A freshman at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, Tyler Clementi, apparently killed himself last Wednesday, after classmates used a hidden camera to record his sexual activities and broadcast them on the Internet, according to the New York Daily News and other local news outlets. Two Rutgers students, Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei, were each charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for the broadcast, and Mr. Ravi faces two additional charges for attempting to arrange a second broadcast, according to the Daily News, which said his lawyer could not be reached for comment. A Twitter post indicated that Mr. Clementi and Mr. Ravi were roommates and that Mr. Clementi was taped with another man, the Daily News reported. According to the newspaper, Rutgers declined to comment on the details of the case but said that it "takes these matters seriously and has policies to deal with student...

The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and the Council of Independent Colleges announced a new Web site today that catalogs programs at private, nonprofit colleges designed to better recruit at-risk students, and to improve the retention and graduation rates of those and other students. The site is part of a larger project, Building Blocks to 2020, designed to help meet President Obama's goals for increasing college access and completion.

Good news for the Class of 2011: The National Association of Colleges and Employers projects that hiring is about to pick up. The 197 employers who took part in the association's survey, Job Outlook 2011 Fall Preview, expect to hire 13.5 percent more new graduates from this year's class than they did from last year's. The association plans to update the projections throughout the year. Results from a much larger annual survey of employers, conducted by Michigan State University, will come out this fall.

The National Center for Education Statistics today released a "first look" at data on college pricing for 2009-10. For example, four-year publics charged an average of $6,393 in tuition and fees for in-state, full-time students last year. Public two-year colleges charged $2,970, four-year private nonprofits $21,050, and four-year for-profits $15,715. The report also looks at changes in published costs since 2000-1, with the largest sectors seeing increases between 20 and 46 percent. The numbers differ from the widely cited College Board "Trends in College Pricing" because the federal data are not weighted to reflect student enrollment. The new federal report also has information on 2008-9 enrollments and degrees conferred.

The University of California at San Diego was the nation's No. 1 university, and Morehouse College was the top liberal-arts college, in Washington Monthly's new guide, published Monday, which aims to counter U.S. News & World Report's college rankings. Washington Monthly ranks colleges based on measures of how much social mobility, research, and community service they foster. For the second time, the magazine also ranked community colleges, based on graduation rates and their performance on the Community College Survey of Student Engagement. Saint Paul College, in Minnesota, topped that list. As with all rankings, people have taken issue with Washington Monthly’s methodology in the past.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has ruled that portions of the student-conduct code at the University of the Virgin Islands are unconstitutional. The appeals court reversed two of a lower court's decisions in the case, ruling that provisions of the code that prohibited "offensive" or "unauthorized" signs and conduct causing "emotional distress" were overly broad restrictions of speech. In particular, the appeals court ruled against a ban on unauthorized signs because the university had no clear policy for authorizing signs. The court also upheld the lower court's ruling that a clause that forbade students to cause "mental harm," or to demean or disgrace anybody, was unconstitutional. The appeals court sided with the university on several other claims.

Private, nonprofit colleges increased published tuition and fees an average of 4.5 percent for the 2010-11 academic year, according to results from a new survey by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, or Naicu. That increase is in line with last year's 4.3-percent increase, which was the lowest jump in 37 years. For the next academic year, the private colleges increased their institutional aid an average of 6.8 percent, after increasing it 9 percent the year before. The survey was filled out by 497 private colleges and universities who are members of Naicu, and the results provide insight into how institutions decided to balance tuition and aid after a year of wrestling with how the sluggish economy would affect incoming students' enrollment decisions.

More than half of the students in a special program at the City University of New York's community colleges graduated within three years, according to new data from the system. The program, Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, was started in 2007 with the aim of graduating 50 percent of its students within three years, much higher than the national average for community colleges. More than 1,100 students started in the first year of the program, and 53 percent of them had graduated by the end of this spring. The program requires students to attend full time and provides them with a host of financial and academic supports. Initially, students had to be ready to do college-level work to join the program, though it has since expanded to include those who need remedial courses.

A majority of colleges that responded to a new survey saw an increase in the number of students who made deposits by May 1 to lock in their spots for this fall's class. But two-thirds of the colleges surveyed expected higher-than-usual "summer melt," which occurs when students who made deposits fail to show up on the campus. The survey, conducted by Noel-Levitz, a consulting company, includes responses from about 330 public and private four-year colleges and universities.

An annual report, published today by Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, shows that high-school graduation rates dipped slightly for the Class of 2007. Only 68.8 percent of students who started as ninth graders in the 2003-4 academic year had graduated four years later, according to the report, "Diplomas Count 2010: Graduation by the Numbers -- Putting Data to Work for Student Success." That's down slightly from 69.2 percent for the previous high-school class and marks the second year of decline in the national graduation rate.