James S. Murphy

Despite what the White House (and a recent amateurish post from AEI) might have you believe, there's not a lot of clear patterns in the post-SFFA enrollment data.

The post-SFFA enrollment tracker is now up to 28 colleges and universities.
Click on the post below to see the details.
Read the post to see which 13 schools shared data last year but not this year!
Share the post so everyone can see the weird thing Stanford did with its numbers this year!!

Here is the portion on grading from the Trump administration's proposed higher education compact.

More UC San Diego students need remedial math — but is that a problem? A UCSD report said the school should reject students who struggle with math, but researchers have found that those students are likely to benefit from an elite education.

New —

What the internet backlash over rising remedial math at UC San Diego misses: Yes, it's a problem that math scores are going down, but selective, well-resourced universities are arguably best equipped to help students catch up.

cbnewsletters.chalkbeat.org/p/what-the-i...

Since the Dept of Education called out student debt in its press release, I thought it might be worth pointing out that students at for profits are more likely to leave with debt and with larger amounts of it. collegeaffordability.urban.org/after-colleg...

a cartoon of patrick and spongebob saying yah ALT: a cartoon of patrick and spongebob saying yah

I saw your piece right after I posted it--made me double check the sector of institutions that weren't in the College Scorecard data I had pulled some time back. So now our numbers line up.

Quick correction after checking the sector of some IHEs that were initially not categorized: For-profits were and for-profit certificate programs were 88% and 80% of the colleges falling below the HS income threshold.

FAFSA Reveals Earnings Data for Colleges and Graduates The Department of Education's new FAFSA changes highlight the alarming number of for-profit institutions where graduates earn less than high school completers.

I threw all the data into a searchable table. jamessmurphy.com/2025/12/09/w...

What the Secretary of Ed also failed to highlight was some serious good news: There are no four-year publics below the HS diploma income threshold and 97% of students are enrolled in institutions above the threshold.

Most of the institutions that were identified as "lower earning" are for-profits (84% of the total) and for-profit certificate programs (80%) in particular.

Two-thirds of for-profit certificate programs and 59% of all for-profit institutions have worse income outcomes than a high school degree.

FAFSA Reveals Earnings Data for Colleges and Graduates The Department of Education's new FAFSA changes highlight the alarming number of for-profit institutions where graduates earn less than high school completers.

The Department of Education shared data today on IHEs where, 4 years after earning a credential, graduates earned less than peers with only a high school diploma.

What ED didn't shout out was just how many of those institutions are for-profits. So I got the data. jamessmurphy.com/2025/12/09/w...

It's telling that the table they released does not include a column for sector.

I met someone this year who was the 12th person in her family to go to Harvard.

Letters to the Editor: USC always had a bad reputation in L.A. Yet more scandals show us why More scandals at USC? It looks like people were on to something decades ago when they always talked about the school with suspicion.

USC will report its (wild) legacy numbers instead. The thing about naming and shaming as a penalty is that its assumes a capacity for shame, which is not something USC is known for. www.latimes.com/opinion/lett...

USC also opted to break the California law banning legacy preferences, but it isn't giving up access to the tens of millions of dollars it gets each year from Cal Grants. It will keep that money and continue to admit almost 2,000(!!!) legacies per year. www.uscannenbergmedia.com/2025/09/30/u...

EdChoice voucher bros, perennially on fire abt public school spending accountability, say This is Fine:
"On any given day, Florida’s education department did not know where 30,000 students were going to school and could not account for the $270 million in taxpayer funds it took to support them."

The IPEDS admissions survey data for 2024-5 still has not been released. It has not been this late in the past 8 years, if ever. This is not a good sign for how things are functioning at the Department of Education and @ipeds.bsky.social.

ED Wants to Begin and End Workforce Pell This Week Higher ed policy experts question whether one week of negotiations will be enough to figure out how to expand the Pell Grant to workforce training programs.

The Department of Education is planning to start and finish workforce Pell regulation negotiations this week. Just like a student who waits until the last minute to write a term paper, the likelihood of mistakes making their way into important documents rises.

Why am I asked to "start a free trial" everytime I open the website where I was a founding subscriber, @criterion.bsky.social? How about fewer celebrity videos and more work on customer experience?

@criterion.bsky.social has so many good movies. And such a terrible website. Sure, I'd love to continue watching these movies I finished watching in 2023. And of course I don't want to pick up where I left off on the nearly 4-hours movie I'm actually currently watching.

Are there things other than education that people pay for (sometimes a lot for) in which they're not expected to think of it as a commercial transaction? Or told they shouldn't think of themselves as consumers?

Not trying to snark here. Genuinely curious. Medical care? Art collecting? Museums?

Becoming a U.S. citizen takes years and involves immigrants acquiring a green card, extensive interviews, background checks, classes and a citizenship test. The naturalization ceremony is the final step to the process, where the oath of allegiance and a citizenship certificate are granted. Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday - known as the country's cradle of liberty - for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn't proceed due to their countries of origin.

Read this: www.wgbh.org/news/local/2...

Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide Trump administration is pausing naturalizations for immigrants from 19 countries.

This is so vile. www.wgbh.org/news/local/2...

Happy #Caturday!

Anders Nilsen Anders Nilsen | Art, Prints, Comics | Tongues Vol 1 - Out Now

If anyone is looking for a present for someone who likes graphic novels, Anders Nilsen's Tongues is the best thing I've read in many years. www.andersbrekhusnilsen.com

Europeans are waking up this morning to find the new US National Security Strategy (quietly) released. And what it has to say on Europe could not be clearer. On the „stark prospect of civilizations erasure“ for example. 👇

From the Community | Who benefits from expanded access to a Stanford education? Masters student Sebastian Andrews argues that ending legacy admissions is a crucial step in the University's stated goal of expanding access to Stanford.

Source: stanforddaily.com/2025/11/30/f...

@stanforduniversity.bsky.social decided to essentially spend $3 million a year to keep admitting legacy students in secret.