The Key with Inside Higher Ed

As public support belief in the value of higher education has steadily declined in recent years, most of the attention for turning that around has been on improving the career readiness of graduates and making college more affordable. But an emergent group of college leaders believes the real key may be to ensure that all learners, regardless of background, have experiences in college that help th...

Are we in the midst of a mental health “crisis” for college students and other young people? How should campus administrators and faculty members be thinking about the mental health of their students and their roles in addressing it? And do we perhaps need to reframe the discussion around what “mental health” even is? This week’s episode of The Key explores an issue that has been at or near the to...

Terry Hartle retired last fall after 30 years as the chief government and public affairs officer at the American Council on Education, where he had a front-row seat to virtually every important higher education policy discussion. In this week’s episode of The Key, Hartle talks about the partisanship and inertia that afflicts today’s politics, politicians’ increased questioning and oversight of hig...

Does the possible sale of the University of Phoenix to a public university system signal the demise of the for-profit higher education sector that Phoenix once epitomized?   This week’s episode of The Key analyzes the implications of recent news that a nonprofit affiliated with the University of Arkansas System might buy the former giant among for-profit colleges. Joining the discussion are Kevin...

In 2010, a book called DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education envisioned a wholesale shift in how people learned. More than a decade later, how has that panned out? This week’s episode features a conversation with Anya Kamenetz, the author and journalist who in 2010 tapped into an emerging set of issues around student debt, rapid technological change and pol...

During the pandemic, many colleges and universities embraced a form of blended learning called HyFlex, to mixed reviews. Is it likely to be part of colleges’ instructional strategy going forward? This week’s episode of The Key explores HyFlex, in which students in a classroom learn synchronously alongside a cohort of peers studying remotely. HyFlex moved from a fringe phenomenon to the mainstream...

Colleges are under growing pressure to prove their “value” to students, parents, legislators and others. The scrutiny can be uncomfortable, but more institutions are responding with serious efforts to measure and explain their value. This week’s episode of The Key, the last in a three-part series on value in higher education, examines the data and metrics we’re using now – and those we might use g...

As recently as a decade ago, the concept of “value” rarely found its way into discussions about federal and state policymaking about higher education. Now it’s unusual to hear a meaningful conversation that doesn’t raise the issue. This week’s episode of The Key, the second in a three-part series on the value of higher education, examines how politicians and policy makers are responding to growing...

For decades, colleges and universities enjoyed almost unquestioned public support as some of America’s most important institutions. Like most institutions, they’ve been knocked off that pedestal in recent years, amid growing questions not about whether higher education remains important but whether it’s available, affordable and valuable enough. This week’s episode of The Key is the first in a thr...

Most business officers are upbeat about their colleges’ financial future. Why is that so, and are they right to be so optimistic? This week's episode of The Key features a discussion about Inside Higher Ed’s 2022 Survey of College and University Business Officers , which generally found college chief financial officers feeling pretty good about how their institutions are faring and how they’re pos...

Many people in higher education recoil at the idea of merging institutions, and it’s little wonder: in most such arrangements, one institution swallows the other, which virtually disappears. But that doesn’t mean the alternative is for every college to remain an island unto itself. Recent events – last month’s merger between Saint Joseph’s University and University of the Sciences in Philadelphia,...

College and university enrollments – particularly at community colleges – continue to plummet. Have they bottomed out? Will they recover if the economy cools off as expected? Has enrollment dropped to a new lower plateau that’s likely to be the baseline going forward? This week’s episode of The Key explores the 7.5 percent decline that college enrollments have suffered since the pandemic, with a f...

How are colleges and universities going about rethinking their teaching and learning strategies in the wake of widescale experimentation with digital instruction? This week’s episode is the last of a three-part series on digital teaching and learning, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The first two episodes explored how the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped what researchers and practition...

The last two years disrupted many aspects of higher education, and the educational technology market -- and the relationship between colleges and companies – are no exception. This week’s episode of The Key explores how well the many hundreds of ed-tech companies that work with colleges, professors and students actually meet the needs of the institutions and their people, where they fall short, an...

This week’s episode of The Key explores whether and how the landscape of digital teaching and learning has been changed by the last two years of global pandemic, recession, upheaval over racial justice, and more. Participants in the conversation are Shanna Smith Jaggars, assistant vice provost of research and program assessment in Ohio State University’s Office of Student Academic Success, and Jes...

Student loan debt forgiveness. Free community college. Pell Grants for short-term programs. Those are just some of the higher education issues occupying the federal policy landscape in Washington. This week’s episode of The Key features a conversation with Under Secretary James Kvaal, the Education Department’s senior official on higher education. He discusses the administration’s current thinking...

Has higher education’s forced experimentation with remote learning changed how students, professors, colleges and the public view online education? And will it make them more or less likely to participate in it?  This week's episode of The Key explores Inside Higher Ed’s recent report, The Evolving Conversation About Quality in Online Learning.” The report examines a wide range of issues around th...

This week's episode of The Key explores why some institutions use those policies and why consumer advocates think they're pernicious, even though they're only a small fraction of the $1.7 trillion student debt problem in American higher education. Martin Kurzweil, director of the institutional transformation program at Ithaka S+R, discusses research on what it calls “stranded credits” that college...

Last month the State of Maryland announced that it would no longer require a bachelor’s degree in the hiring process for nearly half of its jobs, joining a growing number of companies and other employers. Some people in higher education might view steps like that as a slight, since Maryland and other employers are responding in part to questions about the value of degrees and growing concerns abou...

Employers of all kinds are struggling to hold on to their employees in the wake of the pandemic and amid a white-hot job market. Data recently released by the University of North Carolina system, for instance, shows that faculty and staff turnover in the first half of this academic year was about 40 percent higher than the average of the last four years. Are colleges and universities just dealing...

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, student academic misconduct spiked, and an episode of The Key explored the reasons why and steps colleges and professors might take to combat it. The issue hasn’t gone away, even though a lot of instruction has returned to the physical classroom. So this week we revisit the February 2021 conversations, which remain timely and relevant. First up is Bradley Dav...

How has the COVID-19 pandemic and the other upheaval of the last couple of years changed the outlook for colleges, their students and their employees? Bryan Alexander is a writer, author, teacher and “futurist.” He wrote the 2020 book Academia Next and hosts his own series of video conversations, The Future Trends Forum. In this week’s episode of The Key podcast, he first explains the work of prof...

“Transformation” is a buzzword in today’s world, and it’s easy to talk about why it’s necessary. But how do you actually do the hard work of bringing about change within a college or university? This week's episode of The Key features highlights from a panel session at this month's SXSWedu conference in Austin, Tex. The discussion, heavy on practical advice for leading change within and across ins...

Like a lot of undergraduate-focused, smaller institutions, historically black colleges and universities typically went online selectively, sporadically – or not at all. But that’s beginning to change, thanks to significant multi-college collaborations and help from funders increasingly recognizing the value and importance of these underresourced institutions. This week’s episode of The Key examine...

It only took a few decades, but colleges and universities are hiring more Black and brown presidents to lead their institutions.  This week's episode digs into data Inside Higher Ed published last month showing a big upturn in the proportion of minority presidents and chancellors that colleges hired in the year and a half after the death of George Floyd. Better than one in three presidents hired f...