Jo Johnson (Don’t scrap tuition fees, they have been a great success, 5 July) paints a distorted view. Whatever the merits of tuition fees, it is the way they have been managed that is a disgrace. George Osborne sold the tuition fee debt to the private sector, which obviously wishes to make a profit; originally fees were paid back with interest set at the rate of inflation. The well-off have no problem paying them off. No profit there. Those that struggle are the less well-off and those going into vital but relatively low-paid jobs such as social work, nursing and the public sector generally. They now face interest charges of up to 6% to provide the necessary profit. (The Bank of England’s interest rate is 0.25%.) So yet again the less well-off have to pay up for the private profit that the well-off can avoid. Not fair.
Dr Peter Estcourt
South Chailey, East Sussex

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Middle school-age boys aren’t known for their emotional candor. Boys of color, even less so. So when Enrique Aguayo asks a group of eighth graders if they are nervous about entering high school, he gets only a couple of nods, and one acknowledgment. “I’m worried about not passing,” admits Hipolito, a student at Consuelo Mendez Middle School. “I can handle basic math, but algebra — uh-uh.” “You think you got it bad. I got geometry,” Alberto chimes in. The boys are more comfortable dissing Enrique, a graduate student in college administration at the University of Texas at Austin. “Your layups are trash,” one boy says. “You work out with calculators,” says another.

Welcome to Project MALES, a mentoring program at Austin that is part of a small but growing effort to get more Latino males into and through college. The program, which pairs undergraduates with middle- and high-school students and graduate students with undergrads, has sent more than 50 mentors into Austin public schools this year. Over pizza and pickup basketball, the student mentors offer lessons in leadership and college preparation.

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In recent months, The Evergreen State College has been promoted as the archetypal example of the problems associated with political correctness run amok. Videos of students and faculty members using foul language and abusing fellow community members have gone viral. Stills of students wielding baseball bats and acting as a vigilante police force can be found on all corners of the internet. Images of scores of armed members of the Washington State Patrol, clad in riot gear, patrolling campus offer a frightening look at what happens when campus administrators lose control of a college.

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DAKAR, Senegal — The United States has denied visas to five teenage students from Gambia competing in a prestigious international robotics contest in Washington, the team’s leader said Tuesday.

The teens found the rejection “very disheartening,” said Mucktarr M.Y. Darboe, who is also a director in the largely Muslim West African nation’s ministry of higher education.

Darboe said the students were not given a reason for the visa denials in April, and he called the decision “disappointing and unfair.”

The Gambia team is not alone. An all-female team from Afghanistan also was denied visas.

The U.S. Embassy in Banjul could not immediately be reached for comment.

Tiny Gambia has been through dramatic change in recent months, ousting via elections a longtime dictator, Yahya Jammeh, whose administration was accused of human rights abuses. The new administration, inaugurated in January, has promised widespread democratic reforms.

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It has been a month since Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has spoken publicly about higher education. During a U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on June 6, Ms. DeVos spoke in support of the Trump administration’s budget. Senators from both sides of the aisle criticized the proposal, which calls for steep cuts to a range of education programs, as “difficult” to defend. Still, Ms. DeVos fielded questions from the lawmakers for more than two hours.

Since the hearing, the Education Department has announced major changes. On June 14, Ms. DeVos announced the delay and renegotiation of two key Obama-era consumer regulations aimed at reining in abuses by for-profit colleges. And later in the month, speaking at a closed meeting of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the secretary suggested that higher education’s foundational law should be scrapped.

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Though white supremacist activity has plagued colleges nationwide, the University of Virginia has been caught up in a firestorm beyond what has typically been seen in recent months, such as controversial fliers being tacked up around campus or outspoken speakers invited.

Protesters affiliated with what many consider to be racist and hateful groups — the Ku Klux Klan and supporters of the so-called alt-right — in the past two or so months have descended on Emancipation Park, formerly known as Lee Park, in Charlottesville, normally a progressive college town best known as the home of the University of Virginia.

They’re protesting the city’s decision to remove a Confederate marker, a statue of Robert E. Lee. The groups’ proximity to the campus, combined with the area’s history in the Confederacy, has caused fear for some students, particularly students of color.

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An anthropologist who had the unenviable task of sitting through academics’ meetings and reading their email chains to find out why they fail to change their teaching styles has come to a surprising conclusion: they are simply too afraid of looking stupid in front of their students to try something new.

Lauren Herckis was brought in to Carnegie Mellon University to understand why, despite producing leading research into how students learn best, the institution had largely failed to adopt its own findings.

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