Northwest Education Law Blog : Northwest Education Lawyer & Attorney : Williams Kastner Law Firm : Tacoma, Seattle, Portland

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As unionizing efforts become a part of the education industry in the Pacific Northwest, schools should take affirmative steps to prepare for potential union activity in their workforce. Who is eligible to vote for a union? Who isn't? Can schools stop organizing visits on work premises by outside parties? What can employers lawfully do in response to organizing efforts? If the union wins, what happens next? Join Williams Kastner attorneys Judd Lees and Todd Sorensen for a webinar designed to provide you with an overview of labor law, including a thorough discussion of what schools can and cannot do before, during and after their employees endeavor to organize under a union.

Date:
September 14, 2010

Time:
Noon - 1:00 p.m. PST

RSVP:
To RSVP, please e-mail seminars@williamskastner.com. An online meeting confirmation complete with instructions on how to join the webinar will be sent to all registrants.

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The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments on April 19 in a case arising out of the Ninth Circuit, Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. In Martinez, the Ninth Circuit held that that the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco had the right to deny recognition to the Christian Legal Society because CLS requires that its officers and voting members abide by the CLS Statement of Faith. The Supreme Court accepted certiorari to resolve the split between the Ninth Circuit’s decision and that of the Seventh Circuit, which held to the contrary in a similar case involving Southern Illinois University's school of law.

The University of California Hastings’ nondiscrimination policy includes provisions on religion and sexual orientation. CLS, contending that the nondiscrimination policy would require it to permit election of officers who do not abide by principles in the Statement of Faith such as a prohibition on extramarital sex, sought exemption from the policy. After the University denied the request and removed the group’s official recognition and funding, CLS filed suit against the school officials.

The Supreme Court briefs and related materials are compiled here. Inside Higher Ed provides a good overview and discussion of the legal and practical issues involved here.

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India’s cabinet recently approved a proposal permitting foreign universities to open branch locations in India. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, “[t]he cabinet plans to introduce the Foreign Education Providers (Regulatory) Bill in parliament next month. The bill would then have to be passed by parliament before becoming law.”

If the bill becomes law, it will likely mark a shift in the landscape of higher education in India. Critics have raised concerns that since India has over 18,000 colleges and 500 universities, the country should focus on the quality of existing educational institutions, rather than open its arms to more growth and potential competition. However, the introduction of foreign universities to India’s large population and “unmet need for educational institutions” will likely expand the education market and help the country’s economic growth. As reported by the BBC, “[d]espite having top quality educational institutions, India is unable to meet the demand for a quality education . . . Some analysts project that India's growing economy will face a shortfall of half a million qualified graduates over the next five years.”

While some foreign universities may hesitate to install a branch location due to concerns about potential local and legal issues, the proposed bill will undoubtedly offer more opportunities for foreign universities to become involved in India in ways that were previously unavailable.
 

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The protests over budget cuts to higher education in California have repeatedly featured civil disobedience in recent weeks, with numerous building takeovers and sit-ins. But the protests took a more violent turn Friday night with an attack on the home of the chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley.

Dozens of protesters -- apparently a mix of students and non-students -- rushed the home, smashed planters, and threw various objects, some of them aflame, at windows in the home.

Authorities arrested eight people, including two identified as Berkeley students, and charged them with rioting, threatening an education official, attempted burglary, attempted arson of an occupied building, felony vandalism, and assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Many others who were present ran away.

The attack on the Berkeley chancellor's home comes amid a wave of protests at California's public colleges not only over budget cuts dictated by a collapsing state budget, but very much directed at college administrators, who are being accused of not doing enough to minimize the cuts or to reallocate resources to minimize their impact. [Inside Higher Ed]

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More than 220 colleges have long-term student loan default rates so high that they would lose all federal student financial assistance under the terms of a new law that eventually will measure those rates over a three-year time scale, according to new Education Department figures.

Student-loan defaults are more common at for-profit colleges and other institutions that serve lower-income populations, and the move toward a stiffer default-rate measure has left many of those institutions warning of a growing harm to the students most in need.  "The only thing that explains default rate is the socioeconomic background" of the student, said Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, which represents for-profit institutions. "By using that as the metric of quality, you will always be discriminating against low-income students."

Most students are required to begin paying back federally subsidized loans six months after they graduate or otherwise leave school. A college can lose eligibility for both grants and loans if its default rate exceeds 40 percent among its former students in the first year after they're due to begin repayment. Colleges also can lose eligibility if the rate of borrowers defaulting within two years of their scheduled start of repayment is 25 percent or greater for three consecutive years.

A new law, the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HR 4137), approved last year by Congress, will change that last measure, effective in 2012, to begin counting borrowers who default within three years of their scheduled repayment. Using that three-year window, colleges would be ineligible if their borrower default rate is 30 percent or greater for three consecutive years. [Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Inside Higher Ed reports:

"The chairmen of Congress's education committees on Thursday disputed a report that a proposed lender alternative to President Obama's student loan restructuring proposal would save nearly as much money as the administration's plan. Rep. George Miller and Sen. Tom Harkin were responding to news reports indicating that the Congressional Budget Office had "scored" an alternative put forward by Sen. Robert Casey on behalf of lender groups as saving $75 billion, within striking distance of the amount projected to be saved by President Obama's plan to end lending through the guaranteed loan program. The higher level of savings would be achieved through a series of budget gimmicks, the Democratic lawmakers wrote."

