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Executive Summary Fiscal 2010 presented the most difficult challenge for states' financial management since the Great Depression and fiscal 2011 is expected to present states with similar challenges. The severe national recession that most likely ended in the second half of calendar year 2009 has drastically reduced tax revenues from every revenue source. As state revenue collections historically lag behind any national economic recovery, state revenues will remain sluggish throughout fiscal years 2011 and 2012. State general fund spending has been so negatively affected by this recession that both fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2010 saw declines in state spending. This two year decline is unprecedented and is only the second time that state general fund spending has declined in the history of the Fiscal Survey. Forty states decreased their general fund expenditures in fiscal 2010 compared to fiscal 2009. According to governor's recommended budgets for fiscal 2011, 13 states recommended lower general fund expenditures compared to fiscal 2010. In total, 44 states estimate that they will have lower general fund expenditures in fiscal 2010 compared to fiscal 2008. In fiscal 2011, 39 states recommended lower spending than in fiscal 2008. Fiscal 2008 serves as a baseline as it the last fiscal year on record in which states were not significantly affected by the national recession.

"University of the People (UoPeople) is the world's first tuition free online university dedicated to the global advancement and democratization of higher education. This tuition free university embraces the worldwide presence of the Internet and dropping technology costs to bring tuition free and university-level studies within reach to millions of people across the world. With the support of respected academics, humanitarians and other visionaries, this student body will benefit from tuition free university and represent a new wave in global education"

"Veterans Use New GI Bill Largely at For-Profit and 2-Year Colleges Veterans Use Benefits of New GI Bill Largely at For-Profit and Community Colleges Thomas Slusser for The Chronicle For-profit colleges and community colleges were the most popular choices of students who used benefits from the Post-9/11 GI Bill this past academic year, the first in which the aid was available. The attendance patterns were largely similar to those of students who recently used aid under the previous version of the GI Bill.

"This highly entertaining and informative program explains to students why General Education is an important part.."

Breaking Bad Habits: Navigating the Financial Crisis by Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman The "Great Recession" of 2009 has brought an unprecedented level of financial chaos to public higher education in America. Programs are being reduced, furloughs and layoffs are widespread, class sizes are increasing, sections are being cut, and students can't get into classes needed for graduation. Enrollment losses upwards of several hundred thousand are being reported-and only time will tell whether the situation is even worse. Reports of budget cuts in public institutions in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent (Pennsylvania, Virginia, New York, Florida, and California) are becoming common. Halfway through the 2009-2010 fiscal year, 48 states were projecting deficits for 2011 and 2012 (NASBO, 2009). Although states are reluctant to raise taxes, they evidently have less of a problem letting tuitions go up. And up they are going-California, Oregon, Washington, New York, Wisconsin, and Florida announced increases ranging from 10 to 33 percent. The normally tuition-resistant Florida legislature has authorized annual increases in undergraduate tuitions of 15 percent per year until they reach national averages for public four-year institutions. Around the country, the increases are setting off student protests reminiscent of the 1960's, variously directed at campuses, system boards, legislatures, and governors-complete with reports of violence and arrests. The New Normal Higher education has been through tough times before. The pattern of the last two decades has been a zigzag of reductions in state funds for higher education during times of recession, followed by a return to revenue growth about two years after the state coffers refill. But resources have not returned to pre-recession levels. So the overall pattern has been a modest but continuous decline in state revenues. Caption: Percent Change in Appropriations for Higher Education, 1960-2006

