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 [...]

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College in New York since 1975, has long believed that American universities should be playing a major role in improving the country’s secondary education. Botstein, who is also music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, says he’s less concerned about a decline [...]

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 [...]

Is it really surprising that students in a tony New York suburb figured out a way, according to law-enforcement officials, to cheat on the SAT? When I first saw the headlines, I was slightly shocked at the audacity of a scam that allegedly involved a 19-year-old college student accepting large sums of money to take [...]

There’s a reason so many students in U.S. community colleges don’t finish: Not enough enter a specific, college-level program, according to Davis Jenkins, who has over 25 years of experience as a researcher, evaluator, consultant and program manager on projects related to education and employment in the U.S. and abroad. The Hechinger Report spoke with [...]

Why is the performance of students in other countries surpassing that of U.S. students? It’s a question that Marc S. Tucker, president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington, D.C., sought to answer at a symposium last month focused on education reforms in other countries, including Canada, China, Finland, [...]

In 2006, former software engineer John Danner co-founded Rocketship Education, a national nonprofit elementary charter school network based in San Jose, Calif., with Preston Smith. The network is gaining attention for its “hybrid” model of learning, which blends classroom teaching with small-group tutoring and individualized online learning. Danner, who won the John P. McNulty Prize [...]

Psychiatrist Dr. Gary Small recently expressed a sentiment that may have crossed the minds of parents and educators who see how much time teenagers spend chatting online and texting: He worries they may not be learning empathy skills. The digital world has rewired teen brains and made them less able to recognize and share feelings of [...]