American-style summer programs in China, catering to Chinese-born students, have taken American universities by surprise. They are yet one more player in the complex and often opaque Chinese education industry, an industry in which American colleges are finding themselves increasingly entwined. These programs have become a booming enterprise,…

Boston College saw a 26-percent decrease in applications this year, a drop officials largely attribute to a new essay requirement. Last year the private Jesuit institution received a record 34,051 applications for 2,250 spots in its freshman class. This year approximately 25,000 students applied, and all of them had to do one thing their…

In these times of financial crisis, much of the discussion about scholarly publishing has focused on budgets, the switch to electronic formats, and the future of the monograph. Throughout, however, university presses have continued to bring out important scholarship that is the mainstay of academe. "The Chronicle Review" asked a group of editors…

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before. The signs of sickness appeared earlier in the newspaper business, which…

Senior scholars, the A-list of academic publishing, seem to submit fewer unsolicited manuscripts to traditional humanities journals than they used to. The journal has become, with very few exceptions, the place where junior and midlevel scholars are placing their work. Technology and changing habits have called into question the nature of the…

Conduct officers have been moving away from the legalistic disciplinary systems that colleges built in the latter half of the 20th century on the belief that they'd lose lawsuits without them. Confident now that judges won't expect those systems to conform to the rules of criminal procedure, colleges are making hearings less like trials, and more…

The academic year has ended, and over the past few weeks, thousands of students have traveled abroad for the summer or the first year after college. However, students aren't heading abroad in the same direction, or the same spirit, that their parents or grandparents did. This article examines why the patterns of student travel has changed.

The 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico took advantage of the nation's strong economy during the 2007-8 budget year and spent a total of nearly $10-billion on student aid. That was an increase of 6.6 percent from the year before when adjusted for inflation, according to an annual report released this week by the National…

A recently-released analysis of population data has confirmed the acknowledged trend of major diversification in America's higher education student body. After this year's high-school seniors receive their diplomas, the number of graduates nationwide will begin a slow decline until 2015, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher…

Backed by a strong economy and a growing stock market, American colleges and universities raised an estimated $29.8-billion in the 2007 fiscal year, the highest total ever recorded, according to a report released last week by the Council for Aid to Education. But the country's recent economic troubles have some fund-raising experts concerned that…

For several months, the subprime-mortgage crisis has hovered over colleges, its ultimate effects uncertain. That is changing. In the past few weeks, a series of loan companies have withdrawn from broad categories of student lending, and some colleges have acknowledged sharp increases in borrowing costs. The most severe effect may be still to come,…

For decades, college coaches in many sports have been recruiting internationally to stock their teams with the best players they can find. American universities in the NCAA's Division I gain competitive advantages with gifted young athletes from overseas, and the proportion of foreign players in many Division I sports has doubled since the…

This article reports that textbook sales are falling at many university presses, a trend that has accelerated in the past couple of months. That's the word from press directors anxious about the decline but unsure what's causing it or how to stop it. Not every press has been affected. Two of the biggest players, Oxford University Press and…

In his book titled "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age," Larry M. Bartels wrote that "the familiar image of a party system transformed by Republican gains among working-class cultural conservatives turns out to be largely mythical." According to Bartels, who is director of Princeton's Center for the Study of Democratic…

This article reports that the number of international students enrolled in American colleges in the fall of 2007 shattered previous records and represents the largest one-year increase in decades, according to new data from the Institute of International Education. Educators and government officials say the bounce indicates that hostile…