TIME recently crowned 10 college presidents (nearly all men) the "best" in the nation. The article spurred the usual pushback against "top 10" lists and raised questions about the criteria used, but a notable aspect of the list hasn't drawn much attention: One of those presidents is Eduardo Padron, a community-college president.

This was a smart, strategic pick on TIME's part. 2009 is the year of the community college, and while Miami-Dade is exceptional in many ways (including that it's officially Miami Dade College, since it awards BA's), inclusion of a president from that sector was wise.  The signals abound: The status of the public two-year college is rising, at least in the...

It's easy to get lost in the excitement over what appears to be a New Deal for higher education. This was an exciting year, what with the nation's president stepping forward with substantial goals to increase college attainment, heavily invest in community colleges, and reform the financial aid system. The message is loud and quite clear: More Americans should be thinking about college and moving towards enrollment.

But is the message the right one? The Chronicle Review recently tackled the issue by asking a variety of experts to weigh in on this question: are too many students going to college? The answers from folks ranging from Richard Vedder to Sandy Baum were varied and thoughtful, but some of the most difficult questions and concerns weren't raised. Perhaps it's because even saying some...

This is awkward. My 2-1/2-year-old son is paying attention to politics and presidents, and as his parents we couldn't be more proud. Except for one problem. He's begun to call every nonwhite male he sees, "Obama!"  As in (pointing) "Look Mama, there's Obama!"

Awkward.  Sometimes the man is African-American, or in some cases Indian, or even Latino. In not a single instance has he actually been Barack Obama. (Yes, Obama comes to Madison tomorrow -- but Conor will be on his way to Washington so the two will miss each other.) But that doesn't stop Conor from being ever-so-proud to identify his neighbor, fellow airplane passenger, or even my coworker as our current president. 

Now what? (Seriously, now what?)

There's been plenty of talk about a  positive "Obama effect" on America's children, the effect of a highly accomplished role model from...

An article in today's Chronicle Review covers a surge of scholarly interest in "prison studies."  The author does a nice job of capturing key areas of research on this topic, though coverage of work by Bruce Western, Chris Wildeman, Alice Goffman, Nikki Jones, and Devah Pager would have deepened the portrait. For example, a discussion of Goffman's recent ethnography of men in Philadelphia could have illustrated how prison life (and the threat of life in prison) is intimately connected with how...

Friday's Chronicle reports on a new study that points out how difficult it can be to identify which colleges and universities have no-loans policies designed to enhance affordability. Author Laura Perna and her colleagues find that the majority of elite institutions with these policies fail to advertise them in ways that are accessible to low-income students and families -- effectively maintaining their status as "bastions of privilege." The researchers then go on to make several helpful suggestions about how colleges could change their tactics to increase awareness and uptake of their progressive efforts.

But they could've gone one step further and discussed the incentives colleges have to maintain the status quo -- that is, to continue making their current and former students and...

Once upon a time, college students could pay their tuition with a mix of family support, financial aid, and perhaps a little work. Today, family support and aid are woefully inadequate for a broad swath of undergraduates, and full-time work is common.

Is working while in college truly necessary? Are the earnings used for academic expenses related to postsecondary education, or are they frittered away on life's pleasures? Since a handful of studies indicate a negative association between working long hours and rates of degree completion, these questions have taken on broader significance.

Unfortunately, few studies track students' income and expenditures in systematic ways. To better understand spending patterns, and attempt to tease out the reasons for those patterns, one would ideally have longitudinal data collected for a large sample of students, and complemented...

Renewing the War on Poverty clearly needs to be one of President Barack Obama's main objectives during the coming years. As Barbara Ehrenreich and so many others are documenting, the deteriorated safety net is failing poor people during this recession, leaving them in dire straits.

So when Nick Kristof decided to pen a column for The New York Times urging the Democrats to again lead a fight against poverty, his heart was in the right place. But his aim was way off. On Thursday, he wrote that the Dems must focus on public schools, since they "constitute a far more potent weapon against poverty than welfare, food stamps or housing...

Since 1958, the Federal Perkins Student Loan Program has been providing low-interest loans to needy students via campus-based revolving funds. More than 600,000 students (mostly undergraduates with family incomes under $30,000) receive a Perkins each year. The current Perkins differs from other federal loan programs, most notably the Stafford, because it is subsidized (the interest doesn't begin accruing until nine months after graduation) and has a lower interest rate (5 percent, compared to the 6.8-percent Stafford). 

The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) would change the Perkins in some notable ways, not all of which are clear improvements. The proposed changes are rather intricate, and as I've spent a fair bit of time puzzling over them lately I want to bring some of my nagging questions to this wider audience in an effort to gain some insights and...

Well, it had to happen sometime. Faced with a thoughtful, responsive piece of federal legislation to reform the financial-aid system, some ideologue had to come forward with a proposal to end federal student aid entirely. Yep, you heard me right -- get rid of financial aid. Throw out the baby with the bathwater.

The Chronicle is reporting that a director of the Cato Institute's Center for Education Freedom -- aka the freedom not to be helped by the goverment -- is purporting that "student aid explains the pain" of rising tuition. This "higher education expert" (honestly, some people are way too kind) argues that phasing out aid will make colleges more responsive to people who pay "with their own money."

Too bad this expert, Neal McCluskey, didn't bother to do his homework. If he'd...

As I've described in several posts this year, there's an ongoing debate over the role, value, and outcomes of the private for-profit sector of higher education, particularly the two-year schools.  Community colleges are often compared to their for-profit counterparts, many times unfavorably.  For example, their graduation rates are notably lower. And enrollment in the for-profits continues to rise rapidly, suggesting that consumers are voting with their feet, regardless of any hesitation on the part of academic researchers. The students, some say, are the best judge of institutional quality.

But a new study suggests that student behavior may reflect another factor: institutional resources.  Community colleges are historically underfunded, and as I've