so little action, his restless, twenty-something self had wondered. "And where were the young people?" Fast forward a dozen years. Now 37, Mr. Patel is one of the most visible interfaith leaders in the nation. As the founder and president of a national organization that promotes interreligious understanding and action on college campuses, Mr. Patel has converted those old frustrations into a burgeoning new cause, an educational movement rooted in intellectual rigor and powered by academic aspirations. The organization, Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), has trained thousands of college students in techniques for learning about their religious differences and then finding common bonds among their faiths as they undertake projects like cleaning up a polluted river in Ohio, after-school tutoring in Minnesota, and combatting mountaintop removal by mining companies in West Virginia. The group also works with college deans to develop new courses, helps college presidents measure how receptive their campuses are to students of differing traditions, and teaches students how to handle questions about their own faiths while struggling to understand the practices of others. Since 2010, the organization has also been a key player in President Obama's Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge, a program that involves more than 350 colleges. As IFYC has expanded its reach, so has Mr. Patel. His "Acts of Faith" (Beacon Press, 2007) has taken off as a popular campus read, and his second book, "Sacred Ground" (Beacon, 2012), looks like it may as well. He and the 35-person IFYC staff are now leading the charge to bring interfaith education from "niche to norm" throughout American higher education, just as diversity training and multiculturalism are now mainstays of the college experience.

Budget cuts, jurisdictional arguments among colleges, disputes over telecommunications hardware, rapid changes in technology, and sometimes complex state regulatory climates are making state distance learning initiatives difficult. Legislators are concerned that resorting to private ownership of an education telecommunications network would drive up costs. (MSE)

Last year, leading lights in for-profit and nonprofit higher education convened in Washington for a conference on private-sector innovation in the industry. The national conversation about dysfunction and disruption in higher education was just heating up, and panelists from start-ups, banking, government, and education waxed enthusiastic about the ways that a traditional college education could be torn down and rebuilt--and about how lots of money could be made along the way. The question few people want to grapple with is, For whom is college being reinvented? The punditry around reinvention has trumpeted the arrival of MOOCs (massive open online courses), badges, "UnCollege," and so on as the beginning of a historic transformation. Higher education does have real problems, and MOOC's, badges--certificates of accomplishment--and other innovations have real potential to tackle some of them. They could enrich teaching, add rigor, encourage interdisciplinarity, reinforce education's real-world applicability, and make learning more efficient--advances all sorely needed. But the reinvention conversation has not produced the panacea that people seem to yearn for. The furor over the cost and effectiveness of a college education has roots in deep socioeconomic challenges that won't be solved with an online app. Over decades, state support per student at public institutions has dwindled even as enrollments have ballooned, leading to higher prices for parents and students. State funds per student dropped by 20 percent from 1987 to 2011. Meanwhile, the gap between the country's rich and poor widened during the recession, choking off employment opportunities for many recent graduates. Education leading up to college is a mess: Public elementary and secondary systems have failed a major segment of society, and the recent focus on testing has had questionable results.

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 decade into the nation's biggest public university would not be all that significant. Yet by the measures on which it prides itself--its 9-percentage-point increase in freshman-to-sophomore retention rates, its 48-percent increase in bachelor's graduates in STEM fields, its tripling of spending on research, its top-5 rank as a producer of Fulbright students, its above-average increase in the proportion of Pell Grant recipients enrolled, and even its increasing efficiency in spending per degree awarded--it is clear that the size of this university has been key. ASU's size helped make those achievements possible, and it makes them all the more significant.

"Doing well by doing good" is the business mantra of the for-profit-college industry. But one does not have to look far to find people who question the slogan's sincerity or the very legitimacy of that model. And that was even before reports of some companies' abusive student-recruiting practices and questionable educational standards fed a public sense that the billions in federal dollars flowing into these colleges may be benefiting their owners more than their students--much less taxpayers. For-profit colleges are not going to disappear. Still, even more so than higher education as a whole, the colleges do have a credibility problem. No law or policy can change a college hellbent on cutting corners to make a buck. But what if there were for-profit colleges organized as "benefit corporations" or "low-profit" limited-liability corporations? The author reports on a new business model that could make it easier for proprietary colleges to de-emphasize profits for the sake of their academic missions.

Higher education pays off handsomely for society. Yet on a nationwide basis, states' support for higher education per full-time-equivalent student has fallen to just $6,290, the lowest in 15 years. A dedicated source of funds for higher education is problematic. But what if state and federal lawmakers applied the impeccable logic of the gas tax to develop a consensus for a higher-education support strategy? For good measure, what if that gas-tax-style consensus also reflected the highest national priorities, like assuring that needy students aren't shut out of college because of their own or the institutions' financial strains, and holding colleges accountable for better educating students while keeping costs in check? It's a tall order, with as many paths to a solution as there are lawmakers, lobbyists, and advocates. The author discusses three principles that should be part of the considerations.

