American colleges in trouble. Students and families strapped by recession, endowments crushed. Costs, soaring. Is academia headed for Chapter 11?

Teenage students from West Philly High are competing for the X-Prize in hybrid-car design — and challenging the pros.

Forget lipstick. We’re talking issues. This time: education, and what Barack Obama and John McCain would offer the country at school.

The waiting list cases are wrapping up now. The acceptance and rejection letters are up on the fridge or in the trash. But the college admissions season of 2008 is one for the record books.
At 3.3 million, the high school class that just scrambled through admission hoops is the nation’s largest since 1977 — the [...]

Here’s a headline you may have missed: a truce has been declared in the great American “Math War.”
For 20-odd years, mathematicians, parents, and teachers have been arguing over the best way to teach your children math. Well, a national panel formed by President Bush two years ago has just issued its findings, and is pushing [...]

It’s a globalized world, but that doesn’t mean we all live the same. Take high school students in the U.S., China and India. Different worlds.
A new documentary takes the two million minutes of high school life and compares them — in Indiana, Shanghai and Bangalore.
It’s a little shocking to see. Bright American kids on Xbox [...]

The day-to-day news feed out of Iraq misses one of the country’s saddest, and most important, stories: the exodus of Iraq’s intellectual class.
While tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees are heading back, many professionals will never return. And they leave an enormous void — one that hurts the prospects for stability.
We’ll talk to three prominent [...]

After World War II, some 8 million veterans came home and went to college on the GI Bill, helping create the American middle class. Now, the latest generation of vets — battle-tried in Iraq and Afghanistan — is coming home, and many are going to college.
They’ve got less help from Uncle Sam, but they are [...]

By host Tom Ashbrook:
At 8 am, do you know where your three-year-old is? Your four-year-old? A big new movement wants to put them — all the nation’s tiny tots — in school. Universal pre-kindergarten, it’s called. And it’s catching on fast, in red states and blue. Oklahoma, Tennessee, Georgia, West Virginia — all leaders.
Now, the [...]

Sometimes a novel’s plot is unlikely. Sometimes it’s ripped straight from life — or life we can easily imagine. Novelist Tom Perrotta’s latest book, “The Abstinence Teacher,” is the second type.
Ruth is a broad-minded sex-ed teacher at the local high school — in a suburb where evangelical Christians are taking charge of the local culture. [...]

School shootings and the shadow of youth violence around them are very much in the news these days. In the last decade — from Columbine, to Amish country, to last week’s deadly shooting in a Cleveland school and images of an angry Philadelphia teen’s shocking arsenal — the headlines have become almost routine.
Gun. School. Mayhem. [...]

Every parent knows kids need a good night’s sleep to be at their best. And still, young Americans from elementary school age through high school, are sleeping significantly less today than they did thirty years ago.
With homework and TV and the Internet and video games and parents getting home later from work, it’s easy to [...]

Back in the day, American business schools had a tough time fighting their way onto American university campuses. Academics didn’t see what they taught as a serious profession worthy of a spot.
B-schools made their case, arguing they had a science of management and the nation’s greater good at heart. And a million M.B.A.s were born.
Now, [...]

Twenty years ago, Chicago’s Allan Bloom made a bestselling splash with his book “The Closing of the American Mind,” arguing that American universities had walked away from the Western classics and dumbed down American higher education.
Now, former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman arrives to say that door is nearly shut. In his new book, [...]

Marcel Proust may have said it best. “I believe,” said the great French novelist, “that reading, in its original essence, is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
Now, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf says yes, but it’s more than that. The human brain, she says, is endlessly pliable. A generation of research that [...]