This article describes a brand-new liberal-arts university which promises a different approach to teaching. Quest University is the first private, nonprofit, secular college in Canada. It has attracted professors with stellar credentials. Of its 79 freshmen, most are graduates of the rigorous International Baccalaureate high-school program, and…

Faculty pay is a big part of college budgets, but it is not what has driven tuition increases. In this article, the author talks about faculty pay and examines why it is accounted for large increases in college tuition. According to the 2004 American Association of University Professors report that although faculty and staff salary increases…

Recent court rulings have challenged the long-held concept of academic freedom for faculty members. As an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Kevin J. Renken says he felt obliged to speak out about his belief that administrators there were mishandling a National Science Foundation grant to him…

Few documents in higher education have enjoyed the influence or longevity of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the 1960 law that transformed the state's public colleges and served as a blueprint for public systems across the country. Even today, almost 50 years after it was written, the master plan retains a mythic status in…

Making Pell Grants an entitlement and tying the maximum award to a measure of inflation, as President Obama has proposed, would probably yield larger awards and stop the cycle of shortfalls that have plagued the program. The president's plan, which would index the maximum award to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) plus one percentage point, probably…

Colleges are fond of issuing proclamations filled with ambitious goals. So Clemson University was hardly charting new territory in 2001 when its Board of Trustees endorsed 27 goals to make it a top-20 public research university. Less than two years later, Clemson achieved one of those benchmarks by exceeding $100-million per year in research…

Maryland's governor, Martin J. O'Malley, didn't get much of his legislative agenda through the General Assembly this year, but he did succeed on one front: preserving enough state aid for the public-university system to stave off a tuition increase for the fourth consecutive year. Like politicians in several states, Mr. O'Malley, a Democrat, made…

When California approved its budget last month, the community-college system managed to escape the sharp budget cuts that befell most other agencies. But the state's fiscal troubles have nonetheless created a cash crisis for two-year colleges. As part of its plan to close a $41-billion budget deficit, California will delay providing $540-million…

This article reports that a state ballot measure to ban affirmative-action programs based on race, gender, and national origin at public colleges and other state agencies was defeated. Colorado voters narrowly rejected such a referendum last week by a razor-thin margin that took two days to become official. Voters in Nebraska, however, took the…

People can bring guns most places in Arizona, but the state's Board of Regents has long banned all weapons from public college campuses. Now some lawmakers are trying to change that. State Senator Karen S. Johnson, a Republican, proposed a bill in January that would trump the regents' ban, allowing anyone with a concealed-weapons permit to carry a…

Colleges have always struggled with deferred maintenance, but several factors might make that struggle especially challenging in the future. Colleges grew rapidly in the postwar years and have a generation of 1960s or 1970s buildings that need major repair or replacement. In the past 10 years, colleges went through another building boom, adding to…

This article focuses on a report by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada which states that four-year public colleges in the United States have significantly more resources for teaching and research than do their counterparts in Australia, Canada, and Britain. According to the report, "Trends in Higher Education: Volume 3:…

Dozens of colleges and universities, including some of the country's wealthiest institutions, are facing a sharp rise in interest payments on a whopping mound of debt. About a third of the nearly 300 private institutions rated by Moody's Investors Service are financing more than half their debt with variable-rate bonds, some of whose rates have…

Gaps in faculty pay between private and public colleges and universities continue to widen, warned the American Association of University Professors in its annual report on the economic status of the profession. It is a divide, the group argues, that threatens the ability of public institutions to recruit and retain faculty members at all levels.…

The nearly $54-billion that Congress is directing to the states for education as part of the stimulus bill President Obama signed last week may stave off the worst budget cuts proposed for public colleges. But the money is unlikely to save institutions from the state budget ax entirely. And some states slated to get the most aid from that pot of…