A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a proposal to merge the University of Baltimore into Morgan State University, a historically black institution, The Baltimore Sun reported. Read more...

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Tuesday released a report on how some states and colleges are using data to improve student graduation and retention rates. The foundation said the report is based on a decade's worth of lessons learned. Read more...

It's probably for the best that Voltaire (at right) isn't around to see what's going on in the best of all possible states, by which we mean Kentucky. The new Republican governor, Matt Bevin, told reporters last week that he wants to change funding formulas for public higher education so that colleges and universities receive more money for study in fields like engineering and less for others. Read more...

When colleges and universities renovate their libraries, the changes they make often don't align with the priorities of librarians themselves, according to a survey of academic librarians by the Sasaki Associates, a design firm. Read more...

The new Carnegie Classifications of Institutions of Higher Education -- the first produced since the project shifted to Indiana University from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching -- is now officially available. Colleges and universities have been reviewing their data for the last month or so in advance of the official release. Read more...

The University of Oxford has decided not to take down a statue of Cecil Rhodes at its Oriel College despite alumni threats to withdraw millions in donations, the college announced. The statue, like a plaque about Rhodes elsewhere on the campus, has been caught up in the debate that has swept campuses in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere about honoring historical figures whose pasts included racist or other detrimental acts or statements. Read more...

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities this week announced a project to work with 44 of its member institutions to substantially change students' experience during their first year of college. Read more...

A group of research universities will work with three Hispanic-serving universities on a project aimed at increasing the number of Latino professors in humanities fields, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and led by the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Minority Serving Institutions. Read more...

The number of colleges and universities designated as Hispanic-serving continues to grow, as does the proportion of all Latino students they enroll, Excelencia in Education reports. Read more...

The Online Learning Consortium will this year rebrand its main conferences and expand its Quality Scorecard, according to plans released Thursday. Read more...