At Middlebury College--and on campuses throughout the country--class is coming out of the closet. Long hidden from view, economic status is emerging from the shadows, as once-taboo discussions are taking shape. The growing economic divide in America, and on American campuses, has given rise to new student organizations, and new dialogues, focused…

The Supreme Court's members generally are too decorous to exclaim "I told you so." But U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy stands perched on the edge of an I-told-you-so moment, thanks to the court's decision to take up a challenge to a race-conscious college-admission policy that poses some of the same questions he had accused…

The author reports on the U.S. Supreme Court hearing regarding the Texas admissions case that exposes gaps in the affirmative-action law. As the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a lawsuit challenging race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas at Austin, it became evident that the court's past rulings on such policies have failed to…

Patrick McGhee, vice chancellor of the University of East London, has a lot in common with many of the 28,000 students at the large urban institution he leads. He was the first in his family to attend university. And he dislikes much about the government's higher-education reform efforts, which he has deemed "misguided, premature, unproven…

The Tennessee Technology Center system has become something of a darling among college-completion advocates. Comprising 27 locations across the state, the system boasts graduation and job-placement rates that many colleges only dream of: 75 percent and 83 percent, respectively. Such achievements are even more noteworthy given the population the…

The author reports on a Supreme Court case that is echoing across the University of Texas at Austin, and for some students, it is personal. Not long after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Abigail Fisher's case against the University of Texas at Austin, a lighthearted joke made the rounds at the Warfield Center for African and African-American…

In July 2009, Felix V. Matos Rodriguez will take over as president of Hostos Community College of the City University of New York, which in 1970 opened in a converted tire factory in the South Bronx to educate members of a primarily Puerto Rican community. Like Mr. Matos Rodriguez, who moved to the mainland United States at age 18, many of those…

Colleges have talked for decades about the educational benefits of diversity on their campuses without offering much research to show how students are affected by exposure to members of other racial and ethnic groups. In an effort to fill that gap, James Sidanius, a professor of psychology and of African and African-American studies at Harvard…

The University of California has adopted changes to its undergraduate admissions policy that will enlarge its applicant pool and drop the requirement that students take the SAT Subject Tests. The policy is the most significant change in the university's admissions practices in at least a decade. It will increase the number of California…

The Fulbright Program is one of the most successful fellowship programs around. About 1,500 students and 1,300 scholars from the United States and abroad are studying and working on Fulbrights this academic year. But the U.S. State Department, which oversees the program, has been concerned in recent years about the lack of diversity among American…

Wake Forest University will no longer require applicants to submit standardized test scores, the university announced last week. The move makes Wake Forest, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, one of the most prominent institutions with a "test optional" admissions policy. The university's decision reveals the increasing complexity of the…

Thirty years ago, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. sent the nation's selective colleges down a path where few had ventured before. In the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling in "Regents of the University of California v. Bakke," he wrote that colleges were legally justified in giving some modest consideration to their applicants' race, so…

A recently-released analysis of population data has confirmed the acknowledged trend of major diversification in America's higher education student body. After this year's high-school seniors receive their diplomas, the number of graduates nationwide will begin a slow decline until 2015, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher…

Like many elite colleges and universities, Amherst College is going to great lengths and expense to identify and attract to its campus talented students who are not affluent and white. Its efforts are directed at offering opportunities for social and economic mobility to those students, at providing some measure of social equity. Bringing a…

A university president discusses his goal to use the college years, when students live closely together, to create a community where individuals assume responsibility for each other. The writer advocates decision-making with this goal in mind at the forefront. Outdoor spaces and gardens with benches need to be designed to function as inviting…