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By Anne Sobel. There’s no shortage of inspirational quotes on failure, but have you ever noticed that they never come from an anonymous source? A good failure quote has staying power only if someone with grand achievements says it. Americans love a nice, meaty failure—as long as it ends with success. More...

By Robert Zaretsky. During a meeting off campus this semester, a colleague in the business college spoke to me about a course on the history of globalization that we had once taught together. She told me, with some consternation, that the class, cross-listed with business and history when we taught it, had been dropped from the history-department listing when, with my blessing, she had gone solo with it. With her enrollment numbers flagging, she wondered if I could find out what had happened. More...

By Jeffrey Selingo. In the summer of 1994, I interned at U.S. News & World Report, where I was assigned to collect data for the magazine’s annual college rankings, just beginning to grow in influence. A few years later, when I started reporting for The Chronicle, college-enrollment managers and presidents asked me about the methodology employed by U.S. News and just how much they could manipulate the rankings by attracting higher-caliber students. Their approach for moving up in the rankings was relatively simple: Offer financial aid to smart students, whether they needed the money or not. More...

By Justin E.H. Smith. There is a great die-off under way, one that may justly be compared to the disappearance of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, or the sudden downfall of so many great mammals at the beginning of the Holocene. But how far can such a comparison really take us in assessing the present moment?
The hard data tell us that what is happening to animals right now is part of the same broad historical process that has swept up humans: We are all being homogenized, subjected to uniform standards, domesticated. More...

By Mark Keierleber. The U.S. Senate on Thursday confirmed Ted Mitchell, the chief executive of a nonprofit educational-venture fund and a former president of Occidental College, as the Education Department’s top higher-education official. President Obama nominated Mr. Mitchell for the job in October 2013. More...

By Danya Perez-Hernandez. In an Internet-era version of pen pals, some foreign-language professors at American colleges are using free or low-cost technology to match their students with partners in classes in other countries and to provide authentic language-­immersion experiences. Teletandem, or telecollaboration, as the practice is known, uses video­conferencing—whether Skype, Google Hangouts, or Adobe Connect—to complement both in-person and online language courses. For example, students in a Spanish class here are paired with students in an English course abroad. More...

By Steve Kolowich. Delilah Caldwell, a philosophy instructor at Southern New Hampshire University, may well represent the future of higher education’s teaching force. As one of the first full-time faculty members at Southern New Hampshire’s online college, Ms. Caldwell taught 20 online courses last year: four at a time for five terms, each eight weeks long. The textbooks and syllabi were provided by the university; Ms. Caldwell’s job was to teach. She was told to grade and give feedback on all student work in 72 hours or less. More...

By Beckie Supiano. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth A. Warren introduced legislation on Tuesday that would allow student-loan borrowers to refinance their debt at current interest rates. An identical bill is expected to be introduced in the House of Representatives on Tuesday evening.
"There’s no reason on earth to say some kids can get a better deal than others when they both worked hard to do exactly what we said they should do," Ms. Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in an interview. Student-loan interest rates for new borrowers were reduced last summer under legislation tying them to financial markets. More...