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By Libby Sander. As an admissions counselor at Valparaiso University, Daniel Jarratt noticed that few high-school students really knew what they were looking for in a college. For all the talk about the importance of college choice, most students Mr. Jarratt spoke to knew of a few colleges they wanted to attend but couldn’t articulate exactly why they wanted to do so. So on his nights and weekends, Mr. Jarratt, now a first-year Ph.D. candidate in computer science at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, started working on a tool that would direct students to the right colleges even if they didn’t know what they were looking for. More...

By Jonah Newman. In 2011-12, the 50 states and the District of Columbia spent a total of $6.8-billion on need-based grant aid for college students, according to the most recent report from the National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs. That might sound like a lot, but it averages out to $482 per enrolled undergraduate student. That’s less than one-fifth of what the federal government spent on Pell Grants, the main program for needy students. More...

By Mark Keierleber. With state spending on public colleges recovering slowly and tuition rates still rising, a policy-advocacy group has proposed creating a competitive federal grant program to give states incentives to increase spending on and reduce the cost of higher education. The group, the Center for American Progress, on Tuesday released a report exploring the effects of what it called state disinvestment in public colleges and universities. In the report, the group proposed a program through which the federal government would match state funding for higher education if states agreed to carry out reforms that ensured students would have access to an affordable and high-quality education. More...

By Don Troop. Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, announced in a letter to alumni on Thursday that the institution had collected $6.1-billion in a seven-year capital campaign that concluded on December 31. It was the biggest sum raised by an Ivy League institution and the second largest in higher education, behind Stanford University’s $6.2-billion in a campaign that ended in 2011. Harvard University announced a $6.5-billion campaign last fall. More...

By Jabeen Bhatti, Janelle Dumalaon, and Aida Alami. The fight for more visibility and higher rankings on the global higher-education stage has wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council countries scrambling for international academic talent, and offering salary packages with a reputation for being generous. That reputation, it turns out, is not always deserved.
But for many struggling Arab academics from countries where teaching is less lucrative, a common solution is to look toward the Gulf. More...

By David D. Perlmutter. The first time I served as an external reviewer for a candidate’s tenure bid at another university, I had just gotten tenure myself. I was flattered to be asked and wanted to do a good job at what I felt, and still feel, is one of the most sacred tasks of the tenured professor: evaluating whether or not to induct someone into our guild.
So I was ready to do my duty. The only problem? The state of the tenure file I received. It could have been a test case in how not to present a tenure packet to an external reviewer. More...

By Merlin Chowkwanyun and Karen M. Tani. When historians gathered for their annual meeting in January, the future of the discipline itself was on the agenda. Amid the talk about the relevance of historical scholarship and the precarious employment prospects for history Ph.D.’s were promising proposals aimed at broadening the graduate curriculum and rewarding nonacademic career paths. But one potential solution seemed to be largely overlooked: the dual-degree program.
Graduate students in a dual-degree program simultaneously earn a history Ph.D. and a second degree, often a master’s from a professional school. An aspiring historian planning to write on the history of urban planning, for example, could earn degrees in both fields. More...