By Scott Jaschik. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed Monday to review the constitutionality of the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions cases. And many legal experts believe the justices are likely to be skeptical of such consideration. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to consider a case that could effectively make union membership dues optional for public employees. The vast majority of faculty members who are represented by unions are in public higher education, and such a shift could be devastating to the financing of their unions. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Friday's Supreme Court decision that states must authorize and recognize gay and lesbian marriages could create major legal challenges for religious colleges -- primarily evangelical Christian colleges that bar same-sex relationships among students and faculty members. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Historically black colleges -- public and private -- were created amid an era of overt discrimination and hostility to their mission. A new book traces how they responded to those challenges, typically without the financing enjoyed by other institutions, as well as to challenges that followed the theoretical end of Jim Crow. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. What have long set U.S.-trained engineers apart from their global peers -- at least in the minds of lots of employers -- are their softer skills. While universities in many other countries focus almost entirely on technical mastery, American engineering programs also stress the development of additional competencies, such as critical thinking, writing and the ability to work across disciplines and in diverse settings. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Critics have long said graduate students in the humanities take too long -- a decade is not uncommon -- to earn their Ph.D.s. But the calls for reform attracted new converts and grew louder after 2008, when available tenure-track positions in the humanities dropped in number. With fewer available positions, some said, programs needed to help their students accrue less debt and get them out on the job market faster. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Some 15 years ago, the Lilly Endowment funded a massive experiment to see what happened when colleges asked students to think critically about how they might lead meaningful lives. Such purposeful exploration programs, as they were called, popped up on 88 campuses, at a few million dollars each. Read more...

By Kylar Loussikian for The Australian. A squat, anonymous office block on the industrial outskirts of Colchester, north of London, doesn’t appear to be the likeliest place for the headquarters of an international fraud operation. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. In a deal announced Saturday evening by Virginia's attorney general, the college's current leaders agreed to relinquish control to a new president and a largely new board. Saving Sweet Briar, an organization of alumnae who have fought the planned closure of the college, has agreed to raise $12.5 million to continue operating the college in the 2015-16 academic year. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. The University of Arizona, the last holdout in a state investing heavily in distance education for undergraduates, will this fall join the state’s other public universities in offering online bachelor’s degrees, as UA Online opens its virtual doors. Read more...