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Lincoln University’s requirement that all obese undergraduates lose weight or take a one-semester fitness and nutrition course to graduate has angered students, drawn questions from faculty and roiled many observers -- to the point that the institution may back down from the plan following a faculty forum later this week.

While Lincoln’s policy is extreme in mandating a class for students with a body mass index of 30 or greater, many other colleges and universities have developed less controversial programs aimed at fighting obesity among an ever-growing proportion of significantly overweight students. A 2007 analysis of data collected for the Harvard School of Public Health’s College Alcohol Study found the proportion of obese college students increasing -- from 5 percent in 1993 to 8.4 percent by 1999. The spring and fall 2008 National College Health Assessment surveys found 10 percent of college students to be obese.

Lincoln University's aggressive approach has garnered an enormous amount of attention in recent days, and faculty leaders there are said to be reconsidering it. But the underlying issue that prompted the Pennsylvania historically black institution to act is generating significant concern on other campuses, too.

At the University of South Carolina's main campus in Columbia, a string of efforts aimed at “making healthy choices simple” have been brought under the umbrella of the Healthy Carolina initiative. Michelle Burcin, director of the program, points to a four-season farmers' market that averages about $7,000 a week in sales, eight walking and running paths around campus, and Fitness Buddies, an anonymous online networking tool to match students, faculty and staff who share the same exercise interests.

The introductory University 101 class for freshmen includes talks on nutrition and health. The university’s Campus Wellness unit offers free nutrition consultations to all students, as well as Choose to Lose, an eight-week weight management program that includes exercise sessions, nutrition instruction and food logs.

Gustavus Adolphus College, in St. Peter, Minn., has eliminated all-you-can-eat meal plans and instead requires students to pay for each item they take, à la carte. Food waste has been cut by 80 percent. Campuses that have made their dining halls trayless also report dramatic reductions in food waste. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Any thoughts that the U.S. Department of Education planned only to tweak existing regulations that affect for-profit colleges and other higher-education sectors were dashed on Monday when the agency released a draft of proposed revisions to a panel of negotiators. Many people in higher education, especially those in the for-profit sector, were taken aback at the substantial changes proposed, with some calling the move "aggressive" and "surprisingly strong."

The panel, whose members include federal officials and representatives of institutions and associations affected by the regulations, has been charged with re-examining 14 rules in a process known as negotiated rule-making. Among the department's proposed changes are eliminating the 12 "safe harbors" adopted in 2002 to clarify a ban on incentive compensation for student recruiters. The safe harbors specify types of compensation plans that do not violate the ban.

Other proposed changes deal with assuring the integrity of "ability to benefit" testing procedures, defining a high-school diploma, and determining how institutions ensure gainful employment for their students.

Another area of concern was the department's consideration of changes in a rule that requires for-profit institutions to show that a percentage of their graduates find "gainful employment." The department decided not to provide draft regulatory language on gainful employment at this time. However, department officials are considering two options for determining whether institutions are complying with that rule. One would require a college to show a "reasonable relationship" between the price a student is charged for a specific program and the "value added," which the department suggests could be defined as the difference between the salaries in that field earned by the average graduate of the program and the average high-school graduate. Another option would be to look at whether a student's starting annual income was adequate to cover student-loan obligations for the program "while still having an adequate amount available to meet living expenses."

In another area, the department's suggestion that institutions be required to keep listings of high schools in three categories related to the established validity of their diplomas also did not go over well. Harris N. Miller, president and chief executive of the Career College Association, which represents about 1,400 institutions, most of them operated for profit, said the onus should be on the federal government, not the institutions. The government, he said, is the one entity that can keep a list of legitimate schools.

The department also proposed new measures regarding the administration of "ability to benefit" tests. Students who do not have a high-school diploma or a GED, and have not completed high school through home schooling, have to pass an ability-to-benefit test to qualify for federal student aid.

The department has proposed requiring publishers of ability-to-benefit tests to establish a process to identify and follow up on test-score irregularities. A test publisher would be required to decertify test administrators if it determined that test had been administered improperly. Last summer the Government Accountability Office said in a report that officials administering such a test at one college had given out answers and changed answers for students. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Students aren't the only ones benefiting from the billions of new dollars Washington is spending on college aid for the poor.

An Associated Press analysis shows surging proportions of both low-income students and the recently boosted government money that follows them are ending up at for-profit schools, from local career colleges to giant publicly traded chains such as the University of Phoenix, Kaplan and Devry.

Last year, the five institutions that received the most federal Pell Grant dollars were all for-profit colleges, collecting over $1 billion among them. That was two and a half times what those schools hauled in just two years prior, the AP found, analyzing Department of Education data on disbursements from the Pell program, Washington's main form of college aid to the poor.

