By Ry Rivard. Donors gave about $34 billion to North American colleges in 2013, according to an annual survey by the Council for Aid to Education. That's more than $3 billion more than the year before, and the most ever raised in a single year -- topping the $31.6 billion from pre-recession 2008, not adjusted for inflation. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The last time the Higher Education Act came up for a vote in Congress in 2008, Senator Lamar Alexander trotted out a five-foot stack of cartons onto the Senate floor to show the enormity of existing regulations governing higher education. Now that lawmakers are once again contemplating how to rewrite that massive piece of legislation -- which authorizes, among other things, the $150 billion-a-year federal student aid program -- Alexander is returning to his props. Read more...

California Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles jointly announced a new effort Thursday to increase the number of minority Ph.D.s in science, mathematics and technology fields. The four universities will create "a unique, cross-institutional community of underrepresented minority Ph.D. students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty members in the targeted fields. Read more...

By Becca Ramspott. Whether we call it protesting, mudslinging, or “digital hate,” as Chancellor Phyllis Wise did in her blog post addressing University of Illinois’ Twitter incident, there is nothing new about very public, incendiary criticism occurring online — or in person. Racist and derogatory slurs and innuendos happen every day, in our college and university student centers, in our residence halls, out on the field at games. And numerous colleges and universities have felt the wrath of social media outrage in response to a decision, changes in leadership, and other developments. Read more...

By Arthur Levine. Last week the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education released model state legislation to create teaching fellowships for high school seniors willing to teach in high-need schools. Their approach includes a four-year college scholarship, accompanied by professional development, in exchange for a commitment to teach in a high-need school for four years. It is an excellent idea — and it could go farther still. Read more...

By Pamela E. Barnett. The “flipped classroom” is the idea of the moment, advocated by everyone from Bill Gates to Eric Mazur, the pioneering science educator. This educational innovation is exciting and promising – but I’d argue for a slight revision to the discourse to make sure we don’t replace one rigid format with another. My suggestion: let’s scramble, not flip, the classroom. Read more...

By Allie Grasgreen. Young Invincibles, the political advocacy group that has been helping students and other people under 35 enroll in health care programs under the Affordable Care Act before the March 31 deadline, has more than 100 events planned around the country Saturday as part of National Youth Enrollment Day. The events are, in part, an effort to make up some of the ground that was lost due to debilitating malfunctions on the federal enrollment website, HealthCare.gov. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Dozens of colleges and universities have changed the wording of their financial aid web pages since a Democratic Congressman last week accused more than 100 institutions of misleading students about the requirements for obtaining federal grants and loans. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Moodle edges out competitors such as Blackboard among smaller colleges, a new analysis of the learning management systems shows, lending some evidence to the anecdotal popularity of open-source solutions among those institutions. The analysis, published by the former Blackboard engineer George Kroner on his Edutechnica blog, shows familiar players such as Blackboard, Desire2Learn and Instructure are major forces in the market among institutions with 1,000 to 2,000 full-time students. Read more...