As long as her parents can remember， 13-year-old Katie Hart has been talking about going to college. Her mother， Tally， a financial-aid officer at an Ohio university， knows all too well the daunting c...
When it comes to schooling， the Herrera boys are no match for the Herrera girls. Last week， four years after she arrived from Honduras， Martha， 20， graduated from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. S...
When I applied under Early Decision to the University of Pennsylvania four years ago, I was motivated by two powerful emotions: ambition and fear. The ambition was to fulfill my lifelong expectation ...
Competition for admission to the country’s top private schools has always been tough， but this year Elisabeth Krents realized it had reached a new level. Her wake-up call came when a man called the Da...
Largely for “spiritual reasons，” Nancy Manos started home-schooling her children five years ago and has studiously avoided public schools ever since. Yet last week， she was enthusiastically enrolling ...
There was a time when big-league university presidents really mattered. The New York Times covered their every move. Presidents， the real ones， sought their counsel. For Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eise...
THESE HAVE BEEN THE ，BEST OF TIMES for many of the nation‘s top universities-and the worst of times for middle income families struggling to afford them. Thanks to a robust stock market， school endowm...
In the past few years， reformers have embraced a disarmingly simple idea for fixing schools： Why not actually flunk those students who don’t earn passing grades? Both Democrats and Republicans have be...
As colleges and universities send another wave of graduates out into the world this spring， thousands of other job seekers with liberal-arts degrees like Martin’s find themselves in a similar bind. T...
Amy High is decked out in the traditional pink dress and golden stole of ancient Rome. She bursts into a third-grade classroom and greets her students： “Salvete， omnes!” (Hello， everyone!) The kids r...