This year, the trend is accelerating: In the first quarter after the maximum Pell Grant was increased last July 1, Washington paid out 45 percent more through the program than during the same period a year ago, the AP found. But the amount of dollars heading to for-profit, or "proprietary," schools is up even more — about 67 percent.

Regardless of how AP's findings are interpreted, they underscore the extent to which the United States has ramped up its support for low-income college students in recent years, but increasingly outsourced the job to the private sector. [Associated Press]

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In the face of dwindling state support for higher education, Oregon should convert its three largest public universities into public corporations to make it easier for them to raise money, David B. Frohnmayer, who recently retired as president of the University of Oregon, recommends in a report released today by the Oregon University System. The report calls for giving the University of Oregon and Oregon State and Portland State Universities the type of autonomy that the Oregon Health and Science University acquired in the 1990s, when it became a state-assisted public corporation. A legislative leader quoted in The Oregonian seemed receptive to the idea but said it was unlikely that the Legislature could take it. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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As Democrats in the House of Representatives joined the Obama administration in urging college leaders to prepare for the government's seemingly likely switch to 100 percent direct student lending, Congressional Republicans issued a challenge of their own, introducing legislation (with the support of one key Democrat) that would extend a stopgap 2007 law that sustained the lender-based guaranteed loan program with a massive infusion of federal funds. That legislation, the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act, made the federal government the backstop for federal student loans issued by banks and other lenders. Education Department officials have cited the June 30 expiration of the law as a major reason why the administration's plan to shift all student lending to the direct loan program must proceed apace, and Reps. George Miller and Ruben Hinojosa sent a letter to college presidents Wednesday urging them to get their campuses ready for the switch, even though the legislation has passed only the House and faces a fight in the Senate. But by proposing an extension of ECASLA, Republicans are essentially giving lawmakers uneasy about pushing ahead with a massive change in federal policy a potential alternative. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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Elgin Community College and Harper College are trying to save America's young people from becoming zombies. That's the message of a new online animated campaign run by the two Illinois community colleges. The video urges students not to be "mindless followers of the traditional college-search mindset" and to consider the low-cost alternative community colleges provide. The video shows those who borrow to attend expensive four-year institutions facing "a lifetime of mindless, brain-consuming misery" as zombies. [Inside Higher Ed]

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President Obama and his administration need to get more involved if the United States is to meet his goal of having the world's highest proportion of college graduates by 2020, panelists said at the annual meeting of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities here on Monday.

Panelists pointed out that the United States has rallied before and increased college enrollment, especially after World War II, following the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, and with the advent of community colleges. So there is history to assume that the president's goal can be reached, they said.

Among the challenges in meeting the president's goal identified by members are the large number of students in the pipeline—mostly minorities who are not prepared for college work—the lack of stronger credit-transfer agreements between two-year and four-year colleges in some states, and the country's current economic difficulties. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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WASHINGTON — Top federal food regulators threatened on Friday to ban caffeinated alcoholic drinks unless their makers quickly proved that the beverages were safe.

In a statement, the Food and Drug Administration said it had told nearly 30 manufacturers of the drinks that unless they could provide clear evidence of safety, it would “take appropriate action to ensure that the products are removed from the marketplace.” Officials did not say how long such a determination might take.

The drinks, which combine malt liquor or other spirits with caffeine and fruit juices at alcohol concentrations up to about 10 percent, have become increasingly popular among college students. In a news conference, Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, the agency’s principal deputy commissioner, said their consumption was associated with increased risk of serious injury, drunken driving, sexual assault and other dangerous behavior.

The brands under scrutiny, which include Joose from United Brands, are being marketed to young people with social marketing tools. United Brands, for instance, has a Twitter site to market Joose. [New York Times]

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The U.S. Education Department published final regulations Wednesday laying out the requirements for what states must report to the federal government to receive money in 2010 through the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which provided tens of billions of dollars of economic stimulus funds. The rules, which were published in the Federal Register, focus mostly on elementary and secondary education, but they mandate that states be able to collect (from colleges) and publicly report data regarding student enrollment and credit completion. [Inside Higher Education]
 

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A change in the way the federal government will report race and ethnicity data for educational institutions is making it necessary for the university to collect new information from students, faculty and staff.

Beginning in 2010, the U.S. Department of Education is moving away from the practice of classifying individuals by one racial category, and it is changing the way institutions report their data.

The most notable change in the Integrated Post-secondary Educational Data System (IPEDS) is a two-part question that first asks individuals to indicate if their ethnicity is Hispanic or Latino, before moving on to a second part that allows them to identify as more than one race.

While the new survey allows individuals to indicate more than one racial category, students applying for admissions under a revised application no longer will be able to self-identify using multi-ethnic or multi-racial labels of their own choosing, such as Burmese, Comanche or Jewish.

