History of the Higher Education Directory

Federal budget cuts in the early 1980s forced the Department of Education to limit the type of data it published in its popular reference directory Education Directory: Colleges and Universities.  In its complete form, the directory contained data collected annually by the National Center for Education Statistics and included basic institutional characteristics along with chief academic and administrative personnel of degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States that are accredited by agencies recognized by the Secretary of Education. Due to the budget cuts, the abridged version of the directory could no longer list administrators and chief academic personnel.  The loss of this important communication tool created an information vacuum in the higher education community.

In the fall of 1982, Frederick F. Hafner and Philip Y. Hahn founded Higher Education Publications, Inc. in Washington D.C. to fill the void created by the downsizing of the Department of Education’s widely used publication, Education Directory: Colleges and Universities.  The new directory, to be called the Higher Education Directory, would follow the same inclusion criteria that had been established for the Education Directory: Colleges and Universities and would continue to collect data on administrators.  Accuracy and timeliness were the new directory’s primary requirements.

The small staff of Higher Education Publications, Inc. took on the daunting task of collecting, editing and verifying massive amounts of data, a job that had previously been performed by a government agency.  After several months, over 3,500 institutions had been surveyed, tens of thousands of administrator records had been updated and thousands of accreditations had been verified.  With little fanfare, but a warm welcome from the education community, the HEP 1983 Higher Education Directory was published and began a standard of excellence in directory publishing that is still the benchmark for Higher Education Publications, Inc. today.

Over the past two decades of change in the publishing industry, Higher Education Publications, Inc. has continued to adapt new technologies and to improve the Higher Education Directory to meet our clients’ requirements for trusted information.  The directory has earned a reputation as “The Authoritative Source” for information on who’s who in the higher education community.