The governance reforms were a response to some of the problems that may have exacerbated the scandal sparked by Jerry Sandusky, the former football coach convicted last year of more than 40 counts of sexual abuse against young boys.

Among the board’s changes, adopted on May 3, were making the state’s governor and the university’s president two out of six ex officio board members who may not vote; increasing the number of trustees required for a quorum; imposing term limits on all but the ex officio members; and “enhancing” the board’s conflict-of-interest policy.

The changes not only will help prevent future problems stemming from a lack of board oversight, but will be viewed as a “credit positive” for the university, according to the report issued last Wednesday by the credit-rating agency. Moody’s had downgraded Penn State’s credit rating in October 2012, citing the possibility of numerous lawsuits from Mr. Sandusky’s victims.

The agency is not upgrading its rating of Penn State, but in the report, which is available only to Moody’s subscribers, it says the “significant changes” in Penn State’s governance structure and oversight practices “are a credit positive because they strengthen the oversight and management of the university, allowing emerging risks to be appropriately assessed and not overlooked.”

The university is one of the first to start such a fund-raising effort through a partnership with a crowdfunding start-up company. UVa is teaming up with Useed, a company focused on promoting fund raising in higher education by soliciting donations for university research projects or student-proposed entrepreneurial projects.

Crowdfunding Web sites, such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, have become popular among individual students and researchers who want to raise money for specific projects or simply to finance their education. And now some universities are also jumping on the bandwagon to promote crowdfunding opportunities on a larger scale.

Useed also has portals at three other universities: Arizona State University, Cornell University, and the University of Delaware. And last December, the University of Utah teamed up with another crowdfunding start-up company, RocketHub, to attract donations for new university technologies.

“It’s our hope that this innovative initiative will build on the success of the university’s proof-of-concept research programs and establish a new model for funding promising, early-stage research,” said Thomas C. Skalak, UVa’s vice president for research, in a written statement.

Although Useed’s partnerships with other universities focus primarily on student projects, UVa’s site will promote research projects at the university. In a six-month pilot, the portal will feature 10 different projects, including two that started this week.

One featured project seeks to raise $35,000 to make water-purification tools more accessible in rural areas of South Africa. Another project—led by Kathryn Laughon, an associate professor of nursing—seeks to raise $19,000 to develop a new forensic dye to help identify sexual-assault injuries on women of all skin tones.

Ms. Laughon said in a written statement that nurses and physicians who conduct physical examinations following sexual assault find fewer injuries in women with darker skin.

“We have good reason to think that that’s simply a matter of the technology we’re using to visualize these injuries,” she said. Raising money to finance the research “would help us go a long way toward identifying a solution to this important problem.”

“We were kind of stunned,” he said. “You’ve gotta be kidding?”

At issue was a single billboard Berry had rented near Nashville that features a flattering view of the campus, the slogan “26,000 acres of opportunity,” and the college’s name and Web address.

The billboard doesn’t mention that the small private college is in Rome, Ga., about 200 miles down the interstate from Nashville. But the commission told Berry that, under Tennessee law, the out-of-state college needed to register as an educational institution in Tennessee—paying a hefty fee in the process—or face stiff fines.

Berry responded on Monday with a lawsuit filed in federal court against the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. The suit argues that the commission is infringing on the college’s First Amendment rights and violating the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause. If the suit proceeds, it promises an interesting fight and possibly a precedent-setting decision.

Tennessee’s attempt to enforce registration on Berry derives from its argument that the presence of the billboard is equivalent to operating a physical campus in the state. “It’s not uncommon to define local advertising as operating” in the state among the “dozen or more” states with similar laws, according to Gregory Ferenbach, a lawyer with Dow Lohnes who advises colleges on state-authorization issues.

Berry College’s billboard, which is still on display near Nashville.