IPEDS tracks aggregate information about enrollment, program completion, graduation rates, faculty and staff, finances, institutional prices, and student financial aid from every college, university, and technical and vocational institution in the United States and other jurisdictions (such as Puerto Rico) that participate in the federal student financial aid programs. [EnerPub]

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Most of us have probably hit "send" once or twice before being certain that the correct person (and only the correct person) was in the address field. But when it comes to misfiring e-mail, two employees of Cornell University's business school may have set a new standard for embarrassment. The sexually explicit exchanges between these employees (both married, not to each other) were sent accidentally on Friday to a global list at the business school, and now are appearing in numerous places online. A Cornell spokesman confirmed the incident and said that, "an e-mail was sent by the university shortly after the incident to all those who may have received the accidental mailing, with an apology and a request that recipients discard the accidental mailing." [Inside Higher Ed]

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Rep. John Kline of Minnesota, the top Republican on the House education committee, is accusing the Education Department of improperly lobbying colleges to support legislation to overhaul student loans. He says the department has pressed institutions to switch to its direct-loan system before Congress votes to terminate the bank-based system of student lending. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Do Twitter skeptics really believe the popular microblogging service offers no educational value, or are they just afraid of it?

While some higher ed officials — including nearly everyone at Wednesday's debate between W. Gardner Campbell, director of the Academy of Teaching and Learning at Baylor University and Bruce Maas, CIO of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee — use Twitter for fun, many balk at the idea of incorporating it into the classroom.

But Campbell had a different take on the implications of audience members feverishly typing away while a presentation is still in progress. “That’s a godsend!” he said. “Suddenly, I’m not just the one at the front just dispensing everything, and the students aren’t just sort of milling about doing their thing — we’ve actually got a team of people working together. And Twitter is the glue that holds the team together.”

It’s also a data-gathering resource. Live discussion threads, Campbell noted, give professors loads of data on the previously mysterious question of what exactly is going on inside the heads of students during a lecture. No longer is a student’s ability to participate in classroom discussions contingent upon whether he is willing to raise his hand and has the good fortune to be called on, he said.

Campbell acknowledged that the idea of having students tweet during lectures can be a scary prospect, not just for CIOs and public relations managers, but for faculty. “What if something gets quoted incorrectly? What if somebody says something that you didn’t want to share with the world?”

“Well, what if?” he continued. “It’s a cost-benefit trade-off.” [Inside Higher Ed]

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WASHINGTON -- Just as new scrutiny surfaces on the University of Phoenix’s alleged use of illegal recruiting practices, a Department of Education-appointed panel debated possible changes in federal rules governing recruiter compensation for bringing students to their institutions.

In discussions Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, the team of negotiators charged with considering the revision of regulations meant to protect federal financial aid programs from potential abuses by colleges, universities and others turned to the rules guiding incentive compensation for recruiters, financial aid officers and others who may get paid based on how many students apply to or enroll at their institution.

The department chose to reopen the issue in this current round of "negotiated rule making," in an attempt to see whether some or all of the safe harbors needed to be revised or eliminated, or if others ought to be added.

Though complaints about aggressive recruiting tactics have come from all kinds of institutions, there was an inferred emphasis on for-profits like Phoenix (which, for its part, refutes the allegations made by ProPublica and NPR's "Marketplace" in the news story mentioned above). Hawkins said NACAC has catalogued violations “taking place primarily in the for-profit sector but also in nonprofits.” His group’s policies regard admission officers “as professionals, rather than salespersons” and support a full ban on incentive compensation.

Margaret Reiter, a former California deputy attorney general on the panel representing consumer advocacy organizations, voiced specific concerns about the language in almost all of the safe harbors. [Inside Higher Ed]

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The U.S. Department of Education has released a template that colleges can use to create the net-price calculators they are required to offer on their Web sites in two years.

The calculators, which are required under a provision of the Higher Education Opportunity Act, will allow prospective students and their families to estimate their personal out-of-pocket expenses at a particular college.

Colleges have two years, until October 29, 2011, to have their calculators up and running, but they have been encouraged to take action sooner, and some already have made calculators available. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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WASHINGTON -- Tensions between for-profit institutions and their foes came to the fore as a panel of concerned parties convened here Monday afternoon to begin the multi-month process of working out new regulations governing the integrity of federal financial aid programs.

It was the first day of a four-day session (to be followed by two more four-day sessions, one in December, the other in January) of negotiated rule making, intended to help the Department of Education craft regulations on a series of issues that the department can use to oversee institutions that receive federal financial aid under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965.

Among the issues up for discussion are incentive compensation for recruiters, the alleged misrepresentation of information to students, and how to disburse financial aid to programs that offer instruction in modules or compressed timeframes, rather than typical semesters. All are controversial issues in the world of for-profit colleges. The audience of the open-to-the-public event included dozens of for-profit lobbyists and staffers.

So, as could have been anticipated, the first real discord in the process came in finalizing just who would serve on the panel. The department selected committee members who “represent the interests significantly affected by the topics proposed for negotiations,” but gave just three of the panel’s 28 spots to representatives of private, for-profit institutions. After the meeting started, a fourth -- Michale S. McComis, executive director of the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges -- was added without objection as an alternate.

Elaine Neely, the only primary negotiator representing for-profits, proposed the addition of two more primary negotiators: Jeff Arthur, of ECPI College of Technology and co-chair of the Career College Association’s regulatory affairs committee, and William Leach, of Lincoln Educational Services. “It’s important that we have other members of proprietary schools at the table given the number of issues and … students we represent,” she said.

