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Employers value a four-year college degree, many of them more than ever. Yet half of those surveyed recently by "The Chronicle" and American Public Media's "Marketplace" said they had trouble finding recent graduates qualified to fill positions at their company or organization. Nearly a third gave colleges just fair to poor marks for producing successful employees. And they dinged bachelor's-degree holders for lacking basic workplace proficiencies, like adaptability, communication skills, and the ability to solve complex problems. What gives? These days a bachelor's degree is practically a prerequisite for getting one's resume read--two-thirds of employers said they never waive degree requirements, or do so only for particularly outstanding candidates. But clearly the credential leaves employers wanting. While they use college as a sorting mechanism, to signal job candidates' discipline and drive, they think it is falling short in adequately preparing new hires. The tension may lie partly in changes in the world of work: technological transformation and evolving expectations that employees be ready to handle everything straightaway. And perhaps managers are right to expect an easier time finding employees up to the task--after all, three times the proportion of Americans have bachelor's degrees now as did a generation or two ago. While some institutions tout their career centers, internship offerings, and academic programs designed with industry input, others argue that workplace skills ought to be taught on the job. Higher education is meant to educate broadly, not train narrowly, they say: It is business that is asking too much. And if college graduates are not up to scratch, some campus leaders ask, why do employers keep hiring them? The unemployment rate for Americans with bachelor's degrees, after all, is less than 5 percent; for those with only high-school diplomas, it is nearly double. Well, because even though employers may kvetch about college graduates, they generally make better employees than those who finished only high school. If nothing else, having gone through four--or five or six--years of schooling proves that they can stick with a task.

American colleges have to be in India. After all, no other country in this century, save China, is likely to be as important geopolitically, financially, demographically, or culturally. Globally savvy students ought to study here. There are research opportunities for political scientists and public-health specialists, economists, and ethnomusicologists. And, simply put, India, where half of the 1.2-billion-and-growing population is under 30, needs help--building enough universities, wiring enough classrooms, and training enough teachers. American colleges seek to build campuses, partnerships, and research opportunities in India, but red tape, poor facilities, and other problems keep getting in the way. Opening Indian universities to international collaboration will continue to be a demanding chore, and preparing Americans to work here a challenge.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was in the university-building business. The elite institute is back in the university-building business. In addition to the thousands of faculty research collaborations around the globe, the university over the past five years has once more engaged in ambitious efforts to create new, independent institutions, this time in Abu Dhabi, Russia, and Singapore. Other such projects, in Asia and Latin America, are also on the table.

Economists in both India and China see signs of slackening economic activity, from currency fluctuations in India to a falloff in imports, electricity consumption, and real-estate sales in China. A weakening of the economies in the two countries could be worrisome news for American colleges, for which an uptick in full-paying foreign students has been the one bright spot amid recent budgetary woes. China and India are by far the two largest sources of international students in the United States; together, they account for more than a third of all foreign students on American campuses. Mark W. Harris, president of ELS Educational Services, a language-instruction provider, remains bullish about the flow of international students. But he cautions that colleges need to be savvier about their overseas recruiting instead of relying so heavily on certain countries. Many educators, however, hesitate to draw a strong connection between the economy and international enrollments--and history is on their side.

Students in the University of Rhode Island's International Engineering Program (IEP) spend a semester studying at an overseas university and another six months interning at a company abroad; at the end of five years, they earn two degrees, in engineering and a foreign language. Despite the extra academic demands, nearly a third of Rhode Island's undergraduate engineering students, about 300 over all, enroll in the IEP. By contrast, fewer than 4 percent of engineering students nationally study abroad, according to the Institute of International Education, a rate far lower than that of their classmates in the humanities, social sciences, and even business. While other colleges have considered cutting foreign-language programs, Rhode Island's have grown, due in large part to the IEP. Only the University of Michigan graduates more German majors each year, and Rhode Island is one of just seven institutions with a federally recognized national center for intensive language instruction in Chinese. There have been other, less-anticipated benefits of the IEP: Women have enrolled in engineering in increasing numbers and the academic quality of Rhode Island's engineering students has improved. More than half of all IEP students receive the university's top academic scholarship.

