Notes in the Margins: Endowments, foreign students and Alabama Greeks

Study: Record number of foreign students hits U.S. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are flocking to U.S. colleges and universities, helping to drive the number of international students studying in America to record levels. Similarly, all-time high numbers of American students are studying abroad. (Associated Press)

Alabama Greeks Spent $202 Million In The Past Decade On Building Expansions  But with the powerful Greek system embroiled in controversy over claims of racism and electioneering, some wonder whether the massive expansion serves only to consolidate their power. (Associated Press via The Huffington Post)

Tolstoy endures — but here’s why the liberal arts might not Let’s take a look at some of the threats to the four-year college experience that The Hechinger Report has been following in our higher-education coverage. (The Washington Post)

Flawed “Pay it Forward” Program Increases Overall Cost of Higher Education; Bad for Students Unfortunately, the idea, which has been called “dangerous and half-baked” by additional experts in the education field, is seemingly popular among the masses. (iamnotaloan.org)

Fast-Growing Endowments, Without the Ivy The conventional wisdom has been that a top-performing endowment has to be big (over $1 billion), heavily invested in costly alternative strategies like hedge funds and private equity, and managed by a large and sophisticated staff of internal investment professionals. But the new stars of endowment performance are standing that notion on its head. (The New York Times)

• How Augsburg is going all Mark Twain
• How past U of M presidents view higher-ed today
• Metro State data breach affected 160,000 students
• U of M starting massive systems upgrade