Wick Sloane

Wick Sloane, an end user of higher education, began his first piece for Inside Higher Ed, "Somehow I missed the meeting where the nation decided to exit public higher education. I was, after all, chief financial officer of a public university." He has gone on to prod and poke and propose ways that the nation, with colleges and universities that proclaim themselves "the best higher education system in the world," can provide just that education to the millions of students who still cannot afford an education. His first column was adapted from a speech he gave at a higher education conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, where he was a visiting fellow for higher education finance. In education, Wick has been a trustee of an independent school, an elected member of a public school system, and chief financial officer of a Research I public university. Finding that the debates on access were lacking good data on the needs of low-income students, Wick has embedded himself at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston, where he teaches expository writing and does other odd jobs. With the support of the Center for College Accountability and Productivity, he published a paper, "The Undebated Billions," about federal tax subsidies to higher education, and Common Sense, modeled after the Thomas Paine pamphlet, arguing that the four-year bachelor's degree is obsolete. Six of his pieces for IHE were part of a fellowship to investigate community college financing that Wick won from the Hechinger Institute at Teachers College, Columbia University. He contribute columns to "What the Press Should Ask," for Nieman Watchdog, published by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Wick holds degrees from the nation's most highly selective institutions of higher education, Williams College and Yale University. Therefore, by the standards of the academy itself, he must be right.