...Despite a tough economic climate, several states are attempting to hold down college tuition — or at least not let increases get out of control — by avoiding deep cuts to higher education, an area that states have been quick to slash in past years when funds were low...
...The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T., and the University of Maryland...
...So Thursday, (Under Secretary of Education Sara Martinez) Tucker opened the two-day summit of 150 college leaders, state officials, policy experts and others not with a low-key tinker but with a sweeping proposal to restructure the system for awarding federal financial aid, with the chief goals of greatly simplifying the financial application process and administrative structure; informing students much earlier exactly how much financial aid they would receive; and, ultimately, greatly increasing the number of Americans who enter and complete college, an underlying goal of Thursday's summit and most of the Bush administration's work on higher education...