By Mikhail Zinshteyn. A new rating system backed by the White House aims to evaluate nearly all of the nation's colleges and universities. Roughly 6,000 schools that educate around 22 million students are about to endure an unprecedented amount of federal scrutiny. More...

By Joseph Urgo. Return on investment (ROI) is the latest data fetish to emerge in our ongoing quest to understand why it is we educate ourselves and our children. ROI calculates the cost of a college education and compares that cost to expected earnings by someone who has that educational credential. If a four-year private college degree in History costs $200,000, and the average history major earns $50,000 a year, it takes four years to get that investment back. If a degree in Engineering costs the same, but the engineer earns $100,000 a year, the return is faster. And if the degree costs less, say $60,000 at a public college, that too can speed up the return. More...

By Bianca Bosker. Can architecture alone give a campus an air of Western prestige?
Over the next few weeks, American undergraduates flooding back to campus will take part in a university tradition even older than drinking from Solo cups or inhaling stale pizza: They’ll be setting up homes inside the rock-hewn walls of Gothic buildings that look like Medieval castles, retrofitted for serious scholars. Many of these buildings were designed a century ago, when young American colleges—desperate to assert their legitimacy—went on a knock-off binge. They cloned British universities’ libraries, cathedrals, quads, sculptures and even dress codes in the hopes of recreating the feel (and prestige) of Oxford and Cambridge. More...