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The U.S. and West Virginia constitutions acknowledge the right to free speech, which must be protected at public colleges, but Senate Bill 657, which became law in 2021, requires that public colleges protect "any lawful verbal and nonverbal speech." Furthermore, many private colleges also promise free speech to their students. However a campus-climate survey published by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 2021 found that 5-in-6 college students have self-censored because of how they perceived other students, a professor, or the college administration would respond. Two-thirds of college students agreed that it was acceptable to shout down a campus speaker or to try to prevent them from speaking. FIRE reviewed the restrictions on free speech at 17 public or private colleges and universities in West Virginia and found 92 policies that restrict freedom of speech. This report reviews FIRE's ratings, gives examples of restrictive policies, and recommends ways to improve students' free speech rights. [The report was written in partnership with the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy.]

Higher education is in crisis. Revenues from all sources are expected to decrease at both public and private universities. The current crisis will raise existential questions for small and mid-tier institutions. Only universities with massive endowments and highly competitive admissions will escape the effects of the coming enrollment cliff. Special coronavirus relief funding from state and federal governments will improve cash flow in the short term, but they are not permanent solutions. Colleges must act now to cut unnecessary expenses while preserving core academic functions. This policy brief outlines urgent short-term reforms as well as long-term restructuring universities can undertake to survive the revenue shortfalls created by COVID-19 and state economic shutdowns.

This report examines the speech and assembly protections for students and faculty members at North Carolina's universities, both public and private. It is a follow-up to the 2010 report, "Do North Carolina Students Have Freedom of Speech? A Review of Campus Speech Codes." In the eight years since the publication of that report, North Carolina colleges and universities have made remarkable progress in their protection of First Amendment rights on campus. This report is a collaborative project of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). It uses FIRE's speech code rating system to evaluate policies and regulations affecting students' and professors' free speech rights at North Carolina universities. [For "Do North Carolina Students Have Freedom of Speech? A Review of Campus Speech Codes," see ED535446.]

For nearly 50 years, the cost of higher education has risen faster than the pace of inflation, with federal student aid contributing to increasing tuition. In 1987, Secretary of Education William J. Bennett penned a "New York Times" article, "Our Greedy Colleges," in which he wrote, "If anything, increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase." This paper synthesizes empirical findings from 25 articles published in peer-reviewed journals or by respected economic research institutions since 1987. The studies focus on empirical evidence for Bennett's theory. Of the 25 studies, a majority found some effect of federal subsidies on the price of higher education in at least one segment of the higher education market. This paper makes policy recommendations to help slow the growth of university tuition and fees, including: (1) Eliminate Graduate and Parent PLUS loans (the types most likely to drive tuition increases); (2) Focus on Pell Grants instead of loans; (3) Change the student aid eligibility formula; (4) End subsidies for federal student loans; and (5) Cap the growth of tuition and fees at public colleges and universities.

