The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education is an American newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professionals, including staff members and administrators. A subscription is required to read some articles.

The Chronicle is based in Washington, D.C., and is a major news service covering U.S. academia. It is published every weekday online and appears weekly in print except for every other week in May, June, July, and August and the last three weeks in December. In print, The Chronicle is published in two sections: Section A with news, section B with job listings, and The Chronicle Review, a magazine of arts and ideas. It also publishes Arts & Letters Daily.

In 1957, Corbin Gwaltney, founder and editor of the alumni magazine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, joined with editors from magazines of several other colleges and universities for an editorial project to investigate issues in higher education in perspective. The meeting occurred on the day the first Sputnik circled the Earth, October 4, 1957, so the Moonshooter project was formed as a supplement on higher education for the college magazines. The college magazine editors promised 60 percent of one issue of their magazine to finance the supplement. The first Moonshooter Report was 32 pages long and titled American Higher Education, 1958. They sold 1.35 million copies to 15 colleges and universities. By the project's third year, circulation was over three million for the supplement.

In 1959, Gwaltney left Johns Hopkins Magazine to become the first full-time employee of the newly created Editorial Projects for Education (EPE), which was later renamed "Editorial Projects in Education", starting in an office in his apartment in Baltimore and later moving to an office near the Johns Hopkins campus in Baltimore. He realized that higher education would benefit from a news publication.

He and other board members of EPE met to plan a new publication which would be called The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Chronicle of Higher Education was officially founded in 1966 by Corbin Gwaltney, and its first issue was launched in November 1966.

Although it was meant for those involved in higher education, one of the founding ideas was that the general public had very little knowledge about what was going on in higher education and the real issues involved. Originally, it did not accept any advertising and did not have any staff-written editorial opinions. It was supported by grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation. Later on in its history, advertising would be accepted, especially for jobs in higher education, and this would allow the newspaper to be financially independent.

By the 1970s, the Chronicle was attracting enough advertising to become self-sufficient, and in 1978 the board of EPE agreed to sell the newspaper to its editors. EPE sold the Chronicle to the editors for $2,000,000 in cash and $500,000 in services that Chronicle would provide to EPE. Chronicle went from a legal non-profit status to a for-profit company.