The most vocal opposition came from Margaret Reiter, a lawyer and the primary negotiator representing consumer advocacy organizations. In 2007, as a California deputy attorney general, she filed suit against Corinthian Colleges, Inc., and won a $6.5 million settlement for the state. She said the group was already large enough with 14 primary negotiators, all with alternates, and should “go forward with the size group we have.” Pressed for further explanation of her position, Reiter said she thought the panel was already “a well-balanced group representing a variety of constituencies.” Adding more representatives of for-profits, she said, would make the conversation “a little more weighted” and do so unnecessarily since “the proprietary schools tend to have a fairly consistent view among them.” [Inside Higher Ed]

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Idaho State University has fired Habib Sadid, a tenured engineering professor who had been suspended, the Associated Press reported. A faculty panel recently released an opinion that there was not enough evidence to justify Sadid's dismissal, but the university president said that his ouster was in the best interests of the institution. Sadid has been a long-time critic of the university's leaders and he says he is being fired for his dissent, while the university says that he crossed lines from dissent into abusive and unfair behavior. [Inside Higher Ed]

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About a week into any class at Rio Salado College, officials can make a pretty good guess as to which students will succeed and which ones will not. The Arizona community college, where more than half of the 64,000 students pursue their degrees online, has devised a system of predictive modeling that officials believe can forecast, with 70 percent accuracy, how likely it is that a student will achieve a “C” grade or higher (the threshold for transferable credits) in a given course. The tool -- one of several of its kind -- is intended to help instructors to identify at-risk students early enough that they can intervene.

Rio Salado uses more than two dozen metrics during that first week to predict how well that student stands to fare over the entire course, but some of the most effective are the most basic: Has the student logged into the course home page during that first week? Did she log in prior to the first day of class? Other predictive metrics, such as whether a student is taking other classes at the same time, whether she has been successful in previous courses, and whether she is retaking the course, are culled from the college's student information system.

The predictive modeling system uses these metrics to separate students into three color-coded categories: high-risk (red) students, medium-risk (yellow) students, and low-risk (green) students. The instructors of each class are notified a week in about the “yellow” students in their class, so they can then reach out to those students and try to get them on track. The college says it does not currently intervene in the cases of “red” students, citing limited resources (although officials there say they are working on developing a system to address the needs of those students).

Rio Salado differs in that respect from Purdue University, which has run similar predictive modeling program since 2006, and does keep students in the loop. On Thursday, SunGard Higher Education announced it is partnering with Purdue to market the Signals system to colleges everywhere. Like Rio Salado, Capella University, a for-profit online university that has used a comparable system for the past three years, does not tell students about their risk status. [Inside Higher Ed]

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NEW YORK — Shares of for-profit education companies tumbled Wednesday a day after Apollo Group Inc., one of the largest and oldest of the companies, said the Securities and Exchange Commission had launched an "informal inquiry" into its revenue accounting practices, its second SEC probe this year.

"We are confident that the SEC's accounting issue is specific to (Apollo)," wrote RBC Capital Markets analyst Robert Wetenhall in a note to investors Wednesday. DeVry Inc., another of the more-established higher education providers, said on its Tuesday evening earnings conference call that it had not been contacted by the SEC and was not concerned. But the rest of the sector will likely be under pressure "until the dust settles."

SEC inquiries often end without finding harm done by the company. Still, the probe comes at a time when the Department of Education is keeping an eye on the sector at large. In a Congressional hearing earlier this month, Mary Mitchelson, an inspector general of the Education Department, described investigations of different schools' attendance-tracking and financial aid practices. She said the government would continue to pursue cases of "diploma mills" and eligibility exams.

The Government Accountability Office in September released a report critical of the for-profit schools' student loan default rates. The GAO said many proprietary schools admitted unqualified students who had a greater tendency than other students to drop out, let students stay enrolled despite a lack of academic progress and also misrepresented themselves to prospective students. That prompted the Congressional hearing on Oct. 14 at which Mitchelson testified, along with other GAO and Education Department officials. [The Associated Press]
 

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The Eastern Washington University Eagles may fly into the playoffs this season after all.

Tuesday, in a rare penalty reversal, the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Infractions Appeals Committee overturned a 2009 postseason ban that another NCAA panel had imposed on Eastern Washington’s football team.

In February, the Division I Committee on Infractions punished the institution because Paul Wulff, former Eagles head coach and current head coach at Washington State University, had allowed four players who did not meet the NCAA’s academic qualification to practice with the team and receive financial and housing assistance. Also in violation of NCAA rules, the football team had too many coaches. Wulff was chastised by the committee for failing to report these violations after he had been made aware of them. Eastern Washington was also reprimanded for having an inadequate compliance system in place to prevent such violations.

