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The costs of attending community college are steadily rising across the county. But beginning next month in Massachusetts, most of the 68,000 community college students will be able to attend one of the state's 15 two-year schools for $500 a year or less. Under Massachusetts' new Community College Access Grant Program, most students with a family income below $36,000 will pay nothing to attend one of the community colleges. And most students with incomes below $80,000 will pay no more than $500 a year for tuition and fees. Not surprising, virtually all public community college students have incomes well below the $80,000 level, so the majority of community college students will likely reap the benefits.

A primary focus within the field of higher education in prison is to ensure that federal, state, and institution-level polices helping to develop and sustain programs remain durable. Current justifications for policies in support of programs often rely on a predominantly recidivist lens, advocating for programs on the grounds of their likelihood to lower rates of reincarceration and save taxpayers money. However, many advocates argue that such an instrumental approach does not fully capture--and, in fact, might obscure--more foundational civic principles in support of access to higher education in prison. The present article seeks to address the question of how best to justify and defend programs by investigating the perspectives of students themselves, exploring how they articulate the value of their own experiences within a higher education in prison program. Employing interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), the study explores the experiences of 21 formerly incarcerated students who participated in the Boston University Prison Education Program (BUPEP), one of the longest running higher education in prison programs in the country. Participants noted that the program offered a much-needed space to participate in a community of mutual respect and mentorship, develop skills and explore personal interests, and regularly engage in noncoercive, nonprescriptive practices of self-reflection and inquiry. The program provided a space unique within prison contexts, helping to break cycles of both literal and figurative imprisonment. Such findings have important implications for both policy and curricula development within higher education in prison.

As the number of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) grows in the United States, campus administrators and other leaders must explore ways to effectively serve the Hispanic student population. The purpose of this study was to explore how two rural community colleges identified and chose campus programs that best met the needs of their Hispanic students. Participants consisted of two groups: college faculty of any ethnicity and college students of Hispanic ethnicity. Utilizing survey research design, this study aimed to identify factors that influenced administrative decisions at rural Hispanic-serving community colleges when selecting the student services and programs for their Hispanic student population. The results revealed that most faculty were dissatisfied with their role in the institutional decision-making process and that both students and faculty lacked awareness regarding institution HSI designation.

Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.

Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education. The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded a $4 million grant to support a collaboration between […]

While research has documented outcomes for students served by promise programs, few studies have considered the behavior of institutions themselves in the promise era. A new source of revenue combined with larger and more diverse cohorts is likely to motivate changes in spending and staffing—decisions instrumental to student access and success. We employ complementary difference-in-differences and synthetic control strategies to estimate impacts of the first statewide promise program on these two outcomes. Findings suggest institutions diverted expenditures away from instruction, academic support, and institutional support toward greater institutional grant awards. We find no meaningful impact on staffing levels. While some institutional actions may further support the access and success goals of promise programs, the diversity of programs across the nation suggests not all may follow suit. This study should inform policy makers considering the full extent of outcomes of free-college programs and invigorate further research on institutional responses.

Over the past decade, the federal government has made substantial efforts to simplify the college-going process and help students to evaluate college choices. These low-cost strategies aimed at improving college access and success by helping students to make informed decisions about college warrant assessment. This study examines the impact of a recent effort aimed at simplifying information that colleges provide to students about college costs, loan options, and college outcomes. Results from a quasi-experimental analysis indicate that the \"informational intervention\" in this study had limited influence on community college students' enrollment and borrowing decisions. I discuss the limitations of this particular intervention and the potential impact that other related policy efforts designed to help students at various points in the college-going process may have.

This policy brief draws on the 2024 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) report on K-12 STEM Education and Workforce Development in Rural Areas to examine how place-sustaining partnerships-among schools, communities, higher education, and industry-advance rural education and workforce development. Through examples of state-led initiatives and community-driv en models, the brief illustrates how cross-sector collaboration rooted in local context can develop college and career pathways that equip rural learners to thrive and sustain the long-term vitality of rural communities.

This article takes up the central question of how college-level prison education programs should be justified and defended. Author Patrick Filipe Conway argues that the focus on recidivism rates as justification for major initiatives like the Second Chance Pell Program and New York governor Andrew Cuomo's Right Priorities initiative is misguided and puts the long-term viability of prison education programs at risk. He builds his argument on an analysis of the funding sources for Cuomo's initiative as well as on an exploration of the potential negative pedagogical impacts of justification through recidivism rates and taxpayer savings. The article contends that a better defense of college-level prison education is one that locates it as a type of firm counterbalance to the inherent inequities within our communities and the US judicial system, thus better capturing the full ethical responsibility behind the commitment to higher education in prison.

This overview of postsecondary education in the United States reviews the dramatic changes over the past fifty years in the students who go to college, the institutions that produce higher education, and the ways it is financed. The article, by Sandy Baum, Charles Kurose, and Michael McPherson, creates the context for the articles that follow on timely issues facing the higher education community and policy makers. The authors begin by observing that even the meaning of college has changed. The term that once referred primarily to a four-year period of academic study now applies to virtually any postsecondary study—academic or occupational, public or private, two-year or four-year—that can result in a certificate or degree. They survey the factors underlying the expansion of postsecondary school enrollments; the substantial increases in female, minority, disadvantaged, and older students; the development of public community colleges; and the rise of for-profit colleges. They discuss the changing ways in which federal and state governments help students and schools defray the costs of higher education as well as more recent budget tensions that are now reducing state support to public colleges. And they review the forces that have contributed to the costs of producing higher education and thus rising tuitions. The authors also cite evidence on broad measures of college persistence and outcomes, including low completion rates at community and for-profit colleges, the increasing need for remedial education for poorly prepared high school students, and a growing gap between the earnings of those with a bachelor's degree and those with less education. They disagree with critics who say that investments in higher education, particularly for students at the margin, no longer pay off. A sustained investment in effective education at all levels is vital to the nation's future, they argue. But they caution that the American public no longer seems willing to pay more for more students to get more education. They therefore urge the higher education community to make every effort to find innovations, including creative uses of information technology, that can hold down costs while producing quality education.