The college admissions process teaches students how to express themselves during interviews, how to describe their best qualities in application essays. It may also make them wary of college marketing campaigns, and skeptical of being treated as a statistics, due to the large role played by standardized-test scores and grade-point averages. Such…

A pair of economists at the College of William and Mary have devised a new way of comparing colleges' graduation rates--a method, borrowed from business analysis, that they believe is fairer and more useful than the techniques used by "U.S. News & World Report" and the Education Trust. That general technique of regression analysis underlies the…

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize would be shared by Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the award implicitly celebrated a third party--academic institutions. Much of the research on global warming has come from university scientists, and higher…

As at many two-year colleges around the country, the pass rate among Montgomery County Community College students who take remedial-math classes, which cover material students are typically expected to master in high school, is much lower than school officials would like. Of the roughly 1,350 new students at Montgomery County who took a…

Gay and lesbian faculty members may no longer be desperate to hide their true identities in academe, but many are desperately seeking health insurance for their partners. With anti-gay discrimination fading, obtaining health and other benefits for partners is still a major concern for many gay and lesbian academics. A growing number of colleges…

Each year more than 300 applicants vie for 18 slots at the Central Institute of Restoration, the program responsible for the restoration of many of Italy's greatest works of art, and the training of experts in the repair of objects of artistic and/or cultural significance. Successful candidates must demonstrate knowledge of art history, chemistry,…

Nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, a small liberal-arts college is establishing itself as a factory for a coveted international export: students who land Fulbright scholarships to teach or do research abroad. In the last four years, 48 students from Pomona College, which enrolls about 1,500…

Since the arrival of RateMyProfessors.com, many a faculty member has wished his students would keep their opinions to themselves. At Brigham Young University, however, the university pays undergrads to give professors a piece of their mind. Each year the university's Students Consulting on Teaching program employs 25 students to observe…

Going online nowadays often requires more log-ins and passwords than most people can remember. Faculty and staff members will sometimes write their various passwords on yellow sticky notes and post them on their computer monitors--leaving confidential data wide open to any passer-by. What if there were just one password? A single log-on for e-mail…

Because of lofty but imprecise instructions, the Ph.D. dissertation is a decidedly uneven genre. Barbara E. Lovitts, a higher-education researcher who has studied doctoral attrition rates extensively, set out to bring academe's discussion of the dissertation into the age of feedback. She conducted focus groups with professors in 10 disciplines at…

The Carlisle Indian School, founded by Richard Henry Pratt in 1879 to educate American Indian youth as an assist to having those youth success in mainstream America, is featured in two recently published books, "The Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation," by Sally Jenkins (Doubleday, 2007), and "Carlisle vs. Army:…

Just because a professor has been denied tenure doesn't mean that he or she must exit academe. In this article, the author focuses on how to get a new job in higher education. He presents a set of steps designed to help academics choose appropriate positions for which to apply and brand themselves as attractive candidates. Important features to…

For more than four decades, universities have used affirmative-action policies to increase the participation of U.S.-born women and members of minority groups in higher education, where traditionally they have been under-represented. Yet those policies, often applied in decisions about which students to admit and which faculty members to hire,…

Since its unveiling in 2003, professors and college students have flocked to the virtual world of Second Life. Professors use Second Life to hold distance-education classes, saying that communication among students becomes livelier when they assume digital personae. Anthropologists and sociologists see the virtual world as a laboratory for…

Singapore is no longer content to produce only engineers and technocrats, says Tharman Shanmugaratnam, minister for education. The government wants to foster a dynamic environment that can attract thinkers and leaders in many fields, not just science. Singapore's planners envision their city as the "Boston of the East"--where the alchemy between…