Northeastern University will next year take its growing branch campus business outside the U.S., adding an outlet for professional graduate degree programs in Toronto. The university this spring opened its third branch campus in the San Jose, Calif., offices of Integrated Device Technology, giving Northeastern a presence in Silicon Valley. Read more...

Stratford University, a for-profit institution based in Virginia, this week announced that it has become a public benefit corporation. That move, which a handful of other for-profits have made recently, is a legal change to a company's charter, which allows it to focus more on activities that do not generate a profit -- including actions that are aimed at benefiting the public. Read more...

The University of Southern Mississippi has become the second university in the state, following the University of Mississippi, to stop flying the state flag. Many people are urging the state to remove a Confederate flag from one corner of the state flag. Read more...

A group of Democrats in the U.S. Senate sent a letter Friday to Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen urging them to stop for-profit colleges from converting to nonprofit status. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. No consensus exists in American society about the practice of colleges considering race in admissions decisions. Since the 1970s, colleges have been doing so to try to enroll diverse classes of students (and of course under Jim Crow many colleges considered race to prevent diversity). But the practice has always been controversial -- and voters and judges have questioned and in some cases banned the practice. Read more...

By Jake New. Black graduates of historically black colleges and universities are significantly more likely to have felt supported while in college and to be thriving afterwards than are their black peers who graduated from predominantly white institutions, according to the newest data from an ongoing Gallup-Purdue University study. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Is true interdisciplinary work becoming more common, or is it simply a buzzword -- or, perhaps worse, a trumped-up name for flexible academic labor? That’s what a group of graduate students at Southern Methodist University wanted to know, so they took what data were available to them -- job ads -- and analyzed them for possible answers. Read more...