By Gwen Moran. In March 2015, Sweet Briar College, a liberal arts school in rural Sweet Briar, Virginia, announced that it would close, marking another loss in the world of women’s-only colleges. Fifty years ago, there were 230 women’s-only colleges in the U.S., according to the Women’s College Coalition, an association for women’s-only colleges. After years of closure, mergers, and conversion to co-educational institutions, there are roughly 40 such institutions left. More...

By Ted Mitchell. Higher education remains the most important investment any person can make in their future. In the several months I’ve been at the U.S. Department of Education, I have had a number of conversations with students and families that have inspired me to double down on our commitment to making college more affordable and accessible. A big part of our work toward that goal has been to increase both the quantity and quality of information that students, families, borrowers and the public have about higher education. More...

By Carla Rivera. At Cal State Dominguez Hills, recreation and leisure studies are out and cyber-security is in. The geography major at USC has morphed into a new degree program called spatial studies. And Russian and German language programs at UC Riverside are virtually kaput, while Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern studies are on the rise. 
College courses such as English, history and math that form the core of a liberal arts education may be fixed like the North Star, but beyond those, universities are constantly evaluating degree programs and making additions and subtractions to fit needs. More...

By Joseph Paul. While Purdue University President Mitch Daniels isn't taking sides on Indiana's controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act, several university groups said they plan to take a stance on the issue soon. More...

By Amy Laitinen. The cost of college has rapidly increased over the past 30 years. Students today face annual costs, between tuition and living, that can easily exceed $10,000 at a community college, $18,000 at a public four-year college (in-state), and $40,000 at a private four-year school. It's unsurprising that today's students often graduate with large debt loads. More than two-thirds of students graduate with debt. And the average amount of debt owed is about $30,000. More...

By Faith Middleton. In Connecticut and across the nation, students of all ages can now enroll in college courses online for free, and receive credit for them in many places. How can universities afford to do this? 
Our guest says higher education must adapt to the demands of the digital planet or become irrelevant. The money part will be figured out later. So far, the start of the new revolution appears to be working. 
The massive open online courses, most tuition-free, are known by the acronym "MOOC's," and students across the world are quickly enrolling at Yale, Wesleyan, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard, with more colleges jumping quickly on the digital bandwagon. More...

By Gwen Moran. The PhD Project believes that the way to cultivate more diversity in business is to start with the university faculty.
Completing the enormous amount of work it takes to earn a Ph.D. is a remarkable accomplishment. But when Mariana Lebron completed her advanced degree in strategic management, she was just the 39th latina to graduate with an advanced business degree in the U.S. and the first to do so at Syracuse University. More...

By Bobby Blanchard. In the wake of reports of hazing and racial discrimination in higher education nationwide, state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, has filed an amendment to the House budget that would place Texas fraternities and sororities under additional state scrutiny. More...

By Naomi Schaefer Riley. If you want to understand how thick the bubble around higher education is, try this experiment: Ask the parent of a 12-year-old if they think higher education is “sustainable.”
Most likely, they will think you’re referring to college costs, as in, “Is it sustainable for Fordham to continue to charge $65,000 a year? And will it be forced to stop before my child starts his freshman year?” More...

By Sonali Kohli. Corinthian Colleges, a company that owns vocational for-profit colleges, is just one of dozens (pg. 20) of companies in the US that allegedly preys upon financially insecure students with false claims about the quality of the education they will receive. Now, at least 100 former Corinthian students are refusing to pay back around $3.3 million in federal and private student loans, claiming that the school defrauded them. More...