In reversing the ban, the Infractions Appeals Committee stated that “while the violations provided some competitive advantage, the conclusion that the advantage was ‘significant’ was a clear error of judgment, such that the imposition of the postseason ban was arbitrary.”
[Inside Higher Ed]

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The folks over at onlineschool.net have put together a group of 50 lectures regarding education. They write that these lectures may "help you learn about what may be in store for the students of the future and the ways in which education may be changing for the better, utilizing new technology and working with the way we learn." [Online School]

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Education Department officials have been insisting for months that, despite the warnings of some Wall Street analysts to the contrary, the federal government is not intent on intensifying its regulation of for-profit higher education.

That assertion got a little harder to believe on Friday, when the department announced the composition of a committee charged with negotiating a set of new federal regulations related to the integrity of federal financial aid programs. Given the issues on the panel's agenda, its membership leans notably toward critics of the for-profit sector of higher education, and decidedly short on representatives of the colleges.

As is typically the case in the federal negotiated rule making process (which is explained here), the department's September 9 announcement inviting nominations for the committees said it would populate the panels with people who "represent the interests significantly affected by the topics proposed for negotiations."

In this case, the topics under the overall rubric of the integrity of federal financial aid programs include such things as incentive compensation for college recruiters and the use of tests to gauge students' "ability to benefit" from a higher education, which are heavily used by for-profit universities, community colleges, and other open-access institutions.

What's more unexpected, perhaps, is that the group gathered by the department to negotiate a set of issues that relate heavily to for-profit institutions contains so many other members with a clearly stated antipathy toward the sector, and so few members from for-profit institutions themselves. [Inside Higher Ed]

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The Maryland Higher Education Commission has ruled that state residents should not be able to enroll in an online degree program in community-college administration offered by the University of Maryland University College, reports The Sun, a newspaper in Baltimore. Morgan State University, a historically black college, opposed the program on the grounds that it could violate civil-rights laws. In response, Donald N. Langenberg, chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland, has called the commission's decision "insane," comparing it to restrictions that the Soviet Union once placed on citizens' access to information. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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A Congressional panel voted today to expand federal oversight over private student loans, but refused to clarify that institutional "gap loans" would be covered.

By a vote of 33 to 35, the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee rejected an amendment to legislation (HR 3126) to create a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that would have put loans made by for-profit institutions under the agency's purview. Consumer advocates have warned that the loans, called gap loans because they cover the difference between federal aid and the cost of college, could be exempt under language that was added to the bill to protect small businesses.

"This is a clear case of a solution in search of a problem," said Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association. "Our schools should not be saddled with additional compliance requirements simply because they are attempting to help those in financial need get the education necessary to build better, more successful lives."

Before approving the overall legislation, on a vote of 39 to 29, the committee also rejected an amendment by Rep. Tom Price, a Republican of Georgia, that would have exempted all student-loan providers from the agency's oversight. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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The nation's colleges of education are doing a "mediocre job" of preparing teachers for "the realities of the 21st-century classroom" and need "revolutionary change—not evolutionary tinkering," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will say in a speech on Thursday at Columbia University's Teachers College.

He also criticizes states and the federal government for approving weak teacher-training programs and licensing examinations for teachers, and for failing to provide enough support for programs that provide mentors for teachers.

The secretary's remarks echo criticism leveled by a former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine, in a series of reports produced by the Education Schools Project. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Demand for personal financial advisors is projected to grow a whopping 41 percent between 2006 and 2016. Which other careers on Money and PayScale.com's list of America's best jobs will see big opportunities?

1. Telecommunications Network Engineer
2. Systems Engineer
3. Personal Finance Advisor
4. Veterinarian
5. Senior Financial Analyst
6. Business Analyst, IT
7. Software Development Director
[CNNMoney]
 

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The economic slump has not slowed the upward spiral of college costs, the College Board reported Tuesday. Tuition and fees now average $26,273 at private colleges and $7,020 at public four-year institutions, with prices rising faster in the public sector. Compared with the past school year, tuition and fees rose 6.5 percent at public four-year colleges and 4.4 percent at private, nonprofit, four-year institutions, according to the report. Those were steeper rates of increase than in previous years, after adjusting for inflation. Over the past decade, annual increases have averaged 4.9 percent at public colleges and 2.6 percent at private colleges.

The companion report, "Trends in Student Aid 2009," shows that financial assistance is rising at a similar clip, contributing to a widening gap between the published price of college and the amount students actually pay. [The Washington Post]

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A prominent University of Alaska marine-conservation specialist appears to have lost a battle against changes in his working conditions that he had blamed on his institution's unwillingness to alienate the oil industry, which holds considerable sway in his state.

Richard Steiner, a professor of marine conservation at the university, had become a cause célèbre among some environmental groups after he accused the university of responding to his outspoken criticism of oil interests by denying him federal grant funds, subjecting him to harassment, and subsequently moving his office to punish him for filing a grievance about such matters in March.
In a harshly worded memorandum rejecting all of Mr. Steiner's claims, the university's general counsel, Roger Brunner, who had been designated by President Mark R. Hamilton to hear Mr. Steiner's final appeal, characterized the professor as having a history of unsuccessfully bringing complaints of violations of his academic freedom in efforts to gain an upper hand with his supervisors.

