Education

A man who promised Virginia Tech a $30 million donation has been sentenced to prison for wire fraud and money laundering. The Washington Post reports that Phillip Barnard was sentenced to five years and three months in prison Tuesday in federal court. Barnard pleaded guilty earlier this year. Prosecutors said Barnard never had any legitimate…

Purdue University wants to know if its alumni are "ever true." A $2 billion fundraising campaign to support students, faculty, academic programs and facilities is underway at Purdue, the university announced at a private ceremony Friday during the President's Council. "Ever True: The Campaign for Purdue University" started its silent phase in 2012 and will…

If newspapers are having trouble turning a profit without deep annual cuts, how about becoming a nonprofit? That question’s been asked a lot over the last decade of print decline—even though it glides past the fact that nonprofits need revenue and a business model just as much as for-profits do. The latest possibility to be…

A New York judge denied a college's petition to add the wife of a Wall Street billionaire to its name, citing the will of the founding donor. Paul Smith's College President Cathy Dove announced the ruling on the Adirondack college's website Wednesday. The college's board of trustees voted over the summer to rename the college…

A new report from the Century Foundation questions the legitimacy of four former for-profit colleges' recent transformations to nonprofit status. Those institutions are "covert for-profits," according to the report, "where owners have managed to affix a nonprofit label to their colleges while engineering substantial ongoing personal financial benefits for themselves." The report's author is Robert…

A graduate of a Colorado university who wanted to cite the names of Bible verses on a donor nameplate in a football locker room sued his alma mater for rejecting the request. Michael Lucas wanted the plaque recognizing a $2,500 donation he made to be inscribed with "Colossians 3:23" and "Micah 5:9," but not the…

Penn State’s decision to honor a former board member of Jerry Sandusky’s Second Mile charity has drawn more than 100 complaints to the university in less than 24 hours. Penn State selected Bruce Heim—a man who said he witnessed Sandusky enter showers with children—to join a group of alumni for an honorary coin toss prior…

The NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering is set to change its name to NYU Tandon School of Engineering on Monday after receiving a $100-million gift donation, according to a press release. Donors NYU trustee Chandrika Tandon and her husband Ranjan Tandon want the university to raise an additional $50 million for scholarship aid. Tandon said…

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently finalized a rule forcing businesses to share data with workers that expose how much more their chief executives make than they do. In that spirit, let’s take a look at the compensation of the chief executives of three very large education nonprofit organizations heavily involved in standardized testing—the College…

Investigative reporter Gilbert Gaul got a call from his 82-year-old mother-in-law a few years ago to talk football. A Penn State University graduate and longtime season-ticket holder for the Nittany Lions, she had received offers from the university to upgrade her seats or transfer them to family. Both offers involved charges of thousands of dollars—payments…