In the 2009-2010 academic year, women accounted for nearly two-thirds of the 270,600 American students going overseas. Indeed, the proportion of men studying overseas has remained the same--or flatlined, to put it less charitably--for more than two decades. Sending a broader cross-section of majors abroad has not made a dent in the gender gap because, it turns out, women in those fields study overseas at rates disproportionate to their numbers. From its inception, more than a century ago, study abroad has had a reputation as a female pursuit, the lasting image one of Seven Sisters students steaming overseas for a grand European tour of art and culture, a refining gloss for a marriageable young woman. "Women were sent overseas to be culturally educated ladies who could entertain their husbands' business partners," says James M. Lucas, of Michigan State University, who has written extensively about men and study abroad. "The mantra became that study abroad is feminized and a dalliance." Recent research suggests that the two sexes respond to different messages, and different messengers, when deciding to study abroad. Whatever the cause, the trend worries many in the field, who say an international experience has become even more valuable for students. Mr. Lucas, assistant to the dean for international academic student life at Michigan State organizes short study-abroad programs for incoming freshmen. He writes different letters to male and female students to promote the trips. Women get the "traditional" message, which highlights the cultural and experiential benefits of going overseas, while the letter to men "makes it sound more like a privilege," he says. "I tell them, 'This is how you are going to distinguish yourself at a big university and, later on, in a global work force.'"

Several stumbles by American colleges in setting up programs with foreign partners have called attention to problems inherent in making such arrangements. State University of New York Empire State College has allowed a university in Albania to deliver diplomas in its name. In North Dakota, state auditors issued a scathing review of dual-degree programs at Dickinson State University, reporting that they had admitted hundreds of unqualified students, mainly from China, and awarded them degrees even when they failed to meet graduation requirements. Then there is Houston Community College, which has been in the midst of its own desert storm. Students at the Community College of Qatar, in the tiny Persian Gulf emirate, protested after learning that they would not earn degrees from the Texas college, as they had expected to. Those degrees would allow them to transfer to four-year universities. Houston officials maintain that they were working with Qatar's first community college only in an advisory role, but that students could earn Houston diplomas by submitting their transcripts for review. These incidents have renewed concerns about whether, in embarking on ambitious international ventures, American colleges are putting themselves at risk, legally, financially, and reputationally. In their quest for global prestige and, often, dollars, are they rushing abroad without doing their homework? After all, experts note, even internationally savvy institutions, like George Mason University and Michigan State University, have occasionally misstepped in their efforts overseas.

Sun Yat-sen University's East-meets-West curriculum is distinctive, but its embrace of liberal education--education across disciplines, meant to provoke broad thinking--is far from unusual. At a time when China and its East Asian neighbors are trouncing U.S. students on international exams, educators in these countries are nonetheless adopting, and adapting, that quintessentially American approach to learning. Some of the top institutions in the region, like Sun Yat-sen and Taiwan's Tunghai University, are setting up selective liberal-education programs. In South Korea, a declaration by the late Apple chief Steve Jobs that equal parts liberal learning and technological know-how were critical to the computer giant's success has kindled interest in the humanities. This coming fall, all university students in Hong Kong will be required to take a new, fourth year of general-education courses. These undergraduate-education reforms, promoted by government officials and business leaders as well as educators, stem from a basic economic calculus: The countries' current educational systems have produced stellar test takers but few innovators and inventors. The global economy is placing new demands on international hubs like Hong Kong and Singapore and opening up China's once-closed markets to overseas investment. Not only do new hires in these places have to collaborate with counterparts around the globe, they're also competing for jobs. And they're not faring well, dinged for inflexible thinking, inability to work in teams, and lack of creativity. A survey of Hong Kong employers rated local graduates far inferior to those educated abroad. In mainland China, more than one in 10 graduates have yet to find a job a year later, even in a booming economy. Casting their eyes West, reformers have latched onto American-style liberal, or general, education as a way to foster more nimble and adaptable thinkers. But although the efforts share the goal of broadening out the narrow, professionally oriented degree programs favored by local institutions, they may have little in common with the U.S. model, and even less with one another. Some take a canonical Great Books approach, others emphasize interdisciplinarity, while still others are a hodgepodge of courses in public speaking, foreign languages, and computer literacy--in short, anything outside major requirements. Curriculum is just one of many challenges raised by the push toward liberal education.

An experiment was conducted to test whether the front pre-spore cells of Dictyostelium discoideum are converted to rear pre-spore cells when transplanted in the rear. Results showed that cells on both sides sorted themselves with those in front shifting posteriorly and those at the rear shifting anteriorly. This behavior results from the innate differences between cells rather than from positional signals.