The National Science Foundation (NSF), in carrying out the Obama administration's new push for greater public access to research published in scientific journals, will consider exclusivity periods shorter than the 12-month standard in the White House directive, as well as trade-offs involving data-sharing and considerations of publishers'…

Human rights are rapidly entering the academic curriculum, with programs appearing all over the country--including at Duke, Harvard, Northeastern, and Stanford Universities; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Universities of Chicago, of Connecticut, of California at Berkeley, and of Minnesota; and Trinity College. Most of these…

As a new GI Bill moved through Congress in 2008, a handful of influential politicians grew concerned. Would such a generous education program trigger an exodus of service members during two wars? At the Pentagon's urging, the lawmakers proposed a fix: Give troops the option to transfer their benefits to a child or spouse. That policy quickly…

It's no secret that states and the federal government have found themselves in a financial pinch when it comes to higher education. After years of recession and sluggish recovery, states have slashed per-pupil public spending on higher education by 14.6 percent since 2008. At the federal level, though money for Pell Grants has more than doubled…

Patrick McGhee, vice chancellor of the University of East London, has a lot in common with many of the 28,000 students at the large urban institution he leads. He was the first in his family to attend university. And he dislikes much about the government's higher-education reform efforts, which he has deemed "misguided, premature, unproven…

This article features four colleges and how they take on veterans' issues in research and real life. These colleges are (1) Syracuse University; (2) Purdue University; (3) University of Southern California; and (4) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Last year Syracuse established the Institute for Veterans and Military Families to focus…

When President Obama dreams out loud, as he did in a speech last week, of a future when solar panels are as "cheap as paint" and buildings produce their own energy, researchers like the physicist Yang Yang are dreaming right along with him. Mr. Yang's laboratory is among hundreds at colleges around the country that stand to benefit from a new…

Soon after Jamie P. Merisotis took over the Lumina Foundation for Education last year, he began talking about a "big goal." America must increase the proportion of its population with degrees or credentials to 60% by 2025, in order to remain globally competitive and meet the nation's growing demand for college-educated workers, he said.…

This article focuses on the "missing class," the near poor whose incomes place them above the poverty line, but well below the middle class. Near-poor families with two parents and two children subsist on $20,000 to $40,000 a year, which disqualifies them for virtually all public subsidies, but is a far cry from what they need to be…

Many states, and the United States as a whole, are doing a better job than they were two years ago of preparing students for college and expanding access to higher education, according to a national report card on higher education released last week. But the country continues to slip behind other nations on measures of enrollment and degree…

Lawmakers have been putting increasing pressure on private colleges to spend more of their endowments on student aid. Just a few weeks ago, members of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee sent letters to dozens of institutions with endowments of at least $500-million, demanding detailed information about how they manage those endowments, how much…

This article offers a glimpse into one of the many ways in which the Egyptian government and the campus administrators it appoints are slowly and persistently squeezing the life out of universities in Cairo, Egypt. Classroom discussions are monitored, faculty appointments and academic research are scrutinized, and faculty participation in outside…

For adult students at Lehman College, in the Bronx, and LaGuardia Community College, in Queens, the separation between politics and daily life seems practically invisible. Both colleges are part of the 23-campus CUNY system, where more than two in five of the nearly 197,000 students are 23 and older. For most of these students, it is nearly…

In this article, the author discusses Europe's anti-Americanism stance. He observes that Europe's aversion to America has become greater, louder, and more determined, and that it has unified Western Europeans more than any other political emotion (with the exception of a common hostility toward Israel). The author contends that the many disastrous…

Security restrictions imposed since 2001 have unnecessarily constrained university researchers, and those controls should be loosened in order to enhance the nation's economic and strategic competitiveness, says a report issued by the National Research Council of the National Academies. The report's authors, a committee of high-ranking officials…