"In many regards, the current claims appear to be a continuation of Professor Steiner's attempt to free himself from supervision and to have the university create a different job for him which would be more to his liking," Mr. Brunner wrote in the memorandum, which noted that the grievance requested that the university establish a "permanent, autonomous faculty chair for environmental sustainability" on the professor's behalf.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Steiner said Mr. Brunner's decision "looks like the end of the road" and he doubts he will choose to stay there given the circumstances he now finds himself in. "I have very few options here other than to leave the university, which I am likely to do very soon." [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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A three-year degree track could save students money and time, becoming "the higher-education equivalent of the fuel-efficient car," Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Republican of Tennessee, writes in Newsweek. The option, which Mr. Alexander has been promoting for a while, is not for every student but could appeal to those moving on to postgraduate study or just looking for savings. Arguing that colleges must change to slow increasing tuition costs and to deal with falling state support, Mr. Alexander, a former University of Tennessee president and secretary of education, also suggests mandatory summer sessions and changing the tenure system as ways to help students graduate faster and to give universities a competitive edge. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Michael McKeon, Seattle University's dean of admissions, was recruiting and networking in Hawaii last month, according to sources familiar with the situation, when he took a call from the university provost: Drop everything and return to Seattle. McKeon, a 14-year veteran at Seattle U. who'd built a national reputation for opening the doors to poor and minority students, was then abruptly forced out by the university, according to sources. Associate director Melore Nielsen took over his duties Sept. 21 pending a national search for a replacement.

Seattle U. has not offered an explanation for McKeon's departure, either to its own staff or to the public. Both McKeon and Provost Isiaah Crawford declined to be interviewed for this story.

While McKeon's departure came as surprise to educators across the country, behind the scenes Seattle U. has been grappling with a freshman enrollment shortfall and fundamental questions about the type of students it wants to attract. This year, Seattle U. managed to enroll just 747 freshmen — about 10 percent below its target and 17 percent less than last year's class. Gonzaga, meanwhile, enrolled 1,239 freshmen, 15 percent above its target. So many freshmen showed up in Spokane that Gonzaga is renting half a wing of the Red Lion River Inn to house 80 students.

One Seattle U. source said staff have been told there will be a "different direction" when it comes to admissions, but they don't yet know how that will play out. While there will likely be more emphasis on students' test scores and income, the changes won't necessarily result in a wholesale departure from the university's mission, according to the source. [The Seattle Times]

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Exhorted by consumer groups, the Obama administration and its Democratic allies in Congress are moving to create a federal Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which is designed to regulate credit card fees and other forms of consumer credit that get comparatively little oversight from existing federal agencies. Advocates for students have argued that the new agency could fill what they say are significant gaps in the government's ability to regulate non-federal student loans, which grew steadily in popularity as college tuitions rose throughout this decade. But as the House of Representatives drafts its version of legislation to create the new agency, a broad coalition of groups are concerned that lawmakers may ignore a burgeoning form of alternative loans: those that for-profit colleges make directly to students to fill gaps in their ability to pay.

They are urging Congressional Democrats to clarify that a planned exemption in the bill designed to shield local merchants from excessive regulation would not apply to publicly traded higher education companies that are directly giving students tens of millions of dollars in small loans, often structured as consumer financing rather than student loans, and sometimes at double digit interest rates.

"To effectively protect consumers, the CFPA must have full authority to regulate private student loans regardless of the institution offering them," the groups wrote in a letter this month to Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. "For consumers, a private student loan can pose the same serious risks whether issued by a financial institution or by a school. The CFPA should apply and enforce standards based upon the product and not the issuing institution."

For-profit college officials say the groups misrepresent the nature of the loans, which they say are designed to fill the gap (often as little as $1,000) between the federal aid the students qualify for and the cost of their educations, funds that have been harder for students to come by since the tightened credit markets crimped the availability of other private student loans. They also point out that relatively few colleges provide such financing, and argue that private student loans -- including those issued by institutions -- are already regulated, thanks to changes made in last year's renewal of the Higher Education Act. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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India and the United States plan to establish a joint education council of academics and industry experts to pave the way for advanced bilateral relations in higher education, the Press Information Bureau of India said Thursday. The announcement followed a meeting between William Burns, under secretary for political affairs in the U.S. State Department, and Kapil Sibal, India's minister in charge of higher education. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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An audit of the U.S. Department of Education's information systems for managing the federal student-aid programs is calling for increased security, saying several vulnerabilities could compromise the confidentiality and availability of financial and personal data in the systems. The report, by the department's Office of Inspector General, gives no indication that the flaws have led to a security breach, but it says the department needs to improve security controls over the certification and accreditation process for the systems. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Employers are viewing online degrees more favorably, reports Industry Market Trends. Reuters reported that online education grew 13 percent last year, and nearly one-quarter of students now take some online college courses. Adult, mid-career professionals, in particular, are participating in online learning.

A survey of human resources professionals by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that 76 percent view online university degrees more favorably today than they did five years ago. In addition, 58 percent of respondents said individual courses taken through online universities are as credible as traditional university courses. Of SHRM's respondents, 95 percent said there is no difference between tuition reimbursement between employees studying through accredited online universities and those studying through accredited traditional universities. [The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers Transcript]

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The Education Department is stepping up its oversight of the basic-skills tests that students without a high-school diploma or GED can use to qualify for federal student aid, a top official told members of Congress on Wednesday.

