As peer reviewers for the U.S. Department of Education begin to comb through the thousands of pages of applications for $4 billion in federal Race to the Top Fund grants, they'll be under pressure to determine which are most worthy of funding: those that promise the most, or those with the best chance of delivering. In a competition whose criteria…

Faced with a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state higher education officials are trying to relieve the burden on the state by redirecting several thousand high school seniors from California's public four-year universities to community colleges for their first two years of school. The California effort emerges…