By Ry Rivard. Over the past year and a half, the credit ratings of several prestigious liberal arts colleges have been downgraded or assigned a negative outlook by Moody’s Investors Service. 
(Note: This article has been updated from an earlier version to note that these ratings were issued over the last 18 months, not the past several months.) 
These are institutions -- Haverford College, Morehouse College, Oberlin College and Wellesley College – that top students seek out, yet they are showing small but noticeable signs of fiscal stress several years after the end of the recession. Their downgraded ratings are still better than those of plenty of other institutions, and Moody's has issued plenty of gloomy projects about  colleges during the economic downturn. But the recent actions are notable because they affect colleges that are by many measures -- money, prestige, history -- among the most fortunate in the country. Read more...

By Alice Philipson. Oxford University risks undermining its reputation by accepting wealthy foreign students with poor grades for “purely commercial reasons”, an internal report warns. The “associate students”, who generally have lower average grades than a typical Oxford undergraduate, pay as much as £13,000 a term and can stay for up to a year. Although the students are not officially part of the university, senior figures said they “pose severe reputational risk” because their academic standards are “often low”. The report said that colleges, which are independent of the university and are free to set their own admissions policies, granted them admission for “purely commercial” reasons. Read more...