Limiting access to some methods of suicide, a strategy known as means restriction, is gaining support among mental-health researchers. Some suicides can be prevented, the logic goes, if it is more challenging for an impulsive individual to harm himself. But on most campuses, that strategy has not taken hold. Instead, counseling and education tend…

Students brave roadside bombs and Taliban threats while on class assignments. Professors are kidnapped and killed. Campus radio stations get regular visits from military intelligence. Welcome to journalism education in Pakistan's tribal areas. The region is off-limits to most outsiders, so students find themselves reporting for Pakistani and…

Many colleges have put off repairs and renovation since the recession. Now crumbling buildings, limited budgets, and mounting debt present an increasingly intractable problem. Sightlines, a consulting company that tracks and analyzes facilities issues at more than 300 colleges, shared some of its latest findings with "The Chronicle". The data…

College students are a generally healthy lot. But as they grow heavier each year, reflecting the national rise in obesity rates, campus officials are trying to promote healthier habits--and, they hope, mitigate the impact of a sobering trend. More than one-third of college students have a body-mass index, the main measurement for obesity, that…

Amid a national debate about paying college athletes, the NCAA likes to tout its often-overlooked Student Assistance Fund, whose goal is to provide direct financial support to players. The fund--which draws from the association's multibillion-dollar media-rights deals--will distribute some $75-million this year to Division I athletes. The money…

Space is a serious, expensive business on college campuses. Following a decade-long building boom, a crippling recession, a spike in energy prices (with further increases probable), and in some regions fierce competition for a shrinking pool of students, the stakes of managing campus space have never been higher. Students, it is often assumed,…

Can a quality education be provided by any college that relies heavily on adjunct instructors it subjects to lousy working conditions? Some higher-education experts and prominent advocates for adjunct faculty members would like to see accreditors and others who pass judgment on colleges ask questions like that more often. Those concerned about the…

Welcome to the Centennial Conference: 11 small, private liberal-arts colleges in the mid-Atlantic region that belong to the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division III, where there are no sports scholarships to lure top-notch players. Instead, the contest to recruit the best athletes--a high-stakes game that has long defined only the…

In India's beleaguered higher-education system, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) stand apart. The seven institutions have turned out some of the world's finest engineers and computer scientists, eagerly recruited by top graduate schools in the United States. Many of the institutes' graduates have gone on to become the chief executives of…

In the early 1990s, Pomona College began planning to replace a cramped, plain building that had served as its campus center for decades. The Smith Campus Center, which was opened in 1999 and costs $18.3 million during construction, ended up being ignored by students. After tweaking things and achieving little results, the college decided to hire…

A century after a New York banker donated $100,000 to help establish what would become the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, his hometown is reaping the benefits of his generosity. Last month the Technion, Israel's oldest university, and Cornell University won a closely watched competition to build an applied-sciences campus in New York…

Harvard University quietly started offering women-only gym hours early this semester. But since the news broke several weeks ago, it has prompted an onslaught of media attention. Harvard's move, however, is not unique. In recent years, women at several colleges across the country have requested women-only workout times. Some of those women have…

This article reports several two-year institutions who are seeking out architects to create impressive new buildings as well as imaginative renovations of humdrum buildings from the 1960s and 1970s. Johnson County Community College, in Overland Park, Kansas, opened a limestone-sheathed museum, designed by Kyu Sung Woo Architects, that the "Kansas…

When "The Chronicle" asked college employees what they value about their jobs, they put the physical environment in which they work at the top of the list. They said they were concerned not only that their spaces met their needs but also that their campuses had a pleasing appearance. That's no surprise to Thomas G. Contos, university architect at…

The author reports on the reigning economic calculus that helps to drive constant expansion and poor utilization of space on many campuses. The author states that colleges could charge for utilities, which might encourage departments to save energy. Most American colleges do not charge for space--in part because doing so would raise the hackles of…