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Saudi Arabia intends to go from 860,000 college students right now, to 1,700,000 ... in four years! We forecast the need for some darned experienced planners, and a need for that planning to be done in an integrated way.

[It's] a gargantuan task. Creating better-skilled, employable Saudi university graduates, says Mr. Partrick, involves reforming the entire educational system, restructuring the country's labor market, and encouraging a "cultural shift in terms of attitudes toward work—what Saudis will do—and education—what it's appropriate to teach to Saudi children."

All that will have to take place at the same time that increasing numbers of young Saudis pursue higher education. "As we are expanding access," says Mr. Al-Ohali, "there is a lot of emphasis not to lose quality."

Dennis Jones, of NCHEMS, seems to be all over the place. We've seen him recently at a SCUP board meeting, at the second Action Analytics Symposium, at SCUP-45, and now he has this piece in The New England Journal of Higher Education:

In all states, state governments decide how much of their budget goes to direct support of institutions and how much to student financial aid. In some states, elected officials also set (or must approve) tuition levels; in others, tuition policy is within the purview of institutional governing boards. Legislatures also affect institutional finances by mandates regarding the use of institutional resources devoted to student financial aid. In some cases, this takes the form of requiring that institutions waive tuition for certain groups of students (war veterans, families of protective service personnel killed in the line of duty, etc). In other cases, states put limits on the use of tuition waivers.

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Given the lack of attention given to alignment of the pieces, the fact that different policies are often the responsibility of different decision-making groups, and the different constituencies that line up behind different parts of the policy framework, it is little wonder that coherent policy is hard to achieve. The secret is aligning policy with goals; if this can be accomplished, aligning the various components with one another other becomes much easier.

While nearly every university overbooks each year, relying on sophisticated algorithms that predict just how many admitted students will probably go elsewhere, Iowa officials were stunned to learn this spring how far off they were in their math. This fall’s freshman class is likely to have more than 400 more students than last year’s, an unintended increase of about 10 percent, for a total of just over 4,500.

Though the university considers this a happy accident — much of the growth has come from outside Iowa, including from schools as far away as China and India, whose graduates typically pay triple the tuition of state residents — the looming flood of new students has left the university scrambling to figure out where they will sleep, and how to fit them into some of the most popular courses.