Robert Kelchen

The good news: on Saturday, the University of Maryland is offering a student free tuition for the spring semester. The bad news: the student has to stay until the fourth quarter of Maryland's football game against Illinois.

America's manufacturing sector is adding jobs, but most of them require a college degree and/or a bunch of training. This shows yet again the importance of higher education (along with highly skilled trades) in economic development.

This is an absolutely riveting--and depressing--story. It's well worth your time to read.

UNC admissions used AI for several years as a first check on the quality of student writing. Now that students are also using AI, they can't do that any longer.

In one of the first statewide data points for enrollment this fall, Michigan's public universities saw their first collective enrollment decline since 2022. The smallest institution saw a 14% decline in just one year.

Pomona College in California is effectively acquiring the neighboring Claremont Graduate University. www.chronicle.com/article/pomo...

"The Western Australian government has said it is “extremely disappointed” and is seeking an “expedited” cost recovery from Deloitte after errors were discovered in a report about a potential university merger, including AI-hallucinated references…."

The College Scorecard just got a major update, including new data on students' earnings seven years after graduation and the return of post-college earnings data for all students receiving financial aid. Minority-serving institution indicators were removed. collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/changel...

This is another piece by a faculty member on "administrative bloat." The data in recent years: staff employment has declined relative to faculty employment, although my research suggests that lower-level staff take the brunt of the cuts. www.chronicle.com/article/dont...

The article is rightly more nuanced than this post. The main driver of that headline figure is housing. Yes tuition is a challenge, but it’s not what has pushed cost of attendance over $50k.

“does a state school have a special responsibility to provide cut-rate beds to everyone who wants one?” Thats the central question in this story and it’s the wrong thing to ask. Why? www.nytimes.com/2026/10/25/b...

Minnesota, South Carolina, and UCF all rushed the field within an hour of each other this evening. Although I worry about safety, it's also a unique part of college football.

From the obit of Dale Brown, the LSU coach who discovered Shaq www.nytimes.com/2026/10/23/s...

Texas football may have used AI to call a doomed fourth down play in last Saturday's loss to Florida that dropped it near the bottom of the SEC standings. Machine learning has its pros and cons in this area, but it's probably better than having Richard Nixon call plays.

My pick: Brewers in six. I'm excited for this World Series as a baseball fan.

It's annoying to be a reviewer, and suspect you are reading something an AI author has written, or to be an author and suspect you are reading what an AI reviewer has written. A system where humans volunteer time to engage with AI products is not going to last.

It's worth reading the entirety of this speech that the Secretary of Education gave at Arizona State University this week.

Following new federal student loan limits, Sallie Mae is expecting their private student loan volume to increase by 12% to 14% this year.

Poster published during the Second World War by the US Office of War Infomation. catalog.archives.gov/id/515798?ob...

In another sign of the decline of American civilization, people will l soon be able to bet on colleges' admission rates. Yippee.

A key allegation here is that department chairs don't hold faculty sufficiently accountable. I much prefer the department head model, which has longer terms of service and often more autonomy to make difficult decisions. Chairs are peers put in a tough spot for a limited time.

I went on the @chronicle.com's College Matters podcast to discuss the state of higher education finance. I see quite a few cuts on the horizon, but I am also more optimistic about the future of colleges' viability than many as a result.

Despite vote by #NACIQI to deny recognition to the accreditor for cosmetologists -- National Accrediting Commission of Career Arts and Sciences (NACCAS) -- Undersecretary Nick Kent goes with staff recommendation to give them 12 months to come into compliance! acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:...

"The top decile spent about three times as much per child [on childcare, education, and extracurriculars] as the bottom quartile in the early 1980s but more than 13 times as much by 2024." sociologicalscience.com/articles-v13...

Great reporting that made me a little queasy after reading.

K-8 schools need to limit screen time to computer labs only.

The auction to sell the closed Anna Maria College failed this week, while Eastern Nazarene College finally sold two years after closing. Finding buyers for most closed colleges is time-consuming at best.

The Trump administration's settlement with UNC-Chapel Hill requires the university to hire additional staff, raising concerns about administrative spending compelled by the federal government. www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-t...

I'm happy to advise this project on estimating the cost of attendance for students that advances my initial work from a decade ago. Take a look through all of the resources available here.

Oregon State bet big on computer science. After a profitable run, things have gone south.

If you want to wake up on a Monday morning, I highly recommend a swim in a 74-degree pool on a 39-degree morning. It's delightful.

International student visa revocations in 2025 were strongly correlated by campus with public reports of pro-Palestinian protests doi.org/10.1353/rhe....

Just remember...if all your exes live in Texas, residing in Tennessee is a great choice. I'm quoted in this piece on how more college recruiters are going to places with a pool of students who have the ability to pay. fortworthreport.org/2026/10/18/o...

The kids and I like making waffles on weekend mornings. Today, we made pumpkin chocolate chip waffles with pumpkins from our garden.

This is a depressing read on a chemical engineering Ph.D. who has applied for thousands of jobs over the last two years (corporate positions and postdocs) and is still looking. It's well worth your time.

October in the garden means loads of green beans, and they're so delicious seared.

Mexico's ban on junk food in universities is deemed constitutional

I spent my week helping students advance toward graduation and states move toward affordable, workforce-linked higher education. And now I find out that *real* higher ed died out with the Studebaker. Whoops. www.wsj.com/opinion/radi...

This is an interesting read on how one of the biggest executive search firms in higher ed (as well as other fields) evaluated a potential NFL head coach.

Atlantic Association of Universities just released their first peek at 2026-27 enrolments. International student numbers are down collectively by 18%. That's a $60 million hit to the region's universities - 2x the new money they recieved from governments in the last round of provincial budgets.

Yet another example of why land-grant universities are awesome.

Ohio's governor signed an executive order giving its college athletes who graduated high school in 2022 a fifth year of eligibility, going against NCAA policy.

Average hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, fell 0.5 percent in September and are now back to where they were in January, 2025. That means that Americans, on average, have experienced zero real wage growth since Trump returned to office.

Five private colleges have agreed to be founding members of a new accreditor seeking federal recognition. With academic excellence in the accreditor's name, they should be a shoo-in for approval, right?