A lawsuit arising from such a dispute is more rare. “Usually they don’t get that far,” Mr. Ferenbach said. “They work out a settlement, or the [attorney general] office backs off, and they tweak the regulation a little bit.” But Tennessee “has always taken kind of a hard line on this, they’ve always enforced it,” he added. The state’s registration fees are “very high,” he said, “and schools have complained about this a lot.”

A news release from Berry suggests that the college could be forced to pay up to $20,000 a year to register with Tennessee, or, alternately, to pay fines of $500 a day while the billboard remains up. President Briggs said that the commission would not give the college a registration-fee figure in writing. A spokeswoman at Berry confirmed that the college has not removed the billboard or paid any fines.

Representatives of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Mr. Briggs said Tennessee’s response to the billboard was an “arbitrary” reaction to competition from an out-of-state institution. In recent years, Tennessee has become the second-biggest contributor of new undergraduates to the Georgia college’s enrollment of about 2,000, he said. Last year Berry enrolled 164 Tennesseans, a new high and up from 69 Tennessee students a decade earlier.

“It’s been a growth area for us,” Mr. Briggs said. He added that while Berry doesn’t do much advertising—some in nearby Atlanta, some in Alabama—such appeals are “important for us, and we think it’s important in principle, so we’re willing to pursue [the suit].”

Mr. Ferenbach cautioned that he had yet to read the lawsuit’s documents, only news coverage of the dispute, but he said that Berry’s case appears to argue that Tennessee is restricting the college’s commercial speech. To prevail on that score, the state would have to show a “substantial state interest” in insisting on registration, Mr. Ferenbach said, “and in this case it would be protecting consumers,” namely students.

Another, more complicated part of Berry’s argument involves the accusation that Tennessee is violating the Constitution’s clause on the regulation of interstate commerce. That aspect of the case could hinge on whether or not Tennessee’s law—or its own interpretation of it—was discriminatory or placed an undue burden on interstate commerce. “It’d be very much a factual determination,” Mr. Ferenbach said.

“There hasn’t been much case law under the commerce clause over state authorization of higher education,” he added. “If this case proceeds, it will be an important precedent.”

The USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation will recruit students interested in such areas as marketing, business entrepreneurship, computer science and engineering, audio and visual design, and the arts, and will seek to create a new generation of innovators, according to the university. The $70-million gift, comprising $35-million donations from each man, is part of the $6-billion Campaign for the University of Southern California.

Mr. Iovine, who will deliver the university’s commencement address on Friday, worked as a producer and engineer for such artists as John Lennon and Bruce Springsteen, then founded Interscope Records, in 1990. Today he is chairman of Universal Music Group’s Interscope Geffen A&M Records. Dr. Dre was a member of seminal hip-hop group NWA before morphing into an in-demand producer and head of Interscope-distributed Aftermath Records.

Together the two men founded Beats Electronics LLC, the parent of the company that produces Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, a popular high-end line of audio gear.

Forbes estimated Mr. Iovine’s net worth at $400-million in 2011, and Celebrity NetWorth has put the figure at $700-million. Forbes recently ranked Dr. Dre as the third-wealthiest hip-hop star, with $350-million, behind Sean (Diddy) Combs and Jay-Z.

“I feel like this is the biggest, most exciting, and probably the most important thing that I’ve done in my career,” Dr. Dre told The New York Times for an article about the new program.

While details about the entrepreneurship program are still being worked out, it will admit its first class of 25 students in the fall of 2014. They will be selected for their academic achievement and their ability for “original thought,” the university said.

The report, issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, calls for more flexible repayment options and a refinancing market for private student loans.

In the report, the agency analyzes the more than 28,000 comments it received about the difficulties faced by many borrowers with private student loans. The rising amount of student debt can have a “domino effect” on society because high monthly loan payments can deplete a borrower’s savings, making him or her less likely to buy a home or make other financial decisions that could help fuel the economy, the report says.

The report suggests a number of policy options to provide relief for borrowers, including creating a refinancing market for private student loans and working with loan servicers to create more negotiable repayment plans.

