A two-year Congressionally mandated assessment of financial threats to the nation's research universities ended on Thursday with the offer of a grand bargain: Cut costs and form more partnerships with communities and industry, and expect increased revenues and fewer regulations. A report on the study, coordinated by the National Research Council…

As the economy sputters and outcry over the cost of college continues, more students keep enrolling--even if, in the past year, some have used campuses to protest their debt burden and what they see as other economic injustices. Enrollment has ticked up, but who goes to college and how they do it are changing. Students long dubbed…

Coursera has been operating for only a few months, but the company has already persuaded some of the world's best-known universities to offer free courses through its online platform. Colleges that usually move at a glacial pace are rushing into deals with the upstart company. But what exactly have they signed up for? And if the courses are free,…

College endowments earned an average return of minus-3 percent for the 2008 fiscal year and an estimated minus-22.5 percent in the five months after that, two new reports show. More than a quarter of all institutions said they plan to draw less money from their endowment this year than they had expected to spend. After a half-decade of soaring…

The University of North Texas at Dallas (UNT-Dallas) was conceived 10 years ago as a public institution along tried-and-true lines--a comprehensive metropolitan university meant to serve a diverse student population and to improve the economic outlook of a part of the city that prosperity has left behind. But that was before management consultants…