Colleges | featured news

The idea that a college diploma is an all-but-mandatory ticket to a successful career is showing fissures. Risky? Perhaps. But it worked for the founders of Twitter, Tumblr and a little company known as Apple.

One person was killed and another seriously wounded Friday in an attack with a bow and arrow-type weapon on the campus of Casper College in Casper, Wyo., a college spokesman told NBC News.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday revived a challenge to President Barack Obama's healthcare reforms, allowing a Christian college to pursue litigation raising First Amendment objections to a law that the court mostly upheld in June.

The American Council on Education, a non-profit organization that represents most of the nation's college and university presidents, is preparing to weigh in on massive open online courses — MOOCs, for short — a new way of teaching and learning that has taken higher education by storm in recent months.

It's the latest snapshot of the growing burden of student debt and it's another discouraging one: Two-thirds of the national college class of 2011 finished school with loan debt, and those who borrowed walked off the graduation stage owing on average $26,600 - up about 5 percent from the class before....

Growing college enrollment has stretched student debt to a record number of U.S. households, burdening young, poor.

Average reading and writing SAT scores for high school students declined to their lowest levels while math results stalled in the exam used for admission at most U.S. colleges. For the class of 2012, the average critical reading score fell 1 point to 496 from a year earlier, the lowest since data became available in 1972, according to a report released today by the New York-based College Board, which administers the test. The average score for writing dropped 1 point to 488, the lowest since writing was added to the exam in 2006. Math results were unchanged at 514. Scores can range from 200 to 800.

All buildings at the University of Texas at Austin were reopened Friday afternoon after a bomb threat earlier prompted a campus-wide evacuation, officials said.

Two universities, in Texas and in North Dakota, ordered the evacuation of their campuses on Friday after receiving bomb threats.

Colleges increasingly are banning smoking or tobacco products altogether from campus. The University of Oklahoma, the University of Oregon and Montana State University are among those which have enacted campuswide bans this year. The University of California system announced in January that by 2014 all of its campuses would ban use or sale of cigarettes and chewing tobacco.