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California Didn’t Recover. It Restructured.
California Didn’t Recover. It Restructured. Enrollment is back. That’s the headline. U.S. colleges hit 19.4 million students in fall 2025, matching pre-pandemic levels after four straight years of growth based on the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) data. The story looks like a comeback, but it isn’t. Not in California, and not really anywhere else. Let’s…
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Why Income-Based Repayment Is the Financing Model Higher Ed Has Been Missing
Affordability is not a talking point for me. It is the thread that runs through every role I have held in higher education for the past sixteen years. This month, that thread led somewhere new: Pacific West Academy has been approved as a partner school with Edly, giving our Certified Executive Security Specialist (CESS) students…
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The Paradox of the Middle Class: College Got Cheaper in California. It Also Got Harder to Afford.
This blog is inspired by a paper I am working on for the Educational Policy Environment Class, part of the Ed.D in Higher Education Leadership program at CSU Bakersfield. Here is the number that stopped me cold. In 2014, a California middle-class family sending one child to a public university spent roughly 20% of their…