"Are Colleges Worth the Price of Admission? How Colleges Can Set Things Right, and Some That Do 1 By Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus Tuition charges at both public and private colleges have more than doubled-in real dollars-compared with a generation ago. For most Americans, educating their offspring will be the largest financial outlay, after their home mortgage, they'll ever make. And if parents can't or won't pay, young people often find themselves burdened with staggering loans. Graduating with six figures' worth of debt is becoming increasingly common. So are colleges giving good value for those investments? What are families buying? What are individuals-and our society as a whole-gaining from higher education? Several years ago, we set out to answer those questions and began studying institutions and interviewing higher-education leaders, policy makers, and students across the country. Our conclusion: Colleges are taking on too many roles and doing none of them well. They are staffed by casts of thousands and dedicated to everything from esoteric research to vocational training-and have lost track of their basic mission to challenge the minds of young people. Higher education has become a colossus-a $420-billion industry-immune from scrutiny and in need of reform. Here are some proposals that might begin to set things right:"

"Mission Creep in Higher Education By Stan Katz I have been following an effort begun by three outstanding academic psychologists to think about the relationship between ethics and accomplishment in professional lives. The scholars involved are Howard Gardner (Harvard School of Education), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Claremont Graduate University), and William Damon (Stanford School of Education). They call their effort the "Good Work Project," and it has already resulted in several books, including Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon's Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Basic Books, 2001). A helpful descriptive paper can be found online here. Howard Gardner is currently editing a new volume of essays to be published in several months as Good Work: Theory and Practice. He has shared with me Bill Damon's piece "Mission Creep and Bad Work in Higher Places," which I think brilliantly exposes the tension that the Good Work Project is exploring between excellence and ethics, between professional accomplishments and professional goals. The title of this essay tells the reader where Damon is going. He argues that "mission creep" is capable of producing bad, rather than good, work, using two examples of professionalism gone astray. The first wayward profession is higher finance and the second is higher education. His account of "low times in high finance" is that the financial industry has abandoned its appropriate mission "to deploy capital so that enterprises can produce goods and services in a profitable manner." Over the past couple of decades the industry has "departed from its ethical moorings" by, among other things, producing new financial instruments (derivatives) that cannot be properly valued-and that their holders discovered had little value. The problem here Damon contends, is that the financial industry lost sight of its "traditional public mission" as its leaders "gambled away the investments that they were respons

The Rise of Crowd Science 2 David Klammer for The Chronicle Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher, made a major astronomy discovery with a public Web site of telescope images. Today, data sharing in astronomy isn't just among professors. Amateurs are invited into the data sets through friendly Web interfaces, and a schoolteacher in Holland recently made a major discovery, of an unusual gas cloud that might help explain the life cycle of quasars-bright centers of distant galaxies-after spending part of her summer vacation gazing at the objects on her computer screen. Crowd Science, as it might be called, is taking hold in several other disciplines, such as biology, and is rising rapidly in oceanography and a range of environmental sciences. "Crowdsourcing is a natural solution to many of the problems that scientists are dealing with that involve massive amounts of data," says Haym Hirsh, director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. Findings have just grown too voluminous and complex for traditional methods, which consisted of storing numbers in spreadsheets to be read by one person, says Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the University of Washington eScience Institute. So vast data-storage warehouses, accessible to many researchers, are going up in several scholarly fields to try to keep track of the wealth of information."

"Burning Out, and Fading Away June 10, 2010 WASHINGTON -- College faculty aren't any more burned out than the rest of the U.S. workforce on average, but the struggles of the untenured on the tenure track are the most pronounced, according to a survey presented at an American Association of University Professors conference here Wednesday. In an analysis of professional burnout among professors, a Texas Woman's University Ph.D. candidate found tenure track professors had more significant symptoms of workplace frustration than their tenured and non-tenure track faculty counterparts. Janie Crosmer, who conducted the survey of more than 400 full-time faculty across the U.S. in December 2008, said she was unsurprised that the high stresses of pursuing academe's most coveted status led to burnout. As she discussed those stresses during a presentation Wednesday, audience members nodded in agreement, and one faculty member among them described the pursuit of tenure as "a living hell." "

