University of Minnesota President Eric Kaler will receive a 5.5 percent raise next year as part of a five-year contract extension. Kaler will make $785,000 next year under the new deal. By the time his contract runs out in 2020, he will be making more than $987,000. Much of the increase is in the form Read more →
MPR News Intelligence on higher education
Tag: college costs

For those following politics and the cost of college, here’s an announcement I just got about a proposed Net Price Calculator Improvement Act. (Here’s what MPR colleague Tim Post has written about Net Price Calculators.) The meat of the announcement is toward the bottom in bold: Sens. Franken, Grassley Introduce New Bipartisan Bill to Give Read more →

MPR News reporter Tim Pugmire is reporting on Gov. Mark Dayton’s revised budget, which includes this higher-ed tidbit: Tax Relief for Students. The Governor’s tax plan would provide 285,000 recent college graduates up to $190 per year by deducting their student loan interest. Another 40,000 current college students and parents would receive a tuition deduction Read more →

Remember “Scared Straight,” that late-1970s documentary in which prison inmates warned juvenile delinquents against turning to a life of crime? Watch Buzzfeed’s take for the college crowd: “Scared Straight: Liberal Arts Edition.” You can guess what happens: Down-and-out college grads with arts and humanities degrees get in the faces of a crop of liberal-arts students, yelling Read more →

University of Minnesota regents recently kicked around ideas on how to lighten the tuition burden on students and motivate them to finish their degrees within four years. One of those ideas is the fixed-tuition (or guaranteed-tuition) plan, in which students who opt in pay the same tuition their fourth year that they pay in their Read more →

This comes out of a recent report by the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) system. It’s the first time I’ve seen a pretty clear breakdown of how much students pay in tuition during a four-year Minnesota education, depending on what kind of campus they go to and when. The chart indicates that the cost Read more →

As you may have gathered from posts I’ve put up recently, the affordability of an education — especially at the University of Minnesota — is on a lot of people’s minds. Here are a couple of comments posted on the subject. One is from Krista Finstad Hanson, a U alumna. She said she wrote it Read more →
I thought I’d post this as a follow-up to my previous story on open textbooks. It highlights some of the options that student leaders at MnSCU’s universities would like to explore. I find the last two ideas — loosening financial aid and tuition-payment restrictions to account for textbooks — interesting. I’m hoping to follow up Read more →

The University of Minnesota’s finance chief told state legislators Monday that colleges have raised tuition in part because … they can. When a House higher-ed committee member Ryan Winkler (DFL-Golden Valley) asked Richard Pfutzenreuter why tuition everywhere was so high, the U official had this explanation: “To be honest, it’s been there because higher ed Read more →