Bobby Curran grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore, finished high school, and followed his grandfather's steel-toed bootprints straight to Sparrows Point, a 3,000-acre sprawl of industry on the Chesapeake Bay. College was not part of the plan. A gritty but well-paying job at the RG Steel plant was Mr. Curran's ticket to a secure…

Mike Potts was halfway through a five-year prison sentence outside Houston when he heard about a program that would help him start a business when even buddies with clean records were struggling to find work. The Prison Entrepreneurship Program, run by a nonprofit group of the same name, works with Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business…

Everyone has an opinion about technology. Depending on whom you ask, it will either: a) Liberate us from the drudgery of everyday life, rescue us from disease and hardship, and enable the unimagined flourishing of human civilization; or b) Take away our jobs, leave us broke, purposeless, and miserable, and cause civilization as we know it to…

The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today's fast-changing job market. Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of "badges" to certify skills and abilities.…

In this article, the author discusses why he is not preparing his students to compete in the global marketplace. For all the talk of "globalization" as the very engine of their generation's future prospects, his students seemed far more concerned about disappearing jobs at home, rising global temperatures, and a general anxiety about what it all…

Economists may be biased in ways that are not apparent to many. A widely espoused theory in economics is that regulators' decisions often become biased in favor of the industries they regulate; to use economic jargon, they become "captured." Economic incentives encourage even the best-intentioned regulators to cater to the interests of the…

Western Governors University Texas (WGU Texas), where the author is chancellor, is not an easy institution to describe. It just does not fit the profile of most traditional universities, even the newer for-profit and online ones. It brings the work of a national, online, nonprofit university into a state, and it embraces a competency-based…

Many community colleges, along with some public-school districts and family-literacy programs, are overhauling their GED curricula and support services. Nearly 40 million American adults do not have high-school or GED diplomas, according to 2009 data from the American Council on Education, which developed the GED test. Another of the council's…

Billy Gillispie, like many college basketball coaches, was hired--and fired--in a hurry. But the contract negotiations that dragged on for nearly two years while he coached the University of Kentucky's men's basketball team showed little of the same urgency that defined his entrance and exit. Mr. Gillispie worked for Kentucky under a memorandum of…

When President Obama gave his commencement address at the University of Notre Dame last month, he lightened the mood with a joke about honorary degrees. "So far I'm only one for two as president," Mr. Obama said. "Father Hesburgh is 150 for 150." He was referring to the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, former Notre Dame president, who just turned 92.…

At the end of 2005, Robert D. Felner was riding high. A well-paid dean at the University of Louisville, he had just secured a $694,000 earmarked grant from the U.S. Department of Education to create an elaborate research center to help Kentucky's public schools. The grant proposal, which Mr. Felner had labored over for months, made some impressive…

When Robert D. Felner applied to become dean of education at the University of Louisville in 2003, he carried a genuinely impressive vita. But two of the most recent large grants listed on that vita could not have survived close scrutiny--and it isn't clear that Louisville's search committee scrutinized them at all. First, the impressive part:…

The University of Louisville's former dean of education, Robert D. Felner, faces a criminal trial on charges that he and an associate diverted most of a $694,000 earmarked federal grant into their own bank accounts. Louisville officials have announced an administrative overhaul that will, they say, help prevent any future misbehavior with grants.…

A recent report from the Modern Language Association, "Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey," unfortunately passed over an important aspect of women's rise through the professorial ranks: how they move through the process of monograph publication, especially in comparison with male colleagues. As an acquiring editor in the scholarly and…

Academic fame is an even stranger goddess than her nonacademic counterpart. In this article, the author contends that academic fame is not easily lost, compared with other kinds of fame. In the world of films or novels, one's fame is fleeting--one is often only as good as his last production. Films that splashed across marquees in the summer are…