Holy Family School

NEW YORK — For their first fire drill, students at the Refugee Youth Summer Academy trooped out of the building behind their teachers. All that was missing were the sirens

With one of its alumnae, Elena Kagan , poised for confirmation as a justice on the United States Supreme Court , it should be a triumphant season for Hunter College High School, a New York City public school for the intellectually gifted. Enlarge This Image Michelle V.

David Alexander, a former president of Pomona College in California who for 17 years oversaw the selection of Rhodes scholars from the United States , died Sunday at his home in Claremont, Calif.

For generations of pre-med students, three things have been as certain as death and taxes: organic chemistry, physics and the Medical College Admission Test, known by its dread-inducing acronym, the MCAT. Enlarge This Image Michael Appleton for The New York Times Students in Mount Sinaiâ??s Humanities and Medicine Program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So it came as a total shock to Elizabeth Adler when she discovered, through a singer in her favorite a cappella group at Brown University, that one of the nation’s top medical schools admits a small number of students every year who have skipped all three requirements.

MIDDLE SCHOOL students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won’t witness a miraculous educational transformation.

American colleges are spending a declining share of their budgets on instruction and more on administration and recreational facilities for students, according to a study of college costs released Friday. The report, based on government data, documents a growing stratification of wealth across America’s system of higher education

WASHINGTON — A pared-down immigration bill that would give as many as 2.1 million undocumented immigrants under 35 a shot at higher education and legal status is receiving renewed interest because of the short time frame before the November midterm elections. The DREAM Act — or Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors legislation — would give undocumented young people the chance to earn permanent residency and eventually citizenship if they graduate from U.S. high schools, have been in the country at least five years continuously and meet educational or military service stipulations.

GIBSON COUNTY LAKE, Tenn. — The college freshmen Jake Lawrence and Jacob Hardy have two priorities: getting good grades and catching big fish. Standing on the deck of a 20-foot-long bass boat on a 560-acre lake in west Tennessee, they almost look like two tanned brothers.