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. [...]

Firing back against intensifying attacks on the humanities, an association of liberal-arts colleges and universities has released a survey showing that employers want graduates with precisely their kinds of education, and announced a compact with CEOs to make sure they can continue to get it. The report, from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, [...]

As March Madness nears its all-consuming climax, a less widely noticed kind of intercollegiate competition is forcing students to churn endlessly through the higher-education system, wasting their own—and taxpayers’—money. In this game, the players score but it doesn’t count. That’s what happens when students earn academic credit at one university or college, then try to [...]

Once a year, a line of briefcase-wielding accountants in business suits files into an office at Texas Christian University. They’re not there to check on income or expenditures. They’re auditing the admissions statistics. Texas Christian’s dean of admission says it’s the nation’s only university to voluntarily have its admissions data—the number of applicants and their [...]

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, [...]

The amount being spent per student by public colleges and universities has fallen to its lowest level in at least 25 years, a result of state budget cuts that a new report warns are rapidly eroding the nation’s educational edge over its international competitors. The report, by the Boulder, Colorado-based State Higher Education Executive Officers, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]