By Matt Reed. A Harvard University alumnus donated $400 million to endow the institution’s engineering college…
One person donated the equivalent of eight years of HCC’s entire operating budget to one subunit of one university.  The entire gift is tax deductible, of course. Read more...

By Matt Reed. I loved the piece on Sinclair Community College’s student success efforts earlier this week in IHE.  It’s worth checking out, but the short version is that SCC has been doing student success initiatives long enough that it’s starting to do a sort of initiative triage, culling the ones that either haven’t worked or that provide far too little bang for the buck. Read more...

The five largest research publishers (a group that changes a bit by discipline) started publishing half of academic papers in 2006, up from 30 percent in 1996 and 20 percent in 1973, according to new research published Wednesday in PLOS ONE by researchers at the University of Montreal. The piece argues that this concentration has reached oligopoly status and poses dangers to academic publishing. Read more...

The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities sent a letter to U.S. Department of Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell Thursday expressing disappointment in how the federal agency views the for-profit sector in the wake of the department's decision to provide debt relief to former Corinthian Colleges students. Read more...

The Association of American University Presses' sixth annual survey on digital book publishing finds presses are pursuing myriad strategies but balancing them against limited resources. Nearly all respondents, or 92 percent, are exploring digital ebook sales, but eight other strategies, from print on demand to ebook rentals, registered between 86 and 36 percent. Read more...

Some 65 percent of tenured senior faculty members plan to put off retirement for various reasons, according to a new study from the TIAA-CREF Institute. But the reasons behind that figure might not be what you think. Just 16 percent of respondents said they’d like to retire by the “normal” retirement age of 67 but expected to work longer for financial reasons. A much bigger proportion of respondents -- 49 percent -- said they’d want to work past age 67 by choice. Read more...

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will not lose accreditation over the academic fraud that occurred there, but it will face one year of probation, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges announced Thursday. In October, the university released a detailed report about widespread and long-lasting academic fraud at the university. Read more...