The College of the Atlantic (COA)--330 students and 43 faculty members ensconced on Maine's remote Mount Desert Island--has resisted growth, seeing smallness as key to providing an unusual education that cuts across disciplines, rejects academic conventions, and takes a highly personalized approach to teaching and learning. The emphasis on…

Western Oklahoma State College's name comes up whenever athletes get themselves in a jam: They've failed a class. They've dropped another. Maybe they're just short on credits. But they still want to play. Western Oklahoma gives them a chance, offering three credits in two weeks--and for less than $400. Almost as appealing: The community college…

Engineering and teaching are among the most lopsided disciplines in academe's gender split. In 2010, women received 80 percent of the undergraduate degrees awarded in education, the U.S. Education Department reports. And they earned 77 percent of the master's and 67 percent of the doctoral degrees in that field. In engineering, by contrast, women…

The author has been teaching at the Navajo Nation's Dine College for 22 years--five at one of two main campuses and 17 at a remote branch campus in Crownpoint, New Mexico, where he went following his retirement after 30 years as an English professor at Allegheny College. Throughout his academic career, he has made a point of teaching beginning…

For decades, women have enrolled in college in greater numbers than men, and, by many measures, have outperformed them in the classroom. But in recent years, as social scientists and student-affairs offices have focused on other differences between the genders, they have documented patterns that could explain how engagement influences student…

Colleges share many things on Twitter, but one topic can be risky to broach: the reading habits of library patrons. Patrons' privacy is precious to most librarians. Yet new Web services thrive on collecting and sharing the very information that has long been protected. This points to an emerging tension as libraries embrace digital services.…

This article discusses the results of the latest "Open Doors" report from the Institute of International Education. The report states that thousands of mainland Chinese students in pursuit of an American education helped drive up international enrollments at colleges across the United States. Double-digit growth from China, primarily at the…

There have been many efforts in recent years to draw more women into STEM fields. While women have made gains, they are still far less likely than men to major in such fields, especially engineering and computer science. Why? This article presents the responses and the thoughts of a group of scholars and experts.

The role of gender in the global economy is not represented particularly well by old-school "pipeline" theories of women entering particular industries, whether it is manufacturing, medicine, or college teaching. The pipeline analogy suggests that if women enter a field in equal or greater numbers to men, they will somehow automatically be "piped"…

Many colleges have put off repairs and renovation since the recession. Now crumbling buildings, limited budgets, and mounting debt present an increasingly intractable problem. Sightlines, a consulting company that tracks and analyzes facilities issues at more than 300 colleges, shared some of its latest findings with "The Chronicle". The data…

As free online courses draw students to star professors at prestigious colleges, Peer 2 Peer University asks whether instructors are needed at all. This article features Peer 2 Peer University, a three-year-old online institution where students learn together, at no charge, using materials found on the Web. The unusual institution, where anyone…

In a long-simmering national fight over compensation for public-college presidents, the State of California emerged this year as the primary battleground. More than any other institution in recent memory, California State University has publicly and sometimes bitterly wrestled with a vexing question for higher education: How much does a public…

Stakeholders want to know whether the graduates remained in the states where they got their professional science master's (PSM) degree, what their job titles were, and the type of employers they were working for. Business leaders, governors, and university-system heads want to know if graduates are contributing to job creation and work-force…

Few students are as frustrating to a teacher as those who are bright, literate, and interested--but who don't utter a word in class. The author was such a student herself. There are undoubtedly many reasons for muteness. For the author, the major factor was background. Shy students are not necessarily lazy or indifferent or hopeless. Most of the…

Growing up in Westminster in northern Maryland, Ron Shriver, 29, used to pass by the stately brick buildings of the college that is now McDaniel College and wonder: What went on up there on that hill overlooking Main Street? What would it be like to go to a college like that? What would it be like to go to college at all? Nobody in Mr. Shriver's…