Energized by his fellow adjunct professors who had gathered for a national meeting last month in Washington, District of Columbia, Joshua A. Boldt flew home to Athens, Georgia, opened his laptop, and created a Google document. On his personal blog, the writing instructor implored colleagues to contribute to the publicly editable spreadsheet,…

You cannot learn anything about a college these days without hearing about what that college is doing for the planet, whether it is buying local food or shrinking its carbon footprint. A number of organizations are eager to evaluate colleges on their efforts. Grist, Sierra, and Current magazines and the Sustainable Endowments Institute all have…

When John B. Simpson, president of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, compares the campus over which he presides to its public-university peers, the contrast can be unflattering. Buildings and laboratories need upgrading. Richer, more prestigious institutions have a leg up in attracting renowned scholars and big-ticket federal…

This article profiles Loren Pope, a college consultant and a former education editor at "The New York Times" who touted "no name" colleges and called the nation's most famous university, Harvard University, a rip-off. In his influential book "Colleges That Change Lives" (Penguin, 1996), Mr. Pope profiled 40 institutions--most of them small…

A growing chorus of critics--legislators, governors, alumni, students, parents, trustees, and others--is pressuring colleges to increase "accountability" and "transparency." The critics want colleges to measure whether they are actually achieving their core missions, especially educating undergraduates, and to give people the facts about what they…

The annual "America's Best Colleges" issue of "U.S. News & World Report" has long been referred to as the magazine's swimsuit issue. While the comparison is made in jest, in terms of newsstand sales the association with the popular "Sports Illustrated" cover is not far off. Last year the "U.S. News" college issue was among 17 perennial…

According to new research, aspiring professors' negative view of faculty life at top research institutions is common: the large study of the University of California's graduate students revealed that less than half perceive major research institutions to be family-friendly workplaces for tenure-track professors. About 8,400 Ph.D. students from…

Over the last decade, the library of third-party information about colleges has grown exponentially. U.S. News & World Report's annual college guide may get the most attention, but it's a general-interest dinosaur in an ever-expanding realm of niche evaluations of colleges. Now students of all faiths, ethnic origins, and interests can find a guide…

A pair of economists at the College of William and Mary have devised a new way of comparing colleges' graduation rates--a method, borrowed from business analysis, that they believe is fairer and more useful than the techniques used by "U.S. News & World Report" and the Education Trust. That general technique of regression analysis underlies the…

As usual, "U.S. News & World Report's" annual college rankings offered a heavy dose of deja vu when they arrived last August. In this article, the author discusses the response rate to the magazine's controversial reputational survey. The overall response rate plunged to its lowest level ever, a possible sign that organized criticism of the…

As tuition is being introduced--or raised--at publicly supported university systems around the world, more people are embracing the idea that rankings can help consumers get the best value. Jamie P. Merisotis, president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a Washington-based research group, says that in the last few years, national…

People, especially people in Washington, are worried about the state of American higher education. Last September a report by the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education expressed grave concern about the quality and purpose of colleges and universities. The report cited statistics that implied that higher-education institutions are…

Female and minority faculty members rated their institutions less positively as places for junior professors to work than did their male and white counterparts, according to a new report. Young professors said institutional policies designed to help them succeed were important, but they were less satisfied that those policies were effective. Women…

Discusses how colleges are praising the new National Survey of Student Engagement, but insist that institutional scores be kept private. (EV)

A proposed revision in the American Bar Association's accrediting standards for law schools is coming under fire from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which says the proposal seems to require the schools to use racial preferences in hiring and admissions despite federal and state laws limiting such policies. Although a bar-association official…