Universities and their inventors earned more than $1.8-billion from commercializing their academic research in the 2011 fiscal year, collecting royalties from new breeds of wheat, from a new drug for the treatment of HIV, and from longstanding arrangements over enduring products like Gatorade. Northwestern University earned the most of any institution reporting, with more than $191-million in licensing income. The 157 universities that responded to the annual survey of the Association of University Technology Managers, released on Monday, completed 5,398 licenses and filed for 12,090 new patents. They also created 617 start-up companies. The overall revenue figures are about the same as in the 2010 fiscal year, when 155 universities responded. The number of licenses and options completed in 2011 was notably higher than the 4,735 reported in 2010, but in part that was because some institutions began to include more of them in their totals. The number of new patent applications filed was also higher. The totals include data from four institutions that answered anonymously and are not included in the sortable table that accompanies this article. (Year-to-year comparisons for the survey are imperfect because, in some years, institutions that are the most active in patenting and licensing don't participate. Also some participating institutions provide only partial responses.) The 617 start-up companies formed in 2011 was a slight increase from the 613 reported in the previous year. Start-up companies appeared to be a growing focus for some of the institutions in the survey. In 2010, 12 institutions reported forming 10 or more companies; in 2011, 14 institutions did so. That attention reflects broader economic forces. With big corporations doing less and less hiring, there is "more of an awareness from students and faculty that entrepreneurship is a growing career path, a growing alternative." New Ph.D. recipients now realize that one way to continue their research is "though the venture path."

The University of North Texas at Dallas (UNT-Dallas) was conceived 10 years ago as a public institution along tried-and-true lines--a comprehensive metropolitan university meant to serve a diverse student population and to improve the economic outlook of a part of the city that prosperity has left behind. But that was before management consultants from the likes of Bain & Company began popping up at colleges. It was before disciples of Harvard Business School's Clayton M. Christensen--champion of "disruptive innovation"--began winning converts to their ideas for reinventing higher education. Now UNT-Dallas administrators are considering a new model, based on the work of Bain, that would use those disruptive, efficiency-minded ideas as tools to reshape this fledgling university, which has a full-time-equivalent enrollment of only about 1,000 and a 264-acre campus with exactly two buildings. The prospect excites local civic leaders but has left faculty members scared--and feeling like pawns in the emerging national debate on how to make colleges more affordable and accessible. Bain's model calls for a narrow set of career-focused majors in fields like business, information technology, and criminal justice, as well as for a year-round trimester calendar. It would de-emphasize research by faculty members so they could teach as many as 12 courses per year, and it would rely on heavy use of so-called hybrid courses, which would replace some face-to-face teaching with online instruction. It would focus not only on the adult students the institution serves now but also on motivated 18-to-22-year-olds, and it would pay students to take on some advising and administrative tasks normally handled by staff members. It would also reimburse students for their final two trimesters if they are on track to graduate within four years. Bain projects that the model would allow UNT-Dallas to offer an education for less than $6,000 a year well into the future--a bit less than the $6,600 students pay now. Bain says that by adopting the new model and increasing enrollment, the university could operate by 2022 at a cost of $30,000 per graduate. Without a change in course, Bain says, that cost would be about $100,000 per graduate. Bain officials, university administrators, an advisory commission that includes a who's who of Dallas civic leadership, and Mr. Christensen himself hope their model will make UNT-Dallas central to the national conversation on college affordability. Bain says the model could break higher education's cycle of rising costs in the same way that "minimills," those iconic examples from Mr. Christensen's books on disruption and innovation, revolutionized the steel industry in the 1970s.

For-profit colleges are some of the biggest critics of the federal graduation rate, arguing that it gives an inaccurate image of their institutions. They point out that the official calculation doesn't take into account the vast majority of the students who attend their institutions, most of whom are neither "first-time" nor "full-time." So major for-profit institutions, including the University of Phoenix and American Public, DeVry, and Kaplan Universities, now compute and publicize their own alternative graduation or "completion rates," saying that these better reflect the nature of their student bodies and their institutional missions. But with each college company using different criteria, their efforts end up clouding the picture further, rather than clarifying anything. The use of these self-developed rates can also be deceptive, say some critics, especially when colleges publish them alongside other graduation statistics that are not comparable. The federal government contributes to the confusion. For-profits and other colleges with programs covered by the new "gainful employment" regulation are required to compute and publish an "on time completion rate," which many consider misleading and mostly meaningless. For this rate, colleges determine how many students have completed each degree each year and then report the proportion of those graduates who completed within the normal period of time, which is four years for a bachelor's and two for an associate or a master's degree. So if five students graduated with bachelor's degrees between June 2010 and July 2011, and they all managed to do it in just four years, the college's "on time completion rate" would be 100 percent, even if 95 others who started the program four years earlier all dropped out.

