Momentum can stall in a time of diminished resources. For colleges on the fast track, leaders have shifted money around and made some hard choices to keep growing. The author reached out to five up-and-coming institutions to find out how they manage their ambitions during tough times. As many colleges instituted hiring freezes to save money,…

The University of Illinois Global Campus, a multimillion-dollar distance-learning project, is up and running. For its March-April 2009 term, it has enrolled 366 students. Getting to this point, though, has looked a little like the dot-com start-up bubble of the late 1990s. Hundreds of Internet-related companies were launched with overly ambitious…

Despite a shaky economy, Quinnipiac University is currently developing a new campus called York Hill to eventually include residence halls for 2,000 students, a mammoth parking garage, and a $40-million student center. The university has also just acquired an office park a few miles away in North Haven that the space-crunched institution plans to…

Describes how DePaul University, once a commuter institution, set out to become larger, stronger, and more committed to serving low-income students, and is now one of the country's largest private universities. (EV)

Discusses how as the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga expands into a decaying black neighborhood--including donating the land for a public school--not all of the residents support the changes. (EV)