By Jeffrey Selingo. Three years ago, this headline appeared in The New York Times: "Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course." We all know the rest of the story. When the artificial-intelligence class at Stanford University started that fall, 160,000 students in 190 countries had signed up, touching off MOOC mania on campuses around the world. Massive open online courses were heralded as the invention that would disrupt higher education’s expensive business model and would become the next big innovation in the tech world. By the end of 2012, the Times declared it "the year of the MOOC." More...

By Claudia Dreifus. New York University’s students arrived in August at an institution embroiled in scandal.
Universities usually make headlines with sports-related meltdowns, but NYU—the very model of the modern, inflating mega-university—was fending off charges of outlandish payouts and perks to some high-level executives, and of labor and human-rights abuses at its branch campus in the Middle East. More...