Colleges

George Washington University, already the most expensive major university in the U.S., became the first to raise tuition, fees and other mandatory costs beyond $50,000 a year. George Washington trustees set tuition for students enrolling in September at $39,210, an increase of 3.8%, the school said in a statement. Mandatory fees including housing will push that cost to $50,660.

When Jason Robinson transferred to UCLA in the fall as a third-year student, he considered living in a Westwood-area apartment. But then he was offered a spot in a new campus residence hall and joined a trend in Southern California and around the nation. More students want to live on campus these days, and more schools want them to. The result is a building boom. "I couldn't be happier," Robinson, a communications major from Palm Desert, said in the on-campus room he shares with two others.

Cracking down on college students, the music industry is sending thousands more complaints to top universities this school year than it did last year as it targets music illegally downloaded over campus computer networks. A few schools, including Ohio and Purdue universities, already have received more than 1,000 complaints about individual students since last fall -- significant increases over the last school year.

A suicide bomber pushed past guards at a crowded college campus Sunday and set off a thunderous blast that killed at least 40 Iraqis, most of them female students waiting in line to enter classrooms for midterm exams. The attack was the second in recent weeks to target the mainly Shiite Muslim Mustansiriya University. Even as rescue workers mopped up blood from the college grounds, the Iraqi government insisted that the U.S.-Iraqi security plan launched nearly two weeks ago was succeeding.

A San Francisco-based firm paid kickbacks to Pepperdine University and other colleges to steer students to the company for their college loans, New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo alleged Thursday. Education Finance Partners paid schools to be named to their "preferred lender" lists, but neither the company nor the schools properly disclosed the payments to students, Cuomo said. Students were led to believe that lenders earned preferred designations by charging low interest rates, Cuomo said.

At her desk at Hollywood High School, counselor Judy Campbell has a motto for all the procrastinators, miscalculators, confused and unlucky in the college application process. Her message, proclaimed on posters in her office, is: Try Plan B. Even as most high school seniors and their parents are nervously awaiting admission decisions over the next few weeks, a lesser-known movement is at work in many offices like Campbell's.

India's Supreme Court suspended a government program to reserve spots for lower-caste students at the country's top medical, engineering and professional schools -- a plan that has repeatedly prompted widespread protests. The quota system for India's prestigious state-run professional schools was to take effect with the current crop of applications. But a two-judge panel on the court temporarily halted the program, saying it could not be implemented until judges had ruled on its legality.

A settlement with three dozen schools and a major lender announced Monday will make the student loan process fairer to students and their families, New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo said. As part of the settlement, six schools agreed to reimburse students a total of $3.27 million, Cuomo said, and Citibank, which does business at about 3,000 schools, agreed to donate $2 million to a national fund created to educate students and parents about the financial aid industry.

For Francisco Alvarado, a 22-year-old undocumented immigrant enrolled at Cal State Dominguez Hills, a college education would be impossible without some financial assistance. In his two years at the school, Alvarado has received about $4,000 from the student organization Espiritu de Nuestro Futuro, which raises scholarship money for undocumented students.

University officials in California and across the nation, shocked by Monday's massacre at Virginia Tech, said they would review emergency procedures for handling threatening incidents on their campuses. Some campus counseling centers saw an increase in students seeking help, and some anxious parents contacted universities to express concern -- even though for many, the assault occurred 3,000 miles away. Still other parents called their children to say they loved them.