Despite persistent appeals from policymakers and politicians to increase the number of college graduates in the United States, a new report projects a shortfall of nearly 24 million degree-holders by 2025. The cost to the U.S. economy in lost wages and income taxes? About $600 billion a year. They’re the most dramatic figures yet in [...]

So many students will graduate from Slippery Rock University this spring that administrators have had to limit the number of guests each one can invite. There isn’t enough room in the basketball arena for everybody. At a time when American higher education is under fire for dismal graduation rates that have eroded the nation’s leadership [...]

Reggie Herndon returned to college because he wanted to change careers. What he didn’t want was another degree. Herndon, a University of Tennessee graduate from Lynchburg, Va., is on his way instead to finishing a nine-month professional certificate in counterintelligence from Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pa., which he hopes will bolster his odds of landing [...]

An unprecedented multibillion-dollar building boom is under way at U.S. universities and colleges—despite budget shortfalls, endowment declines and seemingly stretched resources. Some $11 billion in new facilities have sprung up on American campuses in each of the last two years—more than double what was spent on buildings a decade ago, according to the market-research firm [...]

When Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville raised its price by 59 percent, it landed directly in the crosshairs of the Obama administration. Under a plan proposed by President Barack Obama in his state-of-the-union address in January, universities and colleges like SIUE that increase what they charge students at the fastest rates would forfeit their eligibility [...]

Construction cranes sprout from the campus of the University of California at San Diego like towering palm trees in the Southern California sun. There’s a new engineering building under construction, and a new addition to the school of management. A new office building is now open, along with a new parking garage, biomedical research and [...]

Scorned for the abysmally low number of their students who earn degrees, the nation’s community colleges may be about to more than double their graduation rates—not by turning out a single additional graduate, but by changing the way the rates are calculated. The move comes two and a half years after President Barack Obama called [...]

Even as policymakers struggle to reform remedial-education requirements blamed for derailing the aspirations of countless community-college students, two new studies suggest that many of those students would do fine without them. The studies, both by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, found that as many as a third of students sidetracked into remedial classes because [...]

TORONTO—At the University of Manitoba, where she enrolled after high school, it seemed to take Angela Conrad forever to satisfy her degree requirements by taking courses in women’s studies, Greek mythology, and other courses she considered impractical. All she really wanted was a job in marketing. “It takes people two years, sometimes three years, to [...]

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 [...]

BRIGHTON, England—When he was 14, Daniel Conn was part of a circle of friends so bright they programmed computer code for fun. One of his classmates went on to work in financial services, while another opened his own business. But when Conn tried college, he said, “I lost confidence in myself. The exams came and [...]

Despite political pressure to improve graduation rates, few states have done anything serious to increase the low proportions of community-college students who actually earn degrees, according to a survey released today. In the survey of community-college officials from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, by the University of Alabama Education Policy Center, two-thirds [...]

Chris Ogren stands in a frustrated hunch at a window of New York University’s financial aid office, where he’s come for the fifth time in two days to sort out a problem with his $45,000 worth of student loans. It gives him little comfort to learn that U.S. universities and colleges are handing $5.3 billion [...]

After days of news about spiraling tuition, increasing student loan debt, and worsening income inequality, higher-education experts met at a selective private college during the weekend to defend their costs—and argue that a degree is still worth the price. “There is no crisis in college costs,” said Robert Archibald, professor of economics at the College [...]

BOSTON — Things were going well for Job Asiimwe as he approached his final semester at Bunker Hill Community College here last winter. Then a toothache almost derailed his college career. Asiimwe, an immigrant from Uganda who’s been on his own since age 19, was close to graduating. He had been accepted to a bachelor’s-degree [...]

ARNOLD, Md.—On the first day of the fall semester last month, new arrivals slowed traffic at the entrances to Anne Arundel Community College, unsure which one to take. They circled for places to park, lined up at the information desk, and struggled with the convoluted calculus of course schedules. A trickle of these new students [...]

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 [...]

WARREN, Mich.—Estranged from his family at 17, Jake Boyd put himself through Macomb Community College in suburban Detroit by working nearly 100 hours a week: 12 hours a day, six days a week, at a car wash, followed by four-hour shifts as a security guard at an apartment complex. Homeless for a while, Boyd had [...]