Danine Adams has taken a few courses at a four-year university, some at a community college, and still more online while working all over the country as an investigator for the federal Bureau of Prisons—career experience that she has also been able to transform into academic credit. A little from here. A little from there. [...]

Arianna Suarez’s first job after emigrating from Cuba as a teenager was as a cashier at a Walmart in Hialeah, Fla.  Thanks in part to college-level classes in business administration that the company provides, she’s since worked her way up to store manager. “It’s all online,” Suarez says of the courses she takes. “You get [...]

Oregon State University President Ed Ray flinched when a stranger confronted him to say his daughter had just graduated from the school with a degree in philosophy. “I thought, ‘Oh my God,’ ” says Ray, who expected he would have to fend off yet another diatribe about the questionable value, in a weak employment market, [...]

Berevan Omer graduated on a Friday in February with an associate’s degree from Nashville State Community College and started work the following Monday in his new job as a computer-networking engineer at a local television station, making about $50,000 a year. That’s 15 percent higher than the average starting salary for graduates not only from [...]

A handful of colleges think they’ve found the secret to closing the gap between the types of graduates they’re turning out and the types employers say they need. Spiders. Not the hairy, creepy kind. The colleges are using artificial-intelligence spiders that crawl through search engines and read thousands of online “help wanted” ads to check [...]

Cable TV installer John Hoffmeister was strapped to a utility pole 30 feet in the air when his cell phone rang with the offer of a better job. The energy company AREVA was calling to say that it would train Hoffmeister to repair nuclear reactors and at the same time send him to a community [...]

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — Courtney Flynn spends a lot of time in a bright, bustling office suite that looks like something out of the Fortune 500, gleaming with floor-to-ceiling frosted glass, conference rooms, and shiny contemporary furniture. She doesn’t work here. She’s what she calls a “serial visitor,” popping in to get advice she hopes will [...]

Joyce English was about to start studying toward an associate degree she hoped would lead to a job as a consultant to healthcare companies around Tacoma, Wash., where she lives. Then she discovered a database created by the state’s workforce training agency estimating what she’d earn with that degree versus how much she could make [...]

After final exams are over, MIT students will return from their holiday break to experience something different from their usual studies—but almost as important. It’s the university’s annual Charm School, offering instruction in everything from how to make a first impression to how to dress for work to which bread plate to use. Other colleges [...]

TACOMA, Wash. — Five-foot-two Jesica Bush exudes confidence, whether she’s scribbling notes in a 6:30 a.m. class at Bates Technical College here or wrestling 900-pound girders atop a mock two-story building. With her blond ponytail tucked inside a brown hardhat, the 30-year-old is an apprentice with the ironworkers’ union, a job that starts at nearly [...]