By Richard Doughty. Massive open online courses offer anyone with access to the internet the chance to study at a top university for free.
"Of all the things to factor in when running an economy, the most troublesome is people." So begins a slick animation on YouTube, produced by the Open University and introducing the University of Florida's online course, Economic Issues: Food and You. It's a Mooc, which means that it's one of several hundred courses, in all disciplines, that attract tens of thousands of students. More...

By Sophie Grubb. We're paying huge fees, but students like me aren't getting a fair amount of contact time. In first year I found having an empty timetable a novelty. It was something to be smug about as my peers went to a full day of lectures and I stayed at home and watched an entire series of Friends. But come my third year of journalism, media and cultural studies, I started to question what I was paying thousands of pounds for. Even the universities minister David Willetts reckons universities are putting research before teaching. More...

By Nico Perrino. Universities are increasingly snooping on their students and staff. Everything from emails and social media to campus whereabouts. It monitors email and social media accounts, uses thousands of surveillance cameras to track behavior and movement, is funded by billions of dollars from the federal government, and has been called "the most authoritarian institution in America". More...

By Simon Jenkins. Instead of research academics need to focus on giving students what they want for their money: that is, a well-rounded education. Money talks. After two years of tuition fees at £7,000-£9,000 universities are apparently rolling in cash, and their students are demanding value for it. Universities are expected to deliver not just education but jobs. Courses are being tailored to "employability". Research is concentrated in the elite Russell institutions. Now the universities minister, David Willetts, is calling for a "cultural change" to reverse the trend of too much time going on scholarship and not enough on teaching. Is this a new dawn in higher education, or a new darkness? More...

By Richard Adams. A sharp increase in the number of 18-year-olds from Peckham, Barking and Croydon going to university has helped London outpace the rest of the country in the proportion of young people entering higher education, a study reveals. According to the study published by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce), young people from London are 36% more likely to enter higher education now than they were in the late 1990s. That compares with a 26% increase for the rest of the country. More...

By Phillip Inman. Undergraduates at Manchester University propose overhaul of orthodox teachings to embrace alternative theories. Few mainstream economists predicted the global financial crash of 2008 and academics have been accused of acting as cheerleaders for the often labyrinthine financial models behind the crisis. Now a growing band of university students are plotting a quiet revolution against orthodox free-market teaching, arguing that alternative ways of thinking have been pushed to the margins. Economics undergraduates at the University of Manchester have formed the Post-Crash Economics Society, which they hope will be copied by universities across the country. More...

If Simon Jenkins' ill-informed diatribe against universities had been a student essay, I would have awarded it a clear fail (Universities should ditch the talk of investing in the future, 23 October). He claims that because of £9,000 fees, universities are "awash" with cash. No, the fees hike (which most academics thoroughly opposed) merely offset the 90% cut in teaching budgets imposed by the government. Many universities are still struggling financially. More...

Bravo Manchester University economics students for criticising "university courses for doing little to explain why economists failed to warn about the global financial crisis" (Economics students rebel at orthodox free-market syllabus, 25 October). However, there could be no explanation of why economists had failed to warn about the crisis, precisely because a significant number of high-profile non-neoclassical economists had warned about the crisis. More...

By Amelia Gentleman. It's a year since AC Grayling's New College of the Humanities opened for business, with its big-name lecturers and £18,000-a-year fees. Is it succeeding in its mission to be 'elite but not exclusive'?
At 9.30am promptly, AC Grayling begins a two-hour Introduction to Philosophy lecture for year one students in an airy conservatory at the back of his new private college. For anyone whose attention is straying, there are views on to a yard with plane trees, a white stucco mews house and the blackened brick of the smart Bloomsbury townhouse where the New College of the Humanities is based. None of the 19 students is gazing out of the window, however. They are focused on the lecture, which centres on René Descartes, but considers along the way the nature of knowledge and how we obtain it. More...