Just as the Internet has made news free and music cheap, it may be about to vastly lower the cost of one of the most expensive commodities in America: college. Several new companies and organizations with impressive pedigrees are harnessing the Internet to provide college courses for free, or for next to nothing. And while [...]

Sandy Baum, an independent policy analyst for the College Board, discovered recently that colleges and universities awarded $5.3 billion in grants beyond the demonstrated financial need of students and their families this year. Her analysis included state-supported public universities, which in some cases gave more than half of their aid to students who federal formulas [...]

America’s universities have long had a reputation for being the best in the world—a truth so apparently self-evident that it’s rarely been doubted or questioned. But what if the nation’s 5,000 institutions of higher education, as a whole, have fallen behind their international peers? Indeed, there’s lots of evidence that American higher education could be [...]

The extraordinary gulf between science and education was on sharp display this week. The New York Times’ Schools for Tomorrow conference and NBC’s Education Nation took place within a few days of each other, both in New York City. The Times’ conference emphasized the tremendous strides that have been made in educational technology—particularly in online [...]

Republican Party presidential candidates continue to battle it out to see who might face the Democratic Party nominee—most likely, President Barack Obama—in the 2012 race for the White House. As they’ve made known their views about everything from health care and taxes to abortion and gay marriage, education has thus far been overlooked as a [...]

Editor’s Note: With the rise of for-profit colleges and online learning, higher education is at a crossroads. Some experts say America’s colleges and universities are facing a period of “disruptive innovation,” with new ideas and technologies potentially sweeping away established institutions—if they don’t adapt. We asked Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring, authors of The Innovative [...]

The Ford Foundation’s International Fellowships Program (IFP) is winding down after 10 years of providing graduate fellowships to underrepresented students from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The foundation has worked with over 4,300 students from 22 countries, churning out an impressive fellowship completion rate of 98 percent and a graduation rate of 91 percent at [...]

President Barack Obama’s efforts to increase the percentage of Americans with college degrees is running into some of the same stubborn obstacles that have stymied educators, politicians, researchers and philanthropic foundations for years. While a few efforts have succeeded in identifying barriers to graduation, research shows that they have yet to bring widespread improvement. Achieving [...]