"The Real Challenge for Higher Education July 15, 2010 By Garrison Walters America, once the world's most educated nation, is fast losing ground. Although we are still second in overall education levels, we are much weaker -- 11th -- in the proportion of younger people with a college degree. In a world where knowledge increasingly drives economic competitiveness, this is a very serious problem. The issue is more than abstract economics, it's also a moral concern: Since 1970, the benefits of higher education have been very unequally apportioned, with the top income quartile profiting hugely and the bottom hardly moving at all (despite starting from a very low level). America's education problem has been apparent for 30 years or so, and there have been a lot of suggestions for making us competitive again. Ideas on the K-12 side include: better trained and motivated teachers, more and better early childhood programs, better prepared school leaders, improved curriculums, higher standards, financial incentives, better data systems, and more rigorous and frequent assessments. On the higher education side, proposals include: motivating professors and administrators with formulas that reward success rather than enrollment, more use of technology, more data, improved administration, and (at least for general education) more testing. And, of course, better funding is relentlessly advocated for the entire educational spectrum. All of these approaches have at least some potential to foster improvement. Some have already demonstrated benefits while some are being seriously oversold (more on that in a separate essay). My fundamental belief, though, is that even if one takes a very optimistic view of the achievable potential of each of these strategies and adds them together, the net result will be significant but insufficient improvement to allow us to catch up in educational levels. If our scope of action is limited to the ideas advanced so far, we will actually contin

"U.S. goes from leading to lagging in young college graduates By Daniel de Vise Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 22, 2010; 6:07 AM The United States has fallen from first to 12th in the share of adults ages 25 to 34 with postsecondary degrees, according to a new report from the College Board. Canada is now the global leader in higher education among young adults, with 55.8 percent of that population holding an associate degree or better as of 2007, the year of the latest international ranking. The United States sits 11 places back, with 40.4 percent of young adults holding postsecondary credentials. The report, to be presented Thursday to Capitol Hill policymakers, is backed by a commission of highly placed educators who have set a goal for the United States to reclaim world leadership in college completion -- and attain a 55 percent completion rate -- by 2025. "

"Colleges and the Governors' Races August 5, 2010 With state budget shortfalls likely to hit $180 billion in 2011, the incoming governors -- a potentially record-size pool of brand-new state chiefs -- will have a lot to take on when they take office in January. Jobs and the economy have dwarfed all other campaign issues, and higher education -- despite its link to economic development -- is unlikely to be a focal point in this year's elections. "Political candidates are grappling with more immediate solutions for job creation opportunities," says Dan Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. "I think we'll see some [newly elected] governors bringing higher education to the top of their political agendas, but right now it's simply not at the top of the list." Four years ago, higher education was one of the top issues in several gubernatorial races. But the economy crashed 13 months after the election, and the recession descended across most of the country, forcing governors to slash funding -- much of it from higher education. According to the most recent State Higher Education Finance report, state funding for higher education fell $2.8 billion in the 2009 fiscal year as a result of the recession. Federal stimulus funds worth $2.3 billion partially offset the costs, but state funding fell another $2.7 billion in 2010 and is likely to continue to fall"

A Marriage Made in Indiana July 14, 2010 Just about everywhere you turn, state leaders are searching for a way to use online education to expand the reach of their public higher education systems at a time of diminished resources. The approaches vary: In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Pawlenty has heralded a future of "iCollege," while in Pennsylvania, the state college system envisions using distance learning to help its campuses sustain their offerings by sharing courses in underenrolled programs. California's community college system turned to a for-profit provider, Kaplan University, to work around its budget-related enrollment restrictions. And a grand experiment to create a fully online branch of the University of Illinois, meanwhile, crashed and burned last fall. Like those and other peers, Indiana's leaders have increasingly recognized that the state cannot thrive economically if it does not bolster college completion, particularly among adults (aged 29-49) who have historically been underrepresented in the state's seven public four-year universities. But they recognize that doing so at a time of (temporarily, if not permanently) diminished resources isn't easy -- and that online education is no panacea because, done right, it isn't cheap."

