Chronicling Higher Education
for Nearly Forty Years

Editor’s Note: The Chronicle of Higher Education was founded with Corporation support that was targeted at critical start-up and development stages of the project. It’s an example of how a focused foundation investment was used to create a publication that has become not only essential to the field it serves but sustainable, as well. The Chronicle remains at the leading edge of higher education reporting while exploring innovations that will continue to ensure its viability over time.

When the first issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education was published in November 1966, some questioned whether there was enough news to warrant a paper that focused solely on the activities of colleges and universities. The Chronicle initially was published every other week by a staff of 12, including 7 editors and writers; it had no editorials and no advertising, and its 5,000 subscribers paid $10 for 22 issues a year. Today, as the Chronicle approaches its 40th anniversary, it is published 49 times a year and has a print circulation of more than 83,000, with 5,600 online-only subscribers and more than 250 institutional subscribers that own licenses allowing everyone on their campuses to access the Chronicle’s entire web site.

The impact of the Chronicle on the world of higher education is documented by a range of factors that are not reflected merely by the number of people who read the paper. In the decades since the first issue appeared, the Chronicle has covered many topics such as cold fusion, plagiarism and evolution that its readership intrinsically seeks at a depth that most of the daily press does not provide. Even today, many newspapers do not often cover higher education from a national perspective, and, when they do, their articles usually follow a Chronicle story on the same subject.

Written by: Joyce Baldwin. Baldwin has written on a wide range of topics for many national publications and is author of two biographies for young adult readers: DNA Pioneer: James Watson and the Double Helix and To Heal the Heart of a Child: Helen Taussig, MD.  Currently she is working on a book, Once Upon a Christmastime, which tells the story of New York City’s first Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Madison Square Park in 1912.