Jeff Selingo

When Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced this month that they were forming a partnership to offer online courses free to the masses, they pledged $60 million to the effort, dubbed edX. That's about twice the median budget of four-year colleges and universities in the United...

Part I of my conversations with students at six colleges and universities about the future of higher ed happened to appear the same day there was yet another announcement that has the potential to chip away at the legacy system. The biggest name brand in higher ed, Harvard University,...

"Do you actually believe in this stuff?" one of my colleagues at The Chronicle of Higher Education asked me last week.

The stuff he was referring to were the disruptive innovations that are supposed to revolutionize how higher ed is delivered in this country, a topic I've been writing...

Scottsdale, Ariz. -- Michael Crow, the ubiquitous president of Arizona State University, opened the Education Innovation Summit here this week by giving his views of what ails higher ed. He called it "filiopietism," or the excessive veneration of tradition. Not enough students are coming into the system, he...

In discussions about the future of higher education, there's often plenty of hand-wringing over the precarious fate of the hundreds of small, tuition-dependent private colleges scattered throughout the country. With many of them located in out-of-the-way places, their isolation means that merging or even collaborating with other institutions to reduce...

In public forums about the drastic changes that higher ed may undergo in the coming years, one question inevitably gets asked of those advocating market disruption: Would the alternatives to the traditional degree pathway be good enough for their own children?

The answers are always nuanced, and I have never...

College campuses are full of long-held assumptions about how academe works. A perilous one for the future of American higher education is that high-school students pick a college, enroll, and -- two or four years later -- graduate from the same institution.

That pathway hasn't been the norm for a...

The lifetime wage premium that accompanies a college degree has long been the best selling point for colleges trying to attract students. The marketing pitch went something like this: Don't worry how much you spend on our degree, we all know that getting a college credential is worth it.

President Obama couldn't have picked a more opportune time to put colleges on notice about their rising costs. Within days of threatening colleges with the loss of some federal aid during his State of the Union address, hundreds of private-college presidents descended on Washington for their annual meeting. A...

The "disruption" of the higher-ed market is a popular refrain these days. Rising tuition prices and student debt have left many wondering if the current model is indeed broken and whether those like Harvard's Clay Christensen are right when they say that innovations in course delivery will eventually displace...

Since the late 1970s, when some type of a college education essentially became a requirement for a solid, sustainable, middle-class job, the cost of that education has skyrocketed.

The annual price tag for a college credential has risen about three times as fast as inflation, and there is no sign...

Student loans are not going away, despite calls by Occupy protesters in recent weeks to have the federal government finance public colleges entirely and write off all student debt.

So rather than debate the impossible, we should instead discuss better ways of financing a college degree.

The higher-ed establishment...

Employer unhappiness with college graduates is nothing new. As the president of the University of Washington, Michael K. Young, told me recently, "employers have never been happy with the graduates colleges are producing."

Still, with three million unfilled jobs in a bad economy, it stands to reason that some employers...

As college costs have skyrocketed, students and their parents have come to view the college experience more and more as a financial transaction. They are the customer, and the college is the business. That consumer mentality -- which I have argued is not as bad as many in higher...

It used to be that Americans had too much debt. Now they don't have enough. The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that "household thrift" is a key reason the economic recovery has been so weak.

But student-loan debt seems to be immune from this newfound penny-pinching. Students...

If there was any question that the current model for the vast majority of colleges is not sustainable for much longer, two pieces of news this past week should give the remaining skeptics yet more evidence.

First, was the news from a survey of economists that Americans' incomes, which...

There seem to be a few unspoken rules among the ruling class in higher ed. Among them: Don't say a purpose of a college education is to get a job, and don't refer to students or employers as consumers of a college education.

I broke both rules in a

Even if college students in the future are likely to take more of their classes online, few of us think that the vast majority of bricks-and-mortar campuses will disappear, at least not overnight.

Like real estate, location matters in higher ed. But unlike many homeowners, colleges looking for a better...

American academics often like to talk about how the higher-education system in the United States is the best in the world. I'm not quite sure how this status is determined -- especially given our declining position in the OECD rankings -- but we seem to have adopted the belief...

We're quickly headed toward a future in which college students will either be super achievers or unprepared for the workplace.

At least that's according to dueling op-ed pieces in two of our nation's most influential newspapers on Sunday. On one hand, you have "super people" whose abilities and activities...