At our Oct. 29 TribLive conversation, I talked with Denise Trauth, the president of Texas State University, about the cost of a college degree, graduation rates, changing student demographics and other issues of the moment in higher education.

The state of Texas used to cover half of the costs of higher education at state colleges and universities. Now it's around 13 percent at the University of Texas at Austin and 22 percent at Texas A&M University in College Station.

On Monday morning, Texas A&M University System officials will unveil EmpowerU, their new accountability website designed to gather comprehensive data on all system institutions and package it in a user-friendly manner online.

The top 10 percent rule at Texas colleges wasn't all about higher education — it was about the inequities in public schools that are still being litigated today.

In 2009, lawmakers indicated their willingness to mess with Texas' "top ten percent" automatic university admissions policy to prevent it from overwhelming the University of Texas at Austin. They may have to do it again in 2013.

A report on government debt from Comptroller Susan Combs examines colleges and public school districts, the latter of which are responsible for a third of the money owed at the local level. 

The state policy that waives tuition and fees for veterans and their families may get tweaked in the upcoming legislative session. It has been a hot topic for universities that support it in principle, but lose millions on it each year.

The higher education background of state Sen. Kel Seliger, the new Senate Higher Education Committee chairman, is pretty thin, particularly when compared with that of his predecessor. But he says he's "learning a lot very rapidly."

This week, MyEdu, an Austin-based company that received a $10 million investment from the University of Texas System, announced that it would offer new services to help students find employment.

Despite Gov. Rick Perry's prediction that no such bill would reach his desk, state Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, said he intends to continue his effort to end the state's policy of offering in-state tuition to some illegal immigrants.

The law should allow all universities to pursue diverse classes of excellent students, for the sake of the students and the quality of their educations, for the sake of a society still striving to bestow opportunity more equally across its many populations, and for the sake of healthy businesses and all of the benefits they contribute to society.

It has now become clear that race-preference admission programs typically do not operate to the preferred student’s advantage. Their relatively poor qualification — of which they are often unaware — usually leads to relatively poor performance, the bottom portion of the class and an increased dropout rate.

The University of Texas at Austin's use of race as a factor in some admissions decisions is being challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court this week. What will happen to the admissions process if UT loses the case?

Gov. Rick Perry says he is against repeal of in-state tuition for American-born children of immigrants living here illegally, but will Texas legislators go along with him?

Gov. Rick Perry on Monday renewed a call for 10 percent of state higher education funding to be based on institutions' graduation totals. House Higher Ed Chairman Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, wants to take that proposal even further.

At the 2012 Texas Tribune Festival, I interviewed the chancellors of the state's six public university systems about the future of higher education.

Texas has 148 public and private colleges and universities but no single source for easily finding statistics about how well they perform. This easy-to-navigate interactive database lets you explore key academic, enrollment and cost records on all of Texas' institutions of higher learning.

As with Gov. Rick Perry’s $10,000 degree proposal, his latest call for reducing the price of college — locking in tuition for four years — may prove difficult to implement uniformly in a state as diverse as Texas.