Testifying before a U.S. House of Representatives education subcommittee, Robert M. Shireman, deputy under secretary of education, said the department has put in place systems to better monitor publishers of the assessments, known as "ability to benefit" tests, and will revisit regulations governing the tests during a rule-making session that starts in November. The department will also consider publishing lists of legitimate institutions and diploma mills to help for-profit colleges differentiate between valid and invalid degrees, he said.

Wednesday's hearing came less than a month after the Government Accountability Office reported it had found that officials administering an ability-to-benefit test at a for-profit college had given out answers and had changed answer sheets so that students would be eligible for federal funds. In its report, the GAO also found that officials at two proprietary schools had helped prospective students obtain invalid high-school diplomas from diploma mills.

The report, "Proprietary Schools: Stronger Department of Education Oversight Needed to Help Ensure Only Eligible Students Receive Federal Student Aid," got the attention of the chairman of the House education committee, who called its findings "extremely troubling." In an e-mail message to Bloomberg News last month, the chairman, Rep. George Miller, Democrat of California, said he would hold hearings on whether for-profit colleges were "gaming the system" to enroll "students who may not be fully ready for college and may be more likely to default" on loans.

Wednesday's hearing did little to answer those questions, though it did give the Education Department and for-profit colleges an opportunity to defend themselves. In his testimony, Harris N. Miller, president of the Career College Association, argued that most of his members "play by the rules" and stressed that the report had not uncovered any "pattern of abuse." [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Surveys by two regional groups of financial aid directors suggest that, despite assurances from the U.S. Education Department, many college officials are worried about the impact that proposed changes in federal student loan programs will have on their institutions and students. The Western and Southern affiliates of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators both asked their members whose institutions are still in the lender-based Federal Family Education Loan Program about the impact they envision from President Obama's proposal to shift all federal lending to the competing direct loan program, a change that would be carried out by legislation that has passed the House of Representatives and will soon be introduced in the Senate. Two-thirds of aid officers said that they were "very" or "extremely" concerned about the prospect of making such a shift by July 2010, as the legislation currently envisions, and nearly half said they expected a significant or severe impact on their budgets. Education Department officials have repeatedly sought to assure aid administrators that the many institutions that have made the shift have had an easy time of it. [Inside Higher Ed]

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A group of distance education leaders today plans to discuss how current state-by-state approval and licensing protocols are hampering online colleges, and how those policies might evolve to accommodate colleges that educate students in many different states via the Web. “American labor’s competitive edge requires work force education that avoids entanglement of online and distance educational providers in a duplicative web of processes in order to offer their services,” says a report from a task force assigned by the forum to study the issue.

That report is expected to be the focus of today’s meeting here. Its authors argue that the state-based approval system is centered around the notion that colleges are fixed in a single location that necessarily falls within the borders of a state. Since online colleges aim to teach students in multiple states, they have to go through multiple accreditation processes to achieve a nationwide presence, then satisfy various bureaucratic requirements in each state if they want to keep teaching students there.

This, says John F. Ebersole, president of Excelsior College (which founded the Presidents’ Forum), can be “sort of a pain in the butt"; more to the point, it forces online institutions to devote a lot of time and resources to acquiring and maintaining licensure in different states. This, the task force argues, “increasingly may act to inhibit student access to essential learning opportunities and at an unnecessarily high cost.”

To remove these anchors from the necks of online colleges seeking a presence in each state, the task force proposes that regional accrediting organizations and their member states reach a common ground on “a specific template of state standards to which all parties would reference their individual requirements.” Under such a system, online colleges would only have to seek the approval of a single accrediting organization and a single state, just like brick-and-mortar colleges -- except they would get to enroll students from all over the country. The system would be based on “reciprocal judgment"; that is, state governments and regional accreditors would have to trust each other that their accredited institutions were on the level.

Solving the discontinuity between state licensing agencies could be the key to getting regional accreditors to trust one another’s judgment, according to Alan Contreras, administrator of the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization. If professional licensing agencies in different states can align their standards, curricula designed to prepare students to meet those standards will necessarily become more similar, Contreras wrote in an outline for a talk he is planning to give today at the Presidents' Forum meeting. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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A United States District Court judge argued that accrediting agencies should be “afforded great deference in their interpretation of their substantive rules,” when he recently upheld an agency’s decision to strip a small Presbyterian college of its accreditation as a result of the significant debt the institution has accumulated. St. Andrews Presbyterian College, an institution of about 800 students in rural North Carolina, sued the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in late 2007, arguing that the accrediting agency “denied it common law due process” and that the agency “failed to follow its own procedures in removing St. Andrews’ accreditation.”

SACS had placed the college on warning and probation prior to its 2007 decision to remove accreditation, advising St. Andrews’ officials that their institution was not in compliance with certain aspects of the agency’s “Principles of Accreditation.” Namely, the accreditor found