“Even if such a program required public funds, or a sharing of the cost between the public sector and the owners of the loans, the economic benefits of facilitating restructuring activity at scale might outweigh program costs,” the report says.

When borrowers take out loans, they typically do not have a strong credit history, or may have to rely on the credit score of a parent to qualify for a loan—even if that person’s credit score is also low. The situation can result in a loan with a higher interest rate. But students who graduate and find a job are often unable to refinance at a lower rate, even though their credit score may have improved.

One company that has worked with the consumer-protection bureau is already giving borrowers those options.

SoFi is an online lending pool that connects student-loan borrowers to alumni of their colleges and universities. SoFi has secured money from alumni at 78 colleges across the country that it uses to issue new loans and to refinance existing loans.

According to Mike S. Cagney, a co-founder and the chief executive officer of SoFi, more than three-quarters of the company’s lending—85 percent of $100-million last year—was in refinancing.

Once a borrower applies online to refinance his or her loans, SoFi approaches the current holder of the loan, pays it off, and issues a new one at a lower interest rate.

“If you get someone who has completed school and is employed, they have a very different credit profile than when they started,” Mr. Cagney said.

But he said that, in addition to providing a refinancing market for private student loans, policy makers and institutions needed to focus on increasing financial literacy among borrowers. A large source of the problem with student debt is that some borrowers take out more loans than they need, or that they would be able to repay, he said.

“If your expected compensation after graduating is $30,000 per year,” Mr. Cagney said, “you can’t take out $100,000 in loans.”

For Strayer Education, the approach seems to be “all of the above.”

As it reported last week that its new-student enrollments were down 14 percent from the same period a year ago, the company also announced the creation of a new Graduate Completion Fund, which will allow Strayer undergraduates who complete three-quarters of their courses to receive the final quarter of their courses free. The company also announced that it would freeze tuition for all current undergraduates (at $1,700 a course, its charges are at the high end among those in the for-profit sector), and impose no tuition increase for 2014.

Strayer, which also offers graduate programs, enrolls about 46,000 students.

“Affordability had just become a large issue for our students,” said Robert S. Silberman, Strayer’s executive chairman, in an interview.

The university also announced that it would no longer allow first-time college students who need remedial mathematics or English classes to enroll online. Some institutions, most notably California State University, are proposing to offer remedial classes via MOOCs and other online formats. But Strayer officials said their research showed that such students—who typically account for about 25 percent of the university’s entering classes—don’t fare as well in online courses as they do in face-to-face classrooms.

Similarly, the Graduate Completion Fund is open only to students who don’t skip more than one term, because Strayer’s research showed lower graduation rates for students who took off for more than one term. (And, of course, the stipulation also limits Strayer’s expenses for the program.)

Stock analysts say the moves are emblematic of changes many for-profit-education companies are making in an attempt to attract students who will persist. Some of this is driven by tougher regulations on student-loan-default rates. And some of it, said Jarrel Price, of Height Analytics, is driven by how the market has changed.

Competition from nonprofit colleges and the ban on paying recruiters based on the number of students they enroll mean the cost of recruiting a student, especially a quality student, has gone up. “They can’t churn and burn anymore,” Mr. Price said. ”It’s uneconomical for them.” Now, he added, “there’s a financial incentive to focus on retention.”

Others say the moves reflect a recognition by Strayer that its prices were just too high. For a student entering Strayer with no college credits, a bachelor’s degree would cost $68,000 before the new persistence discount. Its prices were “out of line with the markets they were serving,” said Trace A. Urdan, an analyst with Wells Fargo Securities.

The university is on pace to break its previous annual fund-raising record, of $366-million in 2008.

A substantial part of the current total derives from the flagship’s incipient medical school. In January the university announced that the computer magnate Michael Dell and his wife Susan had contributed $50-million through their foundation to establish the Dell Medical School, which is scheduled to enroll its first class in 2016. (The state’s higher-education coordinating board has suggested that Texas universities refrain from opening new medical schools until there are enough residency positions statewide to accommodate their graduates.)

