More upper-middle-class students are choosing community college right out of high school, and they expect a full undergrad experience.
Paul Fain
Paul Fain, senior reporter, came to Inside Higher Ed in September 2011, after a six-year stint covering leadership and finance for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Paul has also worked in higher-ed P.R., with Widmeyer Communications, but couldn't stay away from reporting. A former staff writer for C-VILLE Weekly, a newspaper in Charlottesville, Va., Paul has written for The New York Times, Washington City Paper and Mother Jones. He's won a few journalism awards, including one for beat reporting from the Education Writers Association and the Dick Schaap Excellence in Sports Journalism Award. Paul got hooked on journalism while working too many hours at The Review, the student newspaper at the University of Delaware, where he earned a degree in political science in 1996. A native of Dayton, Ohio, and a long-suffering fan of the Cincinnati Bengals, Fain plays guitar in a band with more possible names than polished songs.
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Most Recent Articles
February 24, 2012
For-profit colleges will grow as they continue to fill a gap left by public higher education, which cannot keep pace with demand thanks to slumping government support, according to a new study by John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. That growth will not be due to well-thought-out policy, and will happen despite concerns about the performance of for-profits, Douglass writes.
February 24, 2012
Students attending for-profit colleges received $280 million of the $563 million spent last year by the Department of Defense on tuition assistance for active-duty members of the military, according to a new study by the majority staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Six for-profit college companies collected 41 percent of the total expenditure.
February 23, 2012
Tough new regulations are unlikely this year in Washington, but in California a new state law, hearings and multiple investigations are kicking off.
February 22, 2012
Rick Santorum last week told an audience at the Detroit Economic Club that President Obama "had a war on private education" and that his administration has unfairly attacked private-sector, or for-profit colleges, that do most of the worker training for new jobs, according to a transcript published by The Detroit Free Press. The surging Republican presidential candidate promised that his administration would have a different attitude.
February 22, 2012
California's community colleges face an unexpected $149 million budget cut this year because of low property tax revenue and a "dramatic" increase in the number of students who qualify for tuition waivers, Jack Scott, chancellor of the 112-college system, said in a written statement.
February 21, 2012
Courses on how to learn and manage college life can boost graduation rates. The classes are catching on -- slowly -- at community colleges, but face resistance.
February 17, 2012
A group of U.S. senators on Thursday proposed legislation that would make it harder for for-profit colleges to enroll substantial numbers of veterans and active-duty members of the military without running afoul of federal financial aid rules. For-profits can collect up to 90 percent of their revenue from federal financial aid, but student payments from the Post-9/11 G.I.
February 15, 2012
California community colleges with the lowest student transfer rates to four-year colleges are "intensely segregated" or enroll high percentages of minority students, according to three new reports from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles, while a "handful" of two-year colleges that serve largely white, Asian or middle-class students are responsible for the majority of transfers in the state.
February 14, 2012
For-profit colleges that participate in federal financial aid programs charge more than those that don't, according to new study, which also finds the for-profit sector much larger than most think.
