Samara Freemark

It's one of the best defenses against recidivism, but investment is lacking.

California's San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco is one of few prisons in the nation to offer a college education to inmates. Here's a look at the Prison University Project behind the prison walls.

When inmates at Indiana Women's Prison got an assignment to write the institution's history, the project dug up unknown details and instilled a love of research in inmates.

After an abrupt reversal 20 years ago, some prisons and colleges try to maintain college education for prisoners.

Water has been a matter of national security for Israel since the nation's inception. Drought and growth have pushed the country to use desalination, wastewater recycling and other technology and engineering feats to address the demand. But it's a different picture where Palestinians are involved.

Colleges and universities have become the front lines of one of the great challenges posed by war: how to reintegrate the people who've served.

The longest war in American history is drawing to a close. Now, the men and women who served are coming home, and many hope to use higher education to build new, better lives.

Paul Quinn College was a sorry sight when Michael Sorrell, the school's fifth president in as many years, drove onto the Dallas campus to see what he was dealing with. As Sorrell looked around campus, he had one thought. How do you save a school that everyone thinks is already dead?

Zach Hubert came out of slavery with an adage that he would pass on to his children, and his children's children, and their children down the line. "Get your education," he would always say to them when his family gathered together in later years. "It's the one thing they can't take away from you."

Before the civil rights movement, African Americans were largely barred from white-dominated institutions of higher education. And so black Americans, and their white supporters, founded their own schools, which came to be known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Just 20 percent of college-goers fit the stereotype of being young, single, full-time students who finish a degree in four years. College students today are more likely to be older, part-time, working, and low-income than they were three decades ago.

Since 1982 Heritage University, in Eastern Washington's Yakima Valley, has made it its mission to educate some of the poorest, most isolated students in the country.

Researchers have long been searching for better ways to learn. In recent decades, experts working in cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience have opened new windows into how the brain works, and how we can learn to learn better.

Humans obviously learn a lot of things through trial-and-error. A level of "desirable difficulty" built into a learning and exam process appears to boost the overall retention of new skills or knowledge.

If there's consensus on anything in education, it's this: Tests are awful. But maybe we've been thinking about tests all wrong. Research shows that tests can actually be powerful tools for learning -- but only if teachers use them right.

For decades psychologists cautioned against raising children bilingual. They warned parents and teachers that learning a second language as a child was bad for brain development. But recent studies have found exactly the opposite.