Julie M. Hooper, associate vice president for development, says that while gifts of that size are uncommon in any fiscal year, “adding the medical school to the equation is helping tremendously” with fund raising over all. She goes so far as to call the new school “a game changer” for the institution.

That said, she adds that the university’s current fund-raising success stems from a concentrated effort by its development team, its deans, and President William C. Powers Jr.—or, as Ms. Hooper calls him, the “fund raiser in chief”—as part of a $3-billion campaign.

She also credits an increased focus on estate gifts by the development staff. The current $302-million total includes five estate gifts of $5-million or more; such planned gifts have increased by 150 since the last fiscal year.

A survey of college fund raisers, released in January by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, predicted that giving would rise by 5.8 percent in the 2013 calendar year.

The university’s “Rising to the Challenge” campaign seeks to create hundreds of endowed professorships, raise undergraduate financial aid, and strengthen research support, among other goals.

The campaign will serve as a way “to foster our capacity for collaboration, to invest in faculty in unprecedented ways, and to ease the financial burden of a Johns Hopkins education so that the most talented students can study here, regardless of means,” said the university’s president, Ronald J. Daniels, in a written statement.

Fritz W. Schroeder, the university’s vice president for development and alumni relations, said the campaign would focus on the “people” of Johns Hopkins—the students and faculty. Over the course of the campaign, the university hopes to raise $693-million for financial aid and $968-million for faculty support, he said. The money will create 300 endowed professorships, in addition to the current 385.

Since the campaign’s “quiet phase” began, in 2010, more than 150,000 donors have contributed $1.94-billion, or about 43 percent of the goal, including a $350-million pledge by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, who as an alumnus has given the university more than $1-billion.

University officials said they hope to reach the $4.5-billion mark by 2017.

Part of the money raised in the campaign will create five interdisciplinary programs that focus on how individual schools at Johns Hopkins can work together on larger issues, such as global health, urban planning, education, and water access and sanitation.

For example, the Institute for the American City, one of the programs, draws on the core work and research of the Schools of Engineering, Nursing, and Public Health, among others, and will team up with the City of Baltimore to seek solutions to urban challenges, Mr. Schroeder said.

The programs emerged from Mr. Daniels’s call for different divisions of the institution to function as “one university,” Mr. Schroeder said.

Mr. Schroeder said the global span of the programs should help introduce the university to new donors who otherwise may not be interested but who have a passion for one of the issues the campaign focuses on.

“It’s the idea that Hopkins will be strengthened by building bridges,” Mr. Schroeder said.

A member of the business school’s board since 1994, Mr. Perelman made a $25-million gift in February to the University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater, for a new center for political science and economics.

Mr. Perelman, who has a net worth of $13.7-billion, is No. 65 on the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index, according to Bloomberg News.

View The Chronicle’s list of the largest private gifts made to higher education since 1967.

Some Cooper Union students painted the inside of one campus building black in protest to its new policy of charging tuition. Credit: Alexis Rivas Arch

Imagine if Kenyon College scrapped its literary magazine, Ohio State University folded its football program, and Wellesley College opened its doors to men.

As colleges maneuver to distinguish themselves in an increasingly competitive academic marketplace, it is a rare institution that surrenders a signature tradition. Cooper Union did just that last week, when its Board of Trustees announced that it would begin charging undergraduate tuition after more than a century of granting full-tuition scholarships to every student who was admitted. No one was particularly surprised by the move, which the financially beleaguered New York institution had been considering for more than two years. But it was a watershed moment for Cooper Union.

Its president, Jamshed Bharucha, points out that his highly selective institution remains a bargain for students who are admitted to one of its three colleges, in art, architecture, or engineering. Instead of granting each student a scholarship for the full tuition of nearly $40,000, Cooper Union will still cover half of that cost.

