One hundred fifty private nonprofit colleges failed the Education Department’s “financial-responsibility” test last year, 23 more than did so in 2008 and a 70-percent increase from 2007, says The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Institutions that fail the test, designed to measure colleges’ financial fragility, are subject to tighter scrutiny of student-aid funds and, for the lowest scorers, extra financial obligations. Low scores have also become an indicator that a college could be a target for a takeover by a for-profit education firm, according to the article.

Thirty-four of the colleges on the 2009 roster also failed the test in each of the previous two years. Several schools on the latest list attributed their presence to steep declines in the value of their endowments.

A nonprofit organization that encourages people across the economic spectrum to explore philanthropic collaborations and consider how they can give a higher proportion of their assets was a key inspiration for the Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates Giving Pledge, The Seattle Times writes.

Melinda Gates has credited Bolder Giving, started in 2007 by Boston couple Anne and Christopher Ellinger, with being an impetus behind the campaign to persuade the world’s billionaires to commit at least half of their fortunes to charity.

The organization received a $675,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in May, two months before the pledge campaign was announced.

Two writers for the political site RedBlueAmerica.com debate conservative criticism of the Giving Pledge in a column for Scripps Howard News Service.

Sen. Charles Grassley is demanding that Donald Berwick, the newly installed head of the federal agency that oversees Medicare, disclose information about all donors to his nonprofit medical organization, NPR says.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, which Dr. Berwick founded, lists major donors on its Web site, among them insurance giants such as the BlueCross BlueShield Association, Aetna, and Kaiser Permanente, which do business with Medicare.

Mr. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said failing to reveal all donors to the institute creates “the potential for conflicts arising from donors” to the institute. The White House says Dr. Berwick is in compliance with ethics rules.

The leaders of 61 New Jersey private special-education schools earn more than the $175,000 pay limit that the state’s governor has put in place for public-school superintendents, the The Record.

The heads of those institutions are paid more than $175,000 a year, which is Gov. Chris Christie’s salary and the level he proposes as a pay cap for the state’s school superintendents and administrators, according to an Associated Press story on the findings.

The maximum figure would apply to superintendents of school districts with at least 10,000 students. None of New Jersey's private special-education schools served more than 460 students last year, according to the articles.

The state Education Department is looking into whether the private schools would be subject to the new pay limits because they get state money for students who come to them through the public-school system.

The California man accused of planning a shooting attack on the offices of two nonprofit groups in San Francisco pleaded not guilty Wednesday, says the Associated Press.

Byron Williams was arrested July 17 after what police said was a 12-minute shootout with Highway Patrol officers in Oakland. He faces four counts of attempted murder, among other charges.

Oakland police said Mr. Williams told them after the incident that he was on his way to shoot leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tides Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports environmental and social-justice causes.

Read more about how the nonprofit world is responding to the security threats against charity leaders in an article from the latest issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

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As Warren Buffett and Bill Gates press their Giving Pledge campaign, mega-giving is joining multiple homes and luxury goods as status symbols of the very rich, philanthropy experts tell Reuters.

The recession has spurred the super-rich to look beyond yachts and mansions for status signifiers, according to Robert Frank, who writes The Wall Street Journal’s Wealth Report column.

Patrick Rooney, head of Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, said that while recognition is not a key motivation for people to give, “It would be naive to think that nobody cares about the attention because otherwise there wouldn't be any names on buildings.”

Forty U.S. individuals and families have publicly signed the Giving Pledge. Mr. Buffett and Mr. Gates plan to travel to China in September and to India in March to press their case with the growing number of billionaires in...

California health inspectors say an entertainment-industry charity that serves elderly show-business veterans violated state law when it moved dozens of residents out of its nursing home last year, writes the Los Angeles Times.

The Motion Picture and Television Fund failed to issue 30-day discharge notices informing more than 30 tenants of their rights, including an option to appeal their relocation, according to a report by the state Department of Public Health. No fines or citations were issued in conjunction with the findings.

About 50 people remain in the Woodland Hills, Calif., home, which the fund plans to close. Residents and their families have mounted a campaign to save the facility, which the charity says it can no longer afford to operate.

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Gearing up to celebrate his birthday next week, Bill Clinton is using a growing online service to urge well-wishers to donate, according to the Los Angeles Times and TechCrunch.

The former president is seeking gifts to his foundation for programs to fight malnutrition in Colombia and support U.S. small businesses and other causes through the Birthday Wish feature developed by Causes, an Internet effort.

The solicitation, which will be shared with Mr. Clinton’s 366,000 Facebook fans, is the widest use yet of Birthday Wish and the first by a major celebrity.

Joe Green. the founder of Causes, said 75,000 people have used Birthday Wish to raise $6.5-million for charity. The Berkeley, Calif., company is working with the Clinton Foundation to encourage the use of social media as a tool to raise money and awareness for favored causes.

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A Virginia resort town has become the latest U.S. city to use “donation meters” to collect money for the homeless, the television station WAVY says.

The Virginia Beach City Council approved a pilot program Tuesday to install the meters as a way to give people an easy way to donate spare change to the poor and homeless and reduce aggressive panhandling along the town’s oceanfront.

Similar programs in Baltimore and Denver bring in $5,000 to $15,000 a year to aid homeless services, the television station reports.

Baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers broadcast a game Tuesday night without commercials, filling the airtime between innings with spots about the team foundation and on-air charity fund-raising auctions, writes The New York Times.

Mark Attanasio, the Brewers' owner who recently gave $1-million to the foundation, said he believed the game against the Arizona Diamondbacks marked the first such commercial-free telecast of a Major League contest.

Mr. Attanasio said the auction of items such as a clinic with the team’s hitting coach and a chance to coach first base during a Brewers spring-training game would help the foundation build an endowment.

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