By Jason McSheene. We all know how the new academic year begins: You tell yourself, “This will be my best, most productive year of grad school yet!” But now many of us are more than a month into the fall term, and it’s a good time to ask: What are you really doing differently to ensure this outcome? Has that start-of-school energy dissipated? To get it back, one key strategy is to outline your goals and pursue them intentionally. Read more...

By John R. Thelin. Earl Cheit got it right. His 1971 book, The New Depression in Higher Education, relied on good data to deliver the bad news that many American colleges were in financial trouble. The message was disconcerting, because most colleges had had a decade of full enrollments and major construction, combined with generous support from donors and state legislatures, and abundant federal grants for research. More...

By Paul Voosen. It’s a conservative, incremental time in science these days. Grants are elusive. Many researchers say that, to win financing, they have to almost know the results of their experiment before they conduct it. Forget moonshots; they just want to make it to next year with a full salary.
Despite those headwinds, a group of science-fiction authors and researchers met this month to give a glad yell of support to those engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs with big dreams. It’s time to aim higher, they said—much higher. More...