Colleges, Education | 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.

Efforts to disclose college degrees' earnings potential are picking up steam, holding higher education directly accountable for return on investments by families and taxpayers.

In their quest for the next big drug discovery, pharmaceutical companies are increasingly teaming up with some of the nation's top universities, recruiting campus scientists as partners and offering schools multimillion-dollar deals to work on experimental drugs in development.

Want a solid, middle-class salary straight out of college? Skip the last two years. A site that analyzes state-level data of how much people earn a year after graduating college found some counterintuitive results: Certain students who earn associate’s degrees can get higher salaries than graduates of four-year programs —sometimes thousands of dollars more.

They're the places you think of when you think of "college" - leafy campuses, small classes, small towns. Liberal arts colleges are where students ponder life's big questions, and learn to think en route to successful careers and richer lives, if not always to the best-paying first jobs....

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.

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....

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.