The general education program at UNC-Chapel Hill has abandoned the concept of a core curriculum. Instead, students choose their "required" classes from lists of thousands of courses that may be as narrow and idiosyncratic as Love, Sex and Marriage in Soviet Culture (RUSS 277) or The Gardens, Shrines and Temples of Japan (ASIA 586). General education consists of the courses that a college or university requires a student to take in order to be a "well-rounded person." Usually, students can choose from a variety of courses that fall into categories of knowledge determined by the school to be of particular importance. When properly designed, general education (GenEd) can be the most valuable part of a student's college education. It emphasizes skills, knowledge, and reasoning that are applicable to all careers. These include the ability to organize thoughts and write well, the ability to use logical, scientific, probabilistic, or other forms of reasoning, an awareness of mankind's past activities and ideas as influences on the present and future, the power of analysis, and much more. In today's world, in which graduates will likely change jobs numerous times or possibly never work in their major field of study, such skills are paramount for their success. Society also benefits from a well-designed general education because it teaches students about citizenship, ethics, and culture. A good general education program should elevate a student's sense of what it means to be moral, good, or just. Yet, despite its importance, general education is often treated like a poor second cousin compared to the concentrated study of a specific major discipline. Nowhere is that more true than at UNC-Chapel Hill. The current general education curriculum at UNC-Chapel Hill is far from optimal. Indeed, it is incoherent. UNC-Chapel Hill's general education program follows an all-too-typical "smorgasbord" approach. Students choose from thousands of courses, many of them as narrow as The Folk Revival: The Singing Left in Mid-20th Century America (AMST 266), or as trendy as First Year Seminar: Kung-fu: The Concept of Heroism in Chinese Culture (ASIA 55). Why is the GenEd curriculum so unstructured and unwieldy? A major reason is that it reflects the control of curriculum by faculty, many of whom regard it as a means to advance their own department's courses and even their own narrow fields of research. The inclusion or exclusion of a course in the GenEd program can influence course enrollment and thus the course's possible continuation or elimination. With campus politics at play, faculties frequently create general education programs that are so all-inclusive that they lack any reasonable size or structure. That is the case at UNC-Chapel Hill. This report outlines and examines the UNC-Chapel Hill general education requirements. The actual list of courses (more than 4700 courses) can be found online in a spreadsheet developed by the Pope Center (popecenter.org/UNCGenEd).

To understand and evaluate a university's effectiveness requires a lot of information. But rarely is that information brought together in one place. This report compiles publicly available data about the University of North Carolina system. It illustrates key characteristics of the 16 campuses and how they have changed over the past decade. This information will be useful for students and parents, the public, policy-makers, university administrators, and faculty. This report shows, through graphs and tables, the University of North Carolina system's enrollment growth, tuition history, admissions data, and graduation rates. It provides information on student aid, student debt, the ratio of faculty to students, and the ratio of administrators to faculty. It includes facts about faculty salaries, state appropriations, and state subsidy of instruction costs. The Pope Center publishes this paper as part of their continuing effort to spur transparency in higher education.

The Federal Pell Grant Program, which provides need-based grants to millions of college students, is the federal government's largest education expenditure. It consumes over half the Department of Education's annual budget and in 2010-2011 cost taxpayers about $36 billion per year. Although the program started out as a way to provide college access to low-income students, it has grown so vast in recent years that nearly 60 percent of all undergraduates now receive Pell grants. In spite of the high cost, few people have scrutinized the effectiveness of Pell grants. This report, "Pell Grants: Where Does All the Money Go?" by Jenna Ashley Robinson and Duke Cheston, brings together what is known about Pell grants to determine how well the program serves the students who receive them and the taxpayers who fund them. Calculating Pell Grant Eligibility is appended. (Contains 39 resources.)

"College Bound? Make the Right Choices" is the Pope Center's latest tool for improving colleges and universities "from the bottom up" through better choices. Its purpose is to help high school students and their parents become smarter purchasers of higher education. This booklet by Jenna Ashley Robinson helps young people think through what they want from college--and choose their colleges accordingly. "College Bound?" answers students' most pressing questions about college: (1) Should you go to college?; (2) Choosing a college: One size doesn't fit all; (3) Paying for college (without breaking the bank); (4) Yes, you can get a scholarship!; (5) Avoiding the student-loan racket; and (6) College: More than just a four-year party.

America's colleges and universities are supposed to be strongholds of classically liberal ideals, including the protection of individual rights and openness to debate and inquiry. Too often, this is not the case. Across the country, universities deny students and faculty their fundamental rights to freedom of speech and expression. The report examines the speech, assembly and religious protections for students and faculty at North Carolina's universities--both public and private. Using the speech code rating system from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the Pope Center found that "none" of North Carolina's universities received a "green light." A green light would indicate that there are no serious threats to students' free speech rights in the policies on a particular campus. A "red light" indicates the school has at least one policy that clearly restricts freedom of speech. A "yellow light" is given when a school has some policies that could ban or excessively regulate constitutionally protected speech. "Do North Carolina Students Have Freedom of Speech?" reflects the Pope Center's ongoing interest in encouraging diversity of thought in North Carolina's colleges and universities.