By Paul F. Campos. ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after. More...

By Barry Schwartz. The intense competition for admission to highly selective colleges and universities is destroying our kids. Suniya Luthar has spent about 20 years studying and documenting the growth of dysfunction among upper middle class youth, the prime candidates for admission to selective colleges. Luthar has found that extreme substance abuse, clinical depression, eating disorders and promiscuous sex are growing fast among these young people. Could there be a connection between these trends and the stress associated with applying to college? I think so. More...

By John Schwartz. Syracuse University is dropping all fossil fuel stocks from its endowment, the university announced on Tuesday.
At $1.2 billion, Syracuse’s is the largest endowment to divest entirely of fossil fuel stocks. (Stanford University last year pledged to drop coal stocks from its $21.4 billion endowment.) More...

By Alan Harlam. In the morning, Natalie, a student at Brown University, reads a news article about the link between immigration policies and health outcomes. She then takes the shuttle to the local hospital where she volunteers as a Health Leads advocate helping connect patients with community services and resources. After a mid-day class, Natalie reads an academic paper about language acquisition in the Journal of Pediatrics. She ends her day discussing early childhood development in Rhode Island with her team for TRI-Lab, a new collaborative research program at Brown. More...

By Robert E. Johnson. Much has been written about what colleges of the future will look like. "Erase every preconception you ever had about college learning and step into the future," writes Kate Hilpern in The Independent, as she outlines the elimination of classrooms and lectures, student-tailored degree programs, replacement of tenured professors with learning tutors, and institutions run by businesses. More...

By Stefanie Botelho. America’s colleges and universities are terribly inefficient and excessively expensive, foster relatively little learning and ability to think critically, and turn out too many graduates who end up underemployed. These and related problems have grown sharply in the half century since the Higher Education Act of 1965 heralded a major expansion of the federal role in higher education, but some mildly hopeful signs are now emanating from Capitol Hill. More...

By Stefanie Botelho. Plagiarism Education Week, hosted by Turnitin, will return for its 3rd annual virtual conference from April 20-24 with the theme “Copy/Paste/Culture”. Join daily, free 45-min. webcasts devoted to sharing ideas and best practices with educators and students about plagiarism and integrity. More...