The extensive web of telephone services om most campuses could soon cost the average college or university an extra $100,000 per year—and cost higher education in general hundreds of millions—because of a proposed change to a federally-regulated service fee.

On Dec. 11 the American Council on Education sent a letter to the Federal Communications Commission protesting a change in something called the “universal service fund.” The fund, run by the FCC, is used to subsidize service in rural and low-income areas, providing customers affordable rates.

The change, proposed by telecoms AT&T and Verizon, would charge institutions 85 cents per assigned telephone number, according to an

Some people raise money for every mile they run in a long-distance race. Now two brothers, Michael and Matthew Kopko, have developed a Web site called GradeFund that applies this “marathon model” to helping students raise money for college.

The site enables students to create online profiles and invite family and friends to register as “sponsors” — people who make pledges of financial assistance to individual students based on the grades they earn at the end of each term. Corporate sponsors may also donate money to students who are interested in a subject that is related to their organization.

Launched about two weeks ago, GradeFund is managed by a team of seven people and already has about 900 users, according to Michael Kopko. He says between 15 percent and 25 percent of users are...

Whether they’re making grammatical errors, using suggestive handles, or just writing in an inappropriately casual tone, many students don’t know how to e-mail their professors properly. Or at least that’s the sentiment expressed by the 300-plus posts to a Chronicle forum on the topic.

Common sense — or maybe a spell checker — might seem to be the best remedy for most inappropriate e-mail messages. But another solution may lie in a new Google e-mail application called “Mail Goggles.” The tool is named after “beer goggles,” the slang term college students use to describe how inebriation can make a potential mate seem inexplicably attractive.

Mail Goggles...

Web sites promising to make the college search quicker, easier, and more accurate are popping up so frequently these days that users might need an additional service just to filter through the sites themselves.

Campus Explorer is one of the newest college-search sites to hit the Web. In addition to the usual features that let users search for and compare colleges, the site can analyze a prospective student’s GPA, test scores, and extra-curricular activities to estimate whether he or she will be accepted into various institutions. The site then labels each college or university on a student’s list as a “reach,” a “target,” or a “safety.”

Campus Explorer is user-friendly and offers an extensive database of four-year, two-year, and technical colleges. Most of its information...

Sometimes you can identify trends in technology simply by looking around. And if it seems like every freshman on your campus owns a laptop and has a Facebook account, you might not be hallucinating—at least not at Amherst College, where 432 out of 438 freshmen had joined the “Amherst College Class of 2012” Facebook group by the end of August.

That little fact is part of an “IT Index,” modeled after the Harper’s Index and compiled by Peter Schilling, director of information technology at Amherst. Mr. Schilling hopes the index will help people understand that technology is “in the midst of very radical change.”

A number of Mr. Schilling’s 24 index items suggest the way college students use technology is changing rather quickly. For example, of those 438 freshmen, 93 have registered iPhones or iTouches to the...

Forget college viewbooks. The Web now lets prospective freshmen hear raw reports directly from students on just about any institution they’re interested in.

That’s at least the sentiment expressed by the editors of Unigo, a new college-review Web site that was the subject of a lengthy New York Times Magazine article on Sunday.

The site’s founder, Jordan Goldman, a 2004 Wesleyan University graduate, began collecting reviews, photos, and videos about a year ago from college students across the country, according to the article. The result is 30,000 individual bits of student-submitted content, including reviews, photos, and videos, all of which Goldman says will be included on the Web site.

Text-message alert systems may be ineffective in the event of large-scale emergencies, suggests a new report by Patrick G. Traynor, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“In particular, because of the architecture of cellular networks, such systems will not be able to deliver a high volume of emergency messages in a short period of time,” says the report, titled “Characterizing the Limitations of Third-Party EAS Over Cellular Text Messaging Services.”

Through a series of experiments, Mr. Traynor concluded that modern cellular networks are incapable of meeting the 10-minute alert goal that has been established by the federal

Twitter, a service that lets users blast messages to cellphones, is the latest way for college students to learn about parties. Neighbors of at least one college are saying it’s contributing to out-of-control student gatherings.

Residents of Westchester, the neighborhood surrounding Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, say microblogging services like Twitter are not only allowing students to find out where their classmates are partying, but also when the gatherings are about to be shut down by the police.

Residents have blogged about their concerns, saying microblogging is creating a situation in which “students move from party to party fed by today’s technology” and can easily avoid getting caught for underage drinking. A

Instructor-review Web sites like RateMyProfessors.com are nothing new for today’s tech-savvy students. But even though online rants and raves can suggest which courses to take and which to avoid, they provide users with only a vague idea of how they would fare in a particular course. Until now.

A new site created and maintained by a Yale undergraduate is about to take online course shopping one step further. The site, Gradifi.com, promises to give students a more statistically sound review by actually predicting the grade an individual student would receive in a course, reports the Yale Daily News.

Dan Loewenherz, a junior and the creator of the site, told the student paper he wants students to have resources beyond peer reviews when they pick their courses. Although Yale has an official Online...