A lifetime ago, when I was overseeing reporting projects at The Chronicle of Higher Education in the early 1990s, my colleagues and I had what struck me as a brilliant idea for a major editorial undertaking. We would send a team of reporters to a reasonably sized American city—we pictured Pittsburgh—to examine how the various colleges and universities in the region were competing to serve students, businesses and others.
This was at a time when enrollments and college-going rates were slowing but still growing, while a recession was beginning to pinch state and federal funding for higher education. Competition for students was intensifying; for-profit higher education was ascendant and community colleges were hitting their stride. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see which institutions were gaining ground, which were lagging and why?
The project never happened (for a variety of reasons), but I remembered it recently while talking with college and university leaders in urban areas about both the opportunities and the limitations of greater cooperation with other institutions in their regions.
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