PRRC is a research and consultancy LLC focused on higher education, founded in 2021 by Kelly Grotke and Stephen Hastings-King, who both received PhDs in history from Cornell University. Collectively, our members have decades of experience in finance, research, academic publishing, teaching, and administration. We’ve worked both inside and outside higher ed, drafted international valuation guidance as well as comment letters on proposed regulations to federal and international agencies and SROs, issued regulatory analysis reports, consulted with state officials on divestment legislation, and worked with the European Parliament on matters of expertise and the effective communication of policy.
We offer our clients a range of research reports on endowments and valuation, debt and/or investment history, divestment, credit ratings, budgetary models/consequences, management and institutional priorities, and more, all tailored to their institutional situation and needs. We also offer context- and issue-specific consultations and presentations.
The idea to form PRRC emerged out of pandemic circumstances, which further aggravated an already deep structural crisis in higher ed, one now decades in the making. The idea of “running higher ed like a business” has resulted in increasing adjunctification, ballooning student debt, declining state support, ever-rising tuitions, questionable “public-private-partnerships,” lack of financial transparency, and rapidly declining faculty and also administrator morale. The pandemic only underscored an already serious predicament: how to make non-profit higher education both accessible and sustainable, especially in an environment where the distance between the country’s wealthiest institutions and all the rest reflects the increasing income inequalities within our society more generally.
Prior to forming PRRC, we’d consulted with several private and public colleges and universities that were interested in finding alternatives to austerity. In the course of that work, we discovered that many faculty, administrators, students, and alums were simply unaware of how deeply financialization had affected their institutions. This is understandable – only recall the enormous public confusion about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, the damaging effects of which continue to ripple throughout our society.