"Adult education for the 21st century Too many are unable to make the leap from community college to a four-year degree By Susan C. Aldridge July 6, 2010 I have had the pleasure of handing diplomas to some unusual people at commencement. Still, it was startling to see the child walk toward me. He was 9. He looked younger. He wasn't accepting the diploma for himself, of course. It was for his dad, on active duty in Iraq. He'd sent his son, living on a base in Germany, to get it for him. "Congratulations," I said. He and his dad deserved it. At University of Maryland University College (UMUC), our graduates are America's adult learners. Almost all work full time. Half are parents. Their diplomas often reflect the work, sacrifice - and triumph - of an entire family. The personal achievements of our students, though, are the exception rather than the rule. They highlight a national problem. UMUC graduates often begin studying at the "unsung heroes" of higher education: America's community colleges. But each year, thousands of community college students who want to earn a bachelor's degree - particularly those from modest-income or minority families - cannot continue. America's four-year colleges don't accommodate them. This is not just a tragedy for them. It is a tragedy for our nation. Researchers estimate that baby boomer retirements will soon leave our workforce 14 million shy of the number of four-year degree recipients we need. What stands in the way? First, cost. Students paying about $2,500 a year for community college tuition cannot always afford the $7,000 average for public universities, much less the $26,000 average for private institutions. And there are other obstacles. Four-year colleges and universities often reject credits from transfer students. They schedule courses at challenging times for students who work. Sometimes they cannot even provide enough parking spaces for people rushing from work to class. When it comes to higher educat

"Lumina Documents State and Local Role in Completion Agenda It may seem a daunting, if not impossible, task to get the United States to the widely heralded goal of a nearly 50 percent increase in the college attainment of its citizens -- but the Lumina Foundation for Education aims, in a new report, to break the job down into smaller pieces to show that it is attainable. In the report, published today, Lumina goes beyond reiterating its arguments for why the "big goal" it has set is essential for the United States economy and for individuals alike, though the study does that, too. But in providing state-by-state (and even county-by-county) data on how many graduates a particular area would need to produce if the national target is to be met, Lumina seeks to break the job down into practical, tangible goals. Even at that level, the data show just how far the country has to go, Lumina says: "If the current rate of increase remains, less than 47 percent of Americans will hold a two- or four-year degree by 2025. Economic experts say this is far below the level that can keep the nation competitive in the global, knowledge-based economy.""

The Chronicle of Higher Education September 26, 2010 Texas Governor Treats Colleges Like Businesses By Katherine Mangan Nearly 40 years after a young "yell leader" named Rick Perry fired up sports fans at Texas A&M University, his voice is reverberating across all of the state's public universities. Texas' longest-serving governor, who is favored to win a third four-year term in November, has not been known to watch from the sidelines as his chosen regents govern their institutions. Mr. Perry, a Republican who came to office in 2000, when then-Gov. George W. Bush was elected president, has promoted his conservative ideology through a policy agenda that emphasizes transparency and accountability and treats colleges like businesses whose customers are students. It's an ideology reflected in an Austin-based think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is led by one of his former policy directors, Brooke L. Rollins, and supported by some of his biggest campaign contributors."

No Time to Waste A publication of the SREB 4 Imperatives for States: 1. Set statewide priority and direction, with specific goals, for increasing the numbers of degrees and certificates - including raising accountability for system and institutional leaders and setting measures to assess credential completion, among other actions. 2. Increase access and enrollment in postsecondary education even more, by improving college affordability, students' college readiness, and drawing more adults to postsecondary study. 3. Increase the numbers of credentials earned by students in all colleges and universities through targeted institutional actions- building campus cultures that make completion the first priority and institutionalizing a series of actions that guide students more directly to a credential. 4. Increase productivity and cost-efficiency in degree completion ─ by introducing strategies that reduce excess credits, streamline college-transfer systems, and expect timely degree completion at lower costs.