The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education “promotes public policies that enhance Americans’ opportunities to pursue and achieve high-quality education and training beyond high school.”  The organization also “prepares action-oriented analyses of pressing policy issues facing the states and the nation regarding opportunity and achievement in higher education-including two- and four-year, public and private, for-profit and nonprofit institutions.”  I have cited their Measuring Up reports in previous blog postings as well as utilized some of their published data in my research.  The next, and possibly last, Measuring Up report may be issued this fall or early next year. Read the rest of this entry »

The founder of American Military University, Major James P. Etter, was passionate about the need to provide an affordable college education to service members. We matched our tuition to the semester hour rate maximum reimbursed by the Department of Defense (DOD) which is currently $250 per semester hour. We do not charge an application or admissions fee. We do not charge a technology fee or student activities fee. We provide book grants to all undergraduate students who maintain the minimum satisfactory academic standing of a 2.0 GPA. We have not increased our undergraduate tuition since 2000, nearly eight years.

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It’s almost impossible to pick up a newspaper or magazine these days without reading an article about the affordability crisis in higher education. For the past twenty years, tuitions have increased at a rate about twice that of the consumer price index. Many institutions cite the national statistics on the value of a college degree as the justification for charging increasingly higher tuition.

During the same twenty year period, the grants provided under federal student aid programs (FSA) did not increase at the same average rate as tuitions. Therefore, an increasingly higher percentage of college costs were paid through loans and not grants. Last academic year, loans constituted some fifty-six percent of total student aid while grants accounted for only thirty-eight percent.

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