Interesting Reads This Week
Money, mood, and the shape of AI in higher ed
Glenda Morgan
February 21, 2026
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I read a lot this week. What should I share? The through line was contrast: real money, viral panic, and students quietly building things.
The $619 million question
In the online space, marketing isn’t just a cost, it’s often a defining feature of the business model. A recent LinkedIn post from Perspective Data Science aggregates 2024 Form 990 data and shows just how large that spending has become.
As reported on the 2024 Form 990s and aggregated by Perspective Data Science, the Big 4 nonprofit universities, Western Governors, Southern New Hampshire, National and Everglades spent a staggering $619 million on advertising and promotion in 2024.
The post suggests that the drop-off from the top four to the next highest spenders is not as steep as the chart would suggest.
The next four schools with the highest spends on advertising and promotion were the University of Miami, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania and NYU, which together spent a total of $168 million, or $1,074 per student. Not quite on the scale of the top four, but not an insignificant amount for very strong in-person schools.
In thinking about these data, it is worth bearing a few things in mind.
First, because these data are drawn from nonprofit 990 tax forms, they cover only private nonprofit institutions. I am not aware of a good way to access comparable marketing-spend data for public institutions. This means that institutions such as Arizona State University and Purdue Global are not included.