Endowment growth in 2011 came in no small part because universities have increasingly invested in private equity--the same private equity that has become a hot-button issue on the 2012 campaign trail, with some candidates and commentators calling into question its social value. Private equity is "of increasing significance" for endowments. It made up roughly 12 percent of endowment assets in the 2011 fiscal year, up from 8 percent in 2008. Private equity performed about as well as endowment returns over all, at 19 percent. College endowments are ideal candidates for private-equity investors because they are considered very long-term investors, and are more able to take on the risk of bearing illiquidity and negative returns, such as those from 2009. For 348 colleges participating in a Commonfund survey since 2007, private equity jumped from representing 19 percent of alternative-strategy investments in 2007 to 26 percent in 2011. That seven-point increase was the largest gain of any alternative-strategy investment. Although some endowment managers may hesitate to take on risk in light of the economy, alternative investments are thriving. Colleges typically invest 53 percent of their endowment funds in "alternative strategies," such as private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital. Of those alternative investments, 24 percent are in private equity. Though wealthy colleges are the biggest investors in private equity, it has also been gaining acceptance among medium- and small-size endowments in recent years. The move toward investing in private equity comes as controversy over the practice is brewing among some presidential candidates and members of the public--thanks largely to the role of Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, as a founder of the private-equity firm Bain Capital. Mr. Romney's opponents have accused him of gutting companies, cutting jobs, and practicing "vulture capitalism," and of benefiting from unfairly low tax rates on capital gains. Officials in the endowments sector see the controversy over private equity as "an election-year thing." Private equity is often a positive thing. These funds provide an opportunity for investors to put their money in small firms and "turnaround opportunities."

Not all talk is cheap. Especially not if it comes from the mouths of professors, former corporate executives, or Washington insiders who understand the workings of the $20-billion for-profit higher-education industry and how impending tougher regulations might affect it. Then the talk can be worth hundreds of dollars an hour, thanks to the growing role of "expert networks" now focused on the for-profit college sector. The networks are banks of on-call experts who get paid to speak privately about trends to the networks' clients. The clients are hedge funds and other investors, which pay handsomely--$40,000 a year, in some cases--for that ready access. Expert networks have become increasingly significant players on the Wall Street scene in the past decade, and recently, with allegations that some of them have been involved in insider trading, they have become controversial, too. In the for-profit higher-education industry, where the involvement of expert networks is only about two years old--and where there have been no known charges of insider trading--their growing use coincides with the coming of new federal regulations and rising attention on the sector from Congress and the Department of Education. Expert-network companies rely heavily on academics, particularly for clients that invest in information technology, biotechnology, and the pharmaceutical industries. Only a handful of the three-dozen expert-network companies known to service Wall Street specialize in for-profit higher education, with firms like Gerson, the Coleman Research Group, and the Marwood Group among the most prominent. The services run as a two-way street, with expert-network companies sometimes offering up their experts in conference calls, and sometimes with clients posting requests to the networks for an expert to answer their questions.

The legislative outlook for higher education is summarized state by state. Appropriations requests show the amount sought by state-wide coordinating boards or by individual college and university systems, not by governors. All appropriations requests are for operating expenses of the 1989-1990 fiscal and academic years. (MLW)

Discusses findings from a survey on voluntary giving to higher education, which found that a sharp drop in alumni giving in 2002 spurred a dip in colleges' overall donations for the first time in 14 years. (EV)

Discusses how private-equity funds are pouring millions of dollars into higher-education companies, and that college endowments are among the investors. (EV)

Describes how universities can end up holding an empty bag when companies with which they have formed technology-licensing deals go under. (EV)

Describes how universities try, and sometimes fail, to prevent the revenue based on lucrative licenses from being lost when professors or graduate students commercialize inventions themselves. (EV)

Discusses why college fund raisers are of more than one mind about whether this is a good time to promote gift annuities to donors. (EV)

Describes how universities are racing to find ways to use stem cells to fight various diseases--and to be the first to register patents that could be highly profitable. (EV)

Describes the financial and stock performance of companies in the higher education sector during 2000, and describes how the Chronicle of Higher Education's stock index of for-profit colleges has shown a return of 108 percent since the end of 1999. (EV)

Reports that many new technology companies are recruiting top academics to join their boards in an effort to gain credibility and capture the higher education market. Finds controversy between those who wish to influence the direction of those businesses in order to better serve college constituencies and those who see possibilities for conflicts of interest. (DB)

Describes articulation agreements, special recruiting efforts, special degrees, scholarships, and convenient locations as some of the ways for-profit institutions are actively pursuing community college students. For-profit institutions are increasingly "transfer friendly," as several examples illustrate. (SLD)

Discusses the controversy over the arrangement between UMI, a company that stores, reproduces, and sells master's theses and doctoral dissertations, and the commercially based online retailer, Contentville.com. Both American and Canadian scholars have been surprised to find their work being offered, without their permission, for sale online by Contentville. (DB)

Discusses the increasing role of the London-based media conglomerate Pearson PLC and its subsidiary FT Knowledge in bringing together various Pearson assets in distance and corporate education. The company is developing partnerships with several elite institutions to develop course material for world-wide marketing. Other initiatives include the Learning Network and a partnership with Blackboard. (DB)

Discussion of the downtown in Internet stocks related to education focuses on the challenges to colleges and universities as they select companies with which to work. Suggests that companies with strong business models will succeed since investors are looking for profitability, recognized brands, and mature leadership. (DB)

Sylvan Learning Systems, a company best known for its tutoring and testing operations, plans to create a network of private, for-profit universities in a dozen countries overseas, at the rate of about one institution a year. The director of the U.S. Information Agency will leave his post to head the venture. The plan has received mixed reactions. (MSE)