“But for those of lesser means, it’s going to be more affordable,” President Bharucha says. Not only will they be eligible for full-tuition scholarships; they will also get assistance for housing and other costs. “We now have a sustainable financial model,” he says, adding that while details are still being worked out, anyone who is eligible for a Pell Grant would get a full-tuition scholarship.

Not everyone accepts Mr. Bharucha’s explanation. Students who have organized under the name Students for a Free Cooper Union have staged a series of protest events to demonstrate their opposition to the change. Over the weekend, a contingent led by architecture students repainted the third-floor lobby of Cooper Union’s Foundation Building, changing it from white to black, a reflection of the student mood.

“We have a president who is saying, ‘Tuition is the new free,’” says Joe Riley, a senior in the School of Art. “So the response was, ‘Black is the new white.’”

On Wednesday at 3 p.m. students from a number of New York colleges will descend on Cooper Union for a “May Day Convergence” that Mr. Riley says is part of a movement against student debt and profit-driven higher education.

“Cooper is the canary in the coal mine of higher education today,” says Mr. Riley, who maintains that the enormous education debt held by many college students and alumni is evidence that the system is broken. “Schools aren’t doing enough to provide for lower-income students, or even middle-class students.”

He and other Cooper Union students say the college’s financial woes result from years of fiduciary mismanagement by the Board of Trustees. The students argue that when the industrialist Peter Cooper founded the college, in 1859, he envisioned a place where education was as “free as air and water.” That goal became possible at the dawn of the 20th century, when Andrew Carnegie, as a member of the Board of Trustees, made a generous gift that was matched by Peter Cooper’s children. As President Bharucha tells it, “The then-president of Cooper, Abram S. Hewitt, decided to make it free for all.”

But Mr. Bharucha says that Peter Cooper’s intention was not that higher education would be free to all but only to those who could not otherwise afford it.

“He set up Cooper Union for the working classes or the industrial classes, for people like him who did not have a chance to get a formal education because they had to work,” Mr. Bharucha says. “And they could not afford the colleges of the time, or they had the wrong religion or gender or race. And he eliminated all those barriers, including the socioeconomic barriers.”

Mr. Bharucha acknowledges that while free tuition may be Cooper Union’s most important feature in the popular mind, “there are lots of extraordinary things that distinguish our institution from others.”

Dennis M. Gephardt, vice president and senior analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, the credit-rating agency, notes that Cooper Union is not the first tuition-free college that has been forced to backpedal on its commitment. The Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, which opened its doors in 2002, announced in 2009 that it would cut its scholarships to 50 percent of tuition in response to endowment losses.

“This is just a dramatic example of the broader story impacting all endowed colleges and universities, that after they had investment losses, their ability to offer institutional aid from spending on their endowment was reduced,” Mr. Gephardt says. “So they either had to control expenses or try to generate more net tuition revenue from their students that could pay more, or somehow adjust.”

Richard K. Miller, Olin’s president, says that students who entered in the 2010-11 academic year were the first cohort affected by the change.

“At first there was some anxiety and lack of understanding on the part of the student community as to what we were doing and why,” Mr. Miller says. “There were some folks who imagined that because we were reducing the tuition scholarship, and families would be expected to contribute a higher proportion, that suddenly families who had high levels of financial need would no longer be present in the Olin community, because our sticker price was up, which was not true at all.”

Mr. Miller says that while similarities do exist, his institution faces a different set of issues than those of Cooper Union. “Not only do we not have a large alumni base, the oldest alum is just about to turn 30,” he says.

While he won’t offer formal advice to his counterparts at Cooper Union, Mr. Miller is happy to provide encouragement.

“Cooper is a strong institution with such a strong history,” he says. “Once the dust clears and people can see how this all plays out, and they meet the students that they’ll have in future years, they’ll see that this is not a game-changer. This is a bump in the road.”