Moody's mood regarding higher education has brightened a bit.

The rating agency has upgraded the industry from negative to stable.  Major reasons given in its report are (1) more state aid and (2)  more research funding.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/moodys-upgrades-higher-eds-outlook-from-negative-to-stable/102213?cid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

The report finds that higher ed finances are stabilizing.
http://www.educationdive.com/news/moodys-finds-higher-ed-finances-stabilizing/402014/

Is this report realistic?  Can one rely on Moody's?  Well, let's not forget:
Credit rating agencies (CRAs) — firms which rate debt instruments/securities according to the debtor's ability to pay lenders back — played a significant role at various stages in the American subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 that led to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. The new, complex securities of "structured finance" used to finance subprime mortgages could not have been sold without ratings by the "Big Three" rating agencies — Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch Ratings. A large section of the debt securities market — many money markets and pension funds — were restricted in their bylaws to holding only the safest securities — i.e securities the rating agencies designated "triple-A".^[1] The pools of debt the agencies gave their highest ratings to ^[2] included over three trillion dollars of loans to homebuyers with bad credit and undocumented incomes through 2007.^[3] Hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of these triple-A securities were downgraded to "junk" status by 2010,^[1][4][5] and the writedowns and losses came to over half a trillion dollars.^[6][7] This led "to the collapse or disappearance" in 2008-9 of three major investment banks (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch), and the federal governments buying of $700 billion of bad debt from distressed financial institutions.^[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the_subprime_crisis

All I'm suggesting is that in light of all that's happened during the past year --- Corinthian Colleges' demise; 900 lay offs since last fall at the University of Phoenix; several private colleges closing or nearly closing --- none of us in the private sector of higher education should sit back and assume that we are out of the woods.