The higher education missions get unlocked after you click the 'guide me' button under the guy in the education section and do the inital missions: Building a grade school and expanding it when the annoying blond tells you to. Don't try and do the missions before they ask you, they will act like you didn't do it and you will waste money.
Soon, the woman tells you to place a education module on city hall, and found a community college. Build the education module and ignore the mission, saving money until she tells you we also need a high school. Build the high school. Unless you are going to have every kid in the region going to this city for schooling, I would recommend deleting the grade school and building the high school in its place, as the high school can hold 1000 kids per extra classroom.
Keep saving up money. At a random point before or after you complete the college mission, she will tell you we need a public library and a gymnasium module for the high school. The library looks like a grade school, but loans books to sims who are off of work and slowly educates them. The gym is a module on the high school. Both are $10,000.
Afterward, the woman will ask you to build a University. The difference between this and a community college are the university is more expensive, but raises ALL the tech level industry in your city and you can research very expensive but generally worthwhile modules and great works. I would destroy the college, as it's only going to draw students away from the university, which needs a certain amount of students to upgrade (1000 students need to attend in a day to reach level 2, 2000 for level 3, and so forth.). Or, better yet, save the cash and ignore that mission, the university mission will come anyway, then you can click the 'guide me' button again for the mission to stop coming up. Either way, a college and university at the same city are big no-no's.
At the university, a different person will pop out and say 1 of 2 things, or sometimes both of them will come out: the first is we should run on nuclear power now that we have smart enough sims to operate it safely, the other is that you should build a school of engineering on the university and research the vertical turbine for the wind farms. These missions are just to teach you how to use your educated sims and university. The nuclear power plant should definetley be taken, though it's 120 something thousand, but can generate enough power for every connected city with added modules. You should research the generation 2 power modules and the fast neutron reactor at the university, as they have less upkeep costs and give off way more power.
After you do one of these quests, the blond woman comes out once more and congratulates herself on making the city smarter. Congratulations to you! You have finished the quests!
