Blog

  • Top Ten States with Growing Tuition Costs

    Nell Gluckman of The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an interesting piece about the challenges of public cutbacks in the state of Louisiana. The premise of the article is that there are trickle-down implications of state cutbacks in tuition, faculty morale, and curriculum. Louisiana has passed along substantial tuition increases to its…

  • Student Financial Aid up 6.2%

    Postsecondary institutions gave over $17 billion in financial aid in 2015. This represented a 3% increase from 2014. However, the number of student receiving the financial aid declined 3% so the average financial aid per student when looked at over the entire postsecondary landscape actually increased 6%. We used data…

  • Students Moving Back on Campus

    The number of students living on-campus for the approximately 4,500 non-state institutions has increased from just over 43% in 2011 to nearly 53% just four years later in 2015. The pie graph below shows the movement from 2011 to 2015 with the yellow slice indicating the percentage of students living…

  • Infection Procedures Top Inpatient Volume Growth

    While Medicare inpatient procedure volume has remained flat since 2013, infections are a significant area of high volume change. The treemap below from the Inpatient Procedure Analysis Interactive shows the inpatient volume growth by procedure with color coding by volume change from 2013-2015 using the Medicare Provider and Analysis Review…

  • Room and Board Cost Increases Slowing

    After three straight years of 3-5% increases, room and board annual growth has finally slowed to a more pedestrian 2-3%. In recent years, universities have invested heavily in on-campus facilities and presumably passed these costs to the students at a rate greater than inflation. One administrator once told me that on-campus facilities…

  • When is Free Tuition Really Free?

    The sticker pricing game has been in place a long time. No one ever pays full sticker price for items such as jewelry or cars. That is probably why University of Michigan came under scrutiny for its free tuition guarantee for families with income under $65,000. Cynics pointed this out…

  • Gainful Employment – Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

    The U.S. Department of Education announced yesterday the beginning of the process to rollback and rework Obama-era rules under the gainful employment regulations. These rules, which took years to enact, were designed to hold career-preparation programs accountable for the outcomes of their graduates. The announcement establishes rule making committees to…

  • The Gender Debt Disparity

    The Huffington Post recently posted a very interesting article on gender debt disparity. The article notes that women hold nearly two-thirds of all student debt – a whopping $833 billion dollars. The article postulates that women also take longer to pay off the debt because they earn less than men….