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About a third of college students nationwide are overweight, and the proportion of obese students has increased, to 11.3% in 2009 from 8% in 2000, according to the American College Health Association. College students are still slimmer than other young adults, but campus officials worry about the upward trend. Many colleges feel it's their responsibility to help curb student obesity. This article discusses how colleges help students lose weight by offering weight-management courses on campus and online.

Student-conduct administrators around the country are hailing restorative justice as the next big thing. A blend of mediation and restitution, it seeks to resolve a conflict by identifying the harms caused and devising, with suggestions from both victims and offenders, an agreement to repair them. Restorative justice not only offers an alternative to the legalistic conduct systems colleges now shun; it also resonates with so many mission statements about personal growth and community. In the past few years, a smattering of institutions--including Clemson University, Guilford College, and Michigan State University--have adopted restorative justice to varying degrees. At the University of Michigan, conduct officers are now diverting some students' cases from traditional hearings to restorative conferences. Elsewhere, a conference is a possible sanction after a hearing, or a condition for returning from a suspension. Even without formal programs, some conduct offices are applying the principles of restorative justice, more deliberately challenging students to consider the impacts of their behavior. Concerns crop up, usually that restorative justice squashes students' due-process rights or goes too easy on them. The process is voluntary for students who have claimed responsibility for misconduct. And compared with traditional sanctions, the custom agreements reached through restorative conferences result in "longer, meatier lists of consequences"--and fewer repeat offenders. [Condensed, with permission, from The Chronicle of Higher Education. See EJ838843 for full article.]

A number of colleges in the US are adopting conduct codes for their athletes, which set both expectations for behavior and punishments for specific infractions and give athletics directors, rather than coaches, the power to bench players who break the rules. Some athletic officials call such codes too rigid, though the proponents feel the standards leave less room for argument about the fairness of punishments and can also deter lawsuits by players who feel they have been arbitrarily punished.

Nobody wants to be here. In remedial English, earning no credit, stuck. Now--after months of commas, clauses, and four-paragraph essays--students have one last chance to write their way out. Twenty students sit at computers, poised to start the final in-class essay for English 002 at Montgomery College. Anybody can enroll here, and all kinds do. In 85 minutes the students must craft a thesis and clear topic sentences, using evidence to support their opinions. They have to answer one of three questions, about their assigned book, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," by Sherman Alexie, or their difficulty in mastering goals for the course, such as "Write and edit sentences that observe the conventions of standard American English." The students in English 002 stand at higher education's threshold. If they make it through, they advance to college-level courses that count toward a degree. Otherwise they must decide whether to try again, running down their financial aid, or give up on college and make do without it. For now, they all belong to the second-chance club known as remedial education. They're here because something, somewhere, went wrong. They didn't care about school, or school didn't care about them. For some, reading or writing never came easily. Maybe they didn't speak English as children. Or they lacked money, guidance, opportunity. Courses like English 002 are supposed to catch them all up. It's a lot to ask. Many students have a long way to go, and their obstacles are hardly confined to the classroom. Nationally, of the students who place into remediation--as many as 90 percent at some community colleges--only about a quarter go on to earn a degree. Here, past failures have worn some students down, and the prospect of success seems to frighten them. Several hope to attend four-year colleges and pursue careers, yet some have struggled to pull clear of bad circumstances or habits. Others are just drifting through.

DURHAM, N.C. ON DUKE UNIVERSITY'S main quad, a homemade banner proclaims '51 Service Organizations @ Duke.' Students here hung the sign to remind passers-by of the good that student volunteers [...]

As the economy sputters and outcry over the cost of college continues, more students keep enrolling--even if, in the past year, some have used campuses to protest their debt burden and what they see as other economic injustices. Enrollment has ticked up, but who goes to college and how they do it are changing. Students long dubbed "nontraditional" have become more common. Colleges are seeing more adult learners, significant proportions of part-time students, and increasing mobility through transfers and dual enrollment. Maintaining those enrollment gains is a looming concern. Some administrators, especially at private colleges, worry that liberal levels of tuition discounting to fill classes are unsustainable. And projections of the numbers of high-school graduates published in 2008 by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education continue to produce angst, especially in certain regions. The commission foresees declining numbers for the next six years in the Northeast and Midwest. But, for now, the state of enrollment is healthy, at least according to the most recent available figures, from 2010. In the fall of that year, degree-granting colleges and universities enrolled more than 18 million undergraduate and nearly three million graduate students, up a total of more than 588,000 students over the previous year, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That means almost half of the young people who completed high school are enrolled in higher education, compared with roughly a third three decades ago. Black, Hispanic, and white students are all going to college at increasing rates. The number of students entering college for the first time in 2010 was 2.1 million, up 6.8 percent over 2006, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. After three years of big increases in enrollment, community colleges saw a slight decline last year. From the fall of 2010 to 2011, total enrollment dropped nearly 1 percent, to 8.3 million. Still, the sector's enrollment is up 22 percent since 2007. But the surge, a result of the recession that began in late 2007, finally seems to have let up. Meanwhile, nondegree programs are on the upswing. Higher education's most common award is still the bachelor's degree, but certificates are the new runner-up, having surpassed associate and master's degrees, according to a report in June from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. Certificates made up 22 percent of credentials awarded in 2010, compared with just 6 percent in 1980. The most common occupations of certificate holders are office work, transportation, health care, and metalworking.

Efforts to keep higher education affordable for all students and to promote not only access, but success--all in a climate of dwindling state appropriations and lean budgets--made the past year one of reckoning for colleges. Total outstanding student-loan debt hit the $1-trillion mark as federal officials scrambled to ease the burden on borrowers, partly by requiring colleges to disclose more about students' cost of attendance and financial-aid awards. A campaign-season debate arose in Congress over a scheduled interest-rate increase on some student loans. And the national college-completion agenda prompted both attention to underrepresented students and scrutiny of graduation rates. Seeing students through to graduation remained a challenge for colleges. The author reports on how the national goals to increase the number of graduates bring attention to how colleges can better help students succeed.

When the global financial crisis hit Dubai, many of the Indian expatriate families whose children went to university there sent them back home. But while sons were leaving, daughters were staying. How better to attract the attention of female prospective students than with a young Bollywood actor? Ranbir Kapoor visited University of Wollongong in Dubai in November to promote his new film, "Rockstar," and hundreds of Indian women--and men--flocked to the university. The down economy looms large for international branch campuses, which now number 200 around the world, mainly in Asia and the Middle East. A handful of optimistic ventures have ended in high-profile closures, and many outposts, both established and fledgling, struggle to succeed. To be solvent requires the steady revenue of tuition, but building a brand and recruiting students are formidable tasks. Still, college administrators often go in with a ""Field of Dreams" mentality: If we build it, they'll come." Wollongong, a branch of the Australian university in New South Wales, takes nothing for granted. Striving to maintain a strong reputation in the region, the university draws ever more students to its three buildings in the education theme park of Knowledge Village. Its population of 3,100, evenly split between undergraduate and graduate programs, plus 500 English-language students, comes from 95 countries, and new enrollments in 2011 were up more than a third over the previous year. Coming to Dubai in 1993 gave Wollongong an early foothold, but it can't rely on that in a crowded higher-education market, where studies now show that supply exceeds demand. One of more than 80 universities in this shiny desert metropolis, Wollongong has been agile and aggressive in international recruitment, among other pursuits. Wollongong also invites local high schools to bus over their students, and it takes them to the activities area, usually clacking with Ping-Pong and billiards matches. Television ads also direct students to Dubai, as they watch, for instance, "American Idol" on India's Star TV.

Students in the University of Rhode Island's GLBT community are fed up with what they describe as their marginalization. They are seeking, among other resources, respectable headquarters, where they can invite professors, hold events, and develop a sense of belonging on the campus. Since a week-long protest this past fall, they are gaining ground. The needs of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students, already well-served at some colleges, are attracting attention on campuses around the country. Several gay teenagers' suicides in the fall, including that of a student at Rutgers University, raised awareness of bullying, as have other incidents of bias: a gay-pride flag shredded last year at Elmhurst College, in Illinois, and one burned at Albion College, in Michigan. Concerns about safety and comfort, recently reflected in the first national survey of the GLBT campus population, are leading more administrators to consider how their students feel and what kinds of programs and services may help. Last year the University of Cincinnati and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington hired advisers and opened centers to serve lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. Membership in the national Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals included 75 colleges in 2000; it represents 175 today. But a center is just one item on the LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index--"a national standard of LGBT- and ally-inclusive policies, programs, and practices"--maintained by the Campus Pride advocacy group. Among 54 questions used to generate a 0-to-5-star score, the tool asks: Does your college offer to match students with LGBT-friendly roommates? Does it have an LGBT alumni group? Campus Pride introduced the index in 2007, with 30 public ratings; since then, 260 colleges have released their scores, and 100 more have requested the free evaluation. Some administrators use the index as a checklist, as others do with guidelines for LGBT programs and services published in 2003 and updated last year by the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education. The first national report by the Q Research Institute for Higher Education, released in September, found that nearly a quarter of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer students and employees had experienced harassment at their colleges, and more than half had observed or perceived it. But that report did not drill down to the campus level. And the increasingly popular Campus Climate Index, with its five-star scale, measures services, not sensitivities. LGBT-climate research tends to rely on snowball sampling, in which subjects recruit their friends. That technique, especially as it favors people who are out of the closet, can generate a skewed sample. A new national survey this spring will try to set standards for comparison. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program, which administers the Freshman Survey, is beginning a Diverse Learning Environments Survey, based on 90 institutional-diversity-and-climate instruments. It will poll all students, asking, for example, how often they have interacted with somebody of a different sexual orientation, whether their classmates seem to appreciate differences, and how satisfied they are with the atmosphere. But so far only 18 colleges have opted to participate. Recognizing historic homophobia in the black community, top administrators have committed to complete the Campus Pride Index and form working groups to discuss related issues. At a summit in April, they will share their progress, and professors will present research on LGBTQ issues at historically black colleges and in the black church. In another effort, the UNCF (formerly the United Negro College Fund) is collaborating with the national Human Rights Campaign to expand awareness of gay issues on historically black college campuses.

The US state lawmakers are concerned with the budgets and management of public colleges, though with a little push from "helicopter parents" who hover over their college-age children and challenge administrative decisions, legislators are increasingly intervening in a range of student-life issues. Frequently, legislators who are parents themselves, call a college to plead a student's case and sometimes draft bills in response to the grievances.