The popular wisdom is that they will revolutionize higher education, and possibly even put traditional colleges and universities out of business.
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State colleges and universities even have controlled prices to students somewhat by throwing more tax dollars at institutions and through private fund raising.
Third-party catering is growing in cash-strapped hospitals, universities and even prisons, a captive set of customers if ever there was one.
But Mr Obama is not, of course, running in 2010, although he has recently stepped up his efforts to rally the students, making speeches at a series of universities and even taking to the pages of Rolling Stone to scold apathetic liberals.
However, the compounding costs from an incomplete education shows up in lost wages for employees, remedial training among colleges and universities, and even our aggregate growth rates for the national economy.
With the launch of a new web-based portal called iStart, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is making it even easier and cheaper for universities and non-profits to administer business plan competitions.
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Today, too many kids in this city are living just a few El stops, sometimes even just a few blocks, from shiny skyscrapers and leafy parks and world-class museums and universities, yet all of that might as well be in a different state, even in a different continent.
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In particular, elite colleges and universities have typically limited enrollment even as demand has increased.
Still, some academics at Hebrew University believe qualified students like Salameh pose no security risk, and their acceptance to Israeli universities could even foster better relations in the region.
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Add to this a generation of officials and politicians on both sides of the Rhine who neither studied at each other's universities nor even speak each other's language and, despite the tight institutional mesh that still ties the two together, there is a sense that the Germans no longer need the French as they once did.
And even in the best of times, they receive far less funding than four-year colleges and universities.
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State governments across the country have been slashing aid to public universities even as a college education becomes more and more important in the modern job market.
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Even before a season starts, universities erect billboards and create media strategies to announce to the world that they have an athlete worthy of the game's most prestigious trophy.
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Even if cost is removed from the equation, colleges and universities are faced with the enormous task of scaling a digital content system.
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Educators feared that all courses below university level might be ruled off limits to overseas students, even though between 40% and 50% of foreigners at British universities had taken an earlier course in Britain, usually to hone language or study skills.
Athletic directors and coaches have expressed concerns that these changes would be costly to universities, and put those with smaller budgets at an even greater disadvantage that they already are to keep up with powerhouse football programs such as Alabama and Ohio State.
"With events taking place throughout New Zealand and stretching across the Tasman for the first time - at early childhood centres, schools, universities, sports clubs, churches, government departments and even parliament - the week has been a comprehensive success, " says NZ National Commission for UNESCO chair, Bryan Gould.
Only America, five times its size, has more foreign students, and with fees for local students capped, Britain's universities break even only by charging overseas ones what the market will bear.
Arguably, colleges and universities share that same interest at least on some level, perhaps even more so.
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But even then, if salary and overhead increases continue at the current pace, universities will price themselves out of the reach of most Americans.
Even with credible government guarantees on liability and patents, and with government and universities between them doing the necessary basic research, would big pharma seek to develop and make these drugs?
And no party is likely to allow universities to recruit lots more students, even though more young people than ever want to go, rather than sit out the downturn on the dole.
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Substantial public-sector borrowing to finance public-sector spending and investing - even public-sector investment in roads, or schools, or universities, or airports, all of which would arguably increase the productive potential of the economy - is viewed as dangerous and poisonous: the conventional government view is that way lies the road to bankruptcy of the state.
They pay fees to universities, spend money on things like food and lodging, and may even end up staying on permanently.
The AAMC said there would probably be even more under development but state-funded universities are strapped for cash and unable to fund them.
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The Times of London on Sept. 8, 2010, even rated the University of Colorado among the top 25 Universities in the World and the State of Washington is Consistently rated as among the most efficiently run states in the nation.
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Even the great American research universities that have come closest to creating the core-and-cloud university of the future find it difficult to define the core and to manage relations with the cloud.
Dr Galvani and her colleagues recognised that this was unlikely to be completely correct, even among people working in American universities.
He said the discussions between the University of Aberdeen and Robert Gordon University would enable two distinct, independent institutes to run their universities in "an even more efficient manner".
One is external to the state: the global economy has become a much more knowledge-intensive place, with even the oil business turning into a high-tech industry, so Texas needs more and better universities and schools.
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