Colleges, College Student | featured news

Educators from nine universities are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.

A Columbia University professor gave memorable, yet unorthodox, lecture to his quantum mechanics students.

Using formulas he says are derived from "only math and 15 years of data, no personal hunches," a college student named Ben Zauzmer is taking a Nate Silver-like approach to predicting the Oscar winners -- and he says last year, his model proved 100 percent effective at determining who'd take home trophies in all eight of the major categories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A senator's examination of for-profit colleges paints them as dropout factories, where billions of dollars are squandered on financial aid and the schools' emphasis is more on attracting students than educating them.