As university budgets are squeezed, admissions officials are recruiting students who don’t need financial aid:

“More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August and early September. Similarly, 22 percent of the admissions officials at four-year institutions said the financial downturn had led them to pay more attention in their decision to applicants’ ability to pay.”

A Canadian student has filed a human rights complaint over a campus blackface incident:

“Anthony Morgan filmed the students at a Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) school sporting event earlier this month, as they were dressed in Jamaican colours with their skin painted black. They were also chanting in mock Jamaican accents about smoking marijuana.”

Mother Jones reports on the “gutsiest” student newspapers of 2011:

“In April, La Salle University in Philadelphia demanded that an embarrassing story about a business profwho’d hired exotic dancers for a class not run above the fold in the Collegian. The paper’s solution? It left the top of its front page blank and ran the story below the fold, gaining national attention. Well played, friends, well played.”

 Maurice Sendak talks about why he doesn’t think of himself as a children’s book author: 

“I don’t know what that means. How do you write for children? I really have never figured that out. So I decided to just ignore it. I knew that my books would only be published as children’s books. And I once objected fiercely to that. I wanted Outside Over There to be realized as a complex work of art. Well, it wasn’t. And I had to live with that. And yet, perhaps, in some ways, it’s my favorite book of everything I’ve ever done. But it’s a weird book. It’s a weird book. It’s a weird world.”

A British observer warns her country against following America’s higher education model:

“Unfortunately, with our tripling of tuition fees and the shifting of the burden from state to the individual, it is the US trajectory that the UK seems to be following – one that evidence shows is unwise. As massive tuition-fee increases and poor state support in the US take their toll, graduation rates have fallen well behind those of most other industrialised nations.”

Students at a Cairo university have ended a weeklong sit-in after administrators met most of their demands:

“The conflict is also part of a larger wave of campus activism sweeping Egypt. At state universities, students and faculty are demanding the resignation of presidents and deans appointed during the Mubarak era, and the holding of elections to select their replacements. They are also demanding more openness and an end to security interference in campus affairs. The national Egyptian Student Union was reconstituted after a conference at the American University in Cairo in August. Its activities had been suspended 32 years ago by then-president Anwar Sadat.”