A Perpetual Student Pursues Education to the Nth Degree

By SARA LIPKA

Benjamin B. Bolger’s story seems like a hoax. At age 32, he says, he has just earned his 11th advanced degree: a doctorate that Harvard University awarded him on Thursday.

He distributed a news release for the occasion, proclaiming himself the most credentialed person “in modern history.” The release lists 10 master’s degrees, in various disciplines, from Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Columbia (two), Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, Brandeis, and Skidmore as well as 14 other colleges where he has taught in the past decade.

Mr. Bolger’s unlikely story has another twist: He is dyslexic. He titles his tale “The Boy Who Couldn’t Read Gets a Doctorate from Harvard.”

Proud but winsome, Mr. Bolger is an education addict and his resume is real.

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Harvard, Yale Boost Engineering in Race With China

By Brian Kladko

May 30 (Bloomberg) — Harvard and Yale are boosting their engineering programs because of increased demand and competition from China, where more engineering degrees are awarded each year than in the U.S.

Both academic institutions, following the lead of Princeton University and Columbia University, added to the status, staffing and visibility of the engineering schools in the past year. Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, is enlarging its faculty by 17 percent, to 70, during the next five years. Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is expanding to 100 professors within a decade, up 43 percent.

“These are two institutions that are almost synonymous with education,” said Rick Rashid, the senior vice president for research at Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest maker of computer software, in a May 20 telephone interview. “They’re sending a powerful message, and hopefully that’s a message that helps to pique the interest of young people.”