Colleges

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Yahoo Inc.Chief Executive Scott Thompson resigned from the digital media company Sunday after a dissident shareholder called attention to his apparent misrepresentation of his college credentials. Ross Levinsohn, formerly Yahoo's executive vice president of the Americas region, was named interim chief executive, the company said in a statement. The board of directors also named Alfred Amoroso its new chairman. Amoroso, who is chief executive of Santa Clara software company Rovi Corp., replaces Yahoo board member Roy Bostock, the founder and chairman of Sealedge Investments.

They weren't looking to make a political statement or to be pioneers of gender liberation. Each just wanted a familiar, decent roommate rather than a stranger after their original roommates left to study abroad. That's how Pitzer College sophomores Kayla Eland, female, and Lindon Pronto, male, began sharing a room this semester on Holden Hall's second floor. They are not a couple and neither is gay. They are just compatible roommates in a new, sometimes controversial, dormitory option known as gender-neutral housing that is gaining support at some colleges in California and across the nation.

Students at Locke High School are faring better than their peers in nearby traditional schools, but achievement overall remains low at the charter-managed campus near Watts, according to a new study. Still, the Locke students were more likely to graduate and to have taken courses needed to apply to a four-year state college, according to the UCLA-based National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing. The ongoing research has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The University of Chicago lays claim to an astonishing 78 Nobel laureates -- the most of any institution in the United States and second in the world only to England's University of Cambridge. Renowned physicists Hans Bethe and Werner Heisenberg and economics guru Paul A. Samuelson are all counted among Chicago's Nobel brethren. Wait a minute. Didn't Bethe spend virtually his entire career at Cornell University? Isn't Samuelson considered the heart and soul of MIT economics?

Some high school seniors may have scoffed at warnings about partying instead of studying this spring. But nagging counselors and parents turn out to have been right: A senior-year slump can have painful repercussions. In June and July, elite universities in California and across the country increasingly are revoking admission offers to students whose grades originally were good enough to gain acceptance but whose final exams and transcripts took a dive into Ds or worse.

At Pomona College, a top-flight liberal arts school, this year's sticker price for tuition and fees is a hefty $38,394 (not including room and board). Even after adjusting for inflation, that comes to 2.9 times what Pomona was charging a generation ago, in 1980. This kind of massive tuition increase is the norm. In New England, Williams College charges $41,434, or an inflation-adjusted 3.2 times what it did 30 years ago. USC's current tab of $41,022 is a 3.6 multiple of its 1980 bill.

It is a summer of discontent on many California college campuses. Some, including West Los Angeles College and the three campuses in the San Diego Community College District, have canceled the regular summer session because of budget cutbacks, only offering some non-credit classes and a few specialized courses. Others have severely curtailed course offerings, frustrating students like William Diaz, who found that the few chemistry classes being offered in the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District were all full by the time he was scheduled to register.

Society trusts teachers and school administrators to deliver a lesson arguably more important than reading and math: Cheating is not only forbidden but dishonorable. How discouraging and frustrating it is, then, to discover yet another instance in which an institution itself has been caught violating the rules. On Monday, Claremont McKenna College announced that an official there inflated the SAT scores of incoming students to make the school look good in national rankings, including the overhyped lists published annually in U.S. News & World Report.

President Obama on Friday challenged colleges and universities to cut costs and improve quality or risk losing out to competitors in the race for federal aid. "We are putting colleges on notice," Obama told students at the University of Michigan on Friday morning. "You can't assume that you'll just jack up tuition every single year. If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers every year will go down. " Obama probably won't be able to pass his college affordability agenda this year, with a divided Congress opposing most of his plans.

Brenda Small didn't think twice about taking out student loans to pay for nursing school in the late 1980s. She figured she could easily pay off the $20,000 bill - until an injury a few years later left her permanently unable to work. Her dreams of working in her chosen profession vanished, but not her student debts. Including interest and penalties, the 59-year-old Los Angeles woman now owes more than $39,000 and can't afford to pay the debt from a disability income of $1,234 a month.

It wasn't so long ago that Gwen Jorgensen got a call from U.S. triathlon officials. They knew she had competed as a runner and swimmer in college. Now that she had graduated, they wondered if she might like to try something new. But Jorgensen had pretty much put sports on the back burner to start a career in accounting. Besides, the word "triathlon" conjured images of the grueling Ironman competition, athletes pushing themselves to the point of collapse. "No," she told them, "that doesn't interest me. " Which makes it all the more surprising that - just a few years later - the 26-year-old will race in the triathlon at the 2012 London Olympics, an overnight success in a sport she has grown to love.

Deep Springs College, the tiny but prestigious school and ranch north of Death Valley, plans to admit female students for the first time in its 95-year history. But opponents of co-education sought to block the change Wednesday. In legal paperwork filed in Inyo County Superior Court, two college trustees who want the 28-student campus to remain all-male asked a judge to stop the school from admitting women in fall 2013. Those critics contend that enrolling women would violate the campus' founding trust and original mission to educate "promising young men" in a setting that combines the liberal arts with such physical work as baling alfalfa and milking cows.

The last of an absorbing trio of small Pacific Standard Time shows charting an especially rambunctious moment at Pomona College between 1969 and 1973 looks at the work of nine artists who were either students or on the school's faculty. Ranging from accomplished to unresolved, the paintings, photographs, sculptures and installations often ricochet off one another in form and content, underscoring an era of ferment. At the Pomona College Museum of Art, senior curator Rebecca McGrew and Getty Research Institute specialist Glenn Phillips have chosen 53 works for Part 3 of "It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969-1973.

The Los Angeles Unified School District will require all students to pass a college-preparatory curriculum beginning next fall. The Class of 2016, next year's ninth-graders, will be the first in the nation's second-largest school system who must take those courses needed to apply to a four-year state university. The Board of Education approved a proposal Tuesday that also allows the students to pass those classes with a D - rather than the C needed for admission to either a Cal State or UC school.

Yahoo Inc.investor Third Point, which is fighting for representation on the Internet company's board, criticized Chief Executive Scott Thompson for inaccuracies in his educational record. Thompson lists a bachelor's degree in computer science from Stonehill College, but the school didn't begin offering such a degree until four years after he graduated, Third Point CEO Daniel Loeb said Thursday in an open letter to the board. Thompson has an accounting degree from the school, Loeb said.

Can you afford college? If you've lost your job or watched your college savings vanish, you may be among the countless people lying awake at night, wondering how to say yes to college for next fall. Many families are stunned by annual costs of $20,000 or more cited in the acceptance letters students have received recently. But what families have to pay is not set in stone.

The Obama administration plans to simplify the federal college aid form, which at 153 questions drives millions of families to give up before they finish it. President Obama wants to make the form more user-friendly as part of a sweeping plan to put higher education within reach of more students.

Students traditionally have a soft spot for their alma maters. But as growing numbers of students run up debt in the high five and even six figures to pay for college, that may change. Especially when they discover their old school is actively blocking them from getting a job or going on to a higher degree. That's what increasing numbers of students are finding when they try to obtain an official transcript to send to potential employers or graduate admissions offices. It turns out many colleges and universities refuse to issue these critical documents if students are in default on student loans, or in many cases, even if they just fall one or two months behind.