Finance & Policy News

Shrugging off widespread criticism of its college tuition cap proposal, the Obama administration mounted a public-relations blitz Monday to sell the plan to students and university leaders. Despite its grim chances in Congress, the plan could still reap benefits for the White House, specialists say. It may help restore enthusiasm among college-age voters, a critical constituency for Mr. Obama's re-election effort. College...

Average tuition and fees at public four-year colleges is $7,605 per year for in-state students and $11,990 for full-time out-of-state students, according to a 2010 report from CollegeBoard, a nonprofit organization that researches higher education trends. Time for plan B. Public two-year colleges charge an average of $2,713 per year in tuition and fees. In addition to utilizing community colleges, other methods are being explored to...

It began with allegations that the Yale Daily News had buried a story for months regarding sexual assault allegations against their quarterback Patrick Witt. A few days later, the cameras focused on Vassar College, where dozens of students celebrating their early decision acceptances were later rejected. And finally, highly competitive Claremont-McKenna College admitted that an official had inflated the school's average SAT...

New figures show university endowments averaged total returns of more than 19% for the fiscal year ended last June, the second consecutive year of gains, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers and Commonfund, a nonprofit asset manager. Yet schools say they can't cut tuition until their endowments have had more years of strong growth. "Dramatic changes won't come instantly,...

Much of what the federal government does to help college students is in indirect support, through grants, loans and jobs, which affect people attending private as well as public colleges. Yet that level of support can't keep pace with demand, much less the super-inflationary flow of tuition and other college costs. The imbalance is birthing a generation of graduates defined more by overbearing debt than its preparation for...

Too often, faculty members teach according to habits and hunches, said Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who has extensively studied how to improve science education. In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in how students learn. When these graduate students become faculty...

Applications received by Dartmouth for the Class of 2016 increased of 3 percent from last year, making it one of three institutions in the Ivy League - along with Yale University and Cornell University - to experience an increase in applications this year. Harvard and Princeton Universities each received approximately 1.9 percent fewer applications than last year. Columbia University, Brown University and the University of...

The recent announcement that Massachusetts Institute of Technology would give certificates around free online course materials has fueled further debate about whether employers may soon welcome new kinds of low-cost credentials. Questions remain about how MIT's new service will work, and what it means for traditional college programs. On Monday The Chronicle posed some of those questions to two leaders of the new project.

In his proposed budget, Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell is seeking to cap the use of tuition dollars from in-state students to provide financial aid, a practice employed by almost all colleges and universities, public and private. McDonnell has said he is pushing the cap to spur conversation about aid policies and to keep down the cost of college education, saying the current structure is placing a higher burden on middle-income...