Community colleges pride themselves on their open-door policies. For decades, access and enrollment, especially of traditionally underserved students, were their key markers of success. In recent years, lawmakers, accreditors, and the institutions themselves have begun demanding more. It is no longer enough for community colleges to get students…

Most people have at least secondhand knowledge about Second Life, a virtual-reality world created by Linden Lab, in which avatars (digital characters) lease "islands" for real-life purposes--to sell products, conduct classes, do research, hold conferences, and even recruit for admissions. About nine million avatars reportedly interact on this…

Of the 300 or so native languages once spoken in North America, only about 150 are still spoken--and the majority of those have just a handful of mostly elderly speakers. For most Native American languages, colleges and universities are their last great hope, if not their final resting place. People at a number of institutions across the country…

Strategic plans migrated to higher education from the corporate world. Although some universities have been drafting them for at least 40 years, their use has exploded over the last decade, particularly in the last two years. Now virtually every institution, from research universities to community colleges, has a plan. Competition for students,…

Although the American population is growing more diverse, and colleges are seeking to enroll students and hire faculty members from many different backgrounds, the top leadership at most higher-education institutions remains quite homogeneous. For example, a 2005 Chronicle survey of about 1,300 presidents at four-year institutions, of whom 764…

The USA Patriot Act is having far-reaching effects on the kinds of data that wind up on some academics' computers in Canada. Canadian colleges, responding to provincial laws passed in reaction to the Patriot Act, are preventing professors from entering the United States with students' private data on their laptops and limiting the locations of…

Conservatives are a small minority within the American professoriate, according to a major study whose results were released this month. The study, arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s, found that only 9.2 percent of college instructors are conservatives, and that only 20.4 percent voted for George W.…

Although the United States remains the world's preferred destination for students looking to earn degrees abroad, it is ceding ground to its rivals in Western Europe. Britain has long been the United States' main competitor for international students, but Continental countries like the Netherlands, France, and Germany are increasingly popular…

A year ago, Charles Miller, a former chairman of the University of Texas' Board of Regents, delivered the report of Commission on the Future of Higher Education to Secretary Margaret Spellings. Spellings hailed the report as a turning point: It was the day, she hoped, when U.S. colleges reoriented their mission to provide the highest possible…

At the annual conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (Nacac), admissions deans and high-school counselors gathered in September 2007 to grapple with questions such as: (1) Rethinking the role of standardized tests in admissions (many attendees predict that psychometric giants ACT and SAT, will not always dominate…

In this article, the author discusses the views put forward at the most recent meeting of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a conservative organization devoted to the reformation of academe. Themes included assessment and accountability and the need for an increased focus on undergraduate teaching, and a general distrust of the…

The home-school movement, a once-marginalized segment of the educational community, is all grown up and going off to college. As colleges across the nation report increasing numbers of applications from home-schooled students, policies have been developed to evaluate these candidates. Translating years of independent study into something that…

India's universities are suffering from an acute faculty shortage, with some institutions unable to fill as many as 35 percent of their positions. From the country's elite Indian Institutes of Technology to regional engineering colleges, the dearth of professors has led to overcrowded classrooms, student discontent, and deep concerns about how…

The authors decided to use Bob Dylan's 2004 memoir "Chronicles" as a text in their freshman humanities seminars at Villanova University, partly to illustrate to increasingly career-oriented students--prospective engineers, business majors, and the like--how a liberal education and exposure to classic literature are relevant to everyone, and partly…

Drawing on his personal experience applying to an elite university and working with low-income students at Smith College, the author outlines the assets and challenges low-income students bring to these schools. He discusses the conditions necessary for such students to achieve in an elite environment, focusing on the following four…