University of Wisconsin System President Kevin Reilly says higher education needs to reach out to students at younger ages and work with community groups and religious organizations to prepare “potential customers to desire and use its product.” In Inside Higher Ed, Reilly outlined what he called four pillars of improvement for America’s colleges and universities: better preparation, more graduates, more research, and better dissemination and commercialization...

For two University of Wisconsin-Stout students, communicating within their department and not being afraid to take a chance led to a prestigious NASA research opportunity. During an intensive 10-week internship program this past summer, UW-Stout students Casandra Baer and Bryan Coddington utilized their classroom knowledge of chemistry, the material sciences and engineering to aid in a NASA research project...

This September a team of UW-Madison staff unveiled a new process to reduce the time it takes to eliminate former employees from accessing information technology systems, but the new process still takes longer than many others used throughout the University of Wisconsin System...

A UW-Madison Professor is one of two physicians in the country to receive the 2009 Physician Advocacy Merit Award. The non-profit group - The Institute of Medicine as a Profession is honoring Dr. Michael Fiore with the award...

The average annual cost of tuition and fees at four-year public colleges rose 6.5 percent from last year, to $7,020, according to a report issued Tuesday by the College Board. Including room and board, the average total cost of attendance is $15,213, up 5.9 percent from last year...

In an article just posted on The Times’s Web site, my colleague Tamar Lewin reports that “the average annual cost of tuition and fees at four-year public colleges rose 6.5 percent from last year, to $7,020.” Those figures are among the most grim in a report issued this morning by the College Board...

The struggling economy has taken a toll on those directly responsible for advising students about the college admission process. Nearly half of public schools have raised the caseloads of high school counselors this year, compared with last year, with the average increase exceeding 53 students, according to a study by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. At the same time, the report said, the pressures on applicants (and, by extension, their counselors) are growing, as the number of applications to four-year colleges continued to rise, along with the number of students applying to colleges under early-decision programs...

...Colleges and universities have not slashed sticker prices in response to the economic downturn. On the contrary, tuition and fees rose 6.5 percent at public four-year colleges compared with the 2008-2009 school year and 4.4 percent at private, nonprofit, four-year institutions. Those were steeper rates of increase than in prior years, after adjusting for inflation...

College costs are higher than ever, according to a new report, putting a degree even further out of reach for many Americans..."We're in a very strong sellers market for higher education," said Pat Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, who noted that the high school graduating class of 2009 was the largest in history. "Colleges and universities are capitalizing on that more than any other institution in the economy. If you walk around a shopping mall, nobody else is raising prices at the same rate"...

As state funding cuts loom in 2011, leaders of the Colorado State University system have started considering an option unheard of in all but a handful of states: converting to a part-public, part-private structure in which students pay more for costlier degrees...

As the number of college applicants and applications have gone up, many colleges have seen other things go down, including their acceptance rates, their "yield" rates, and their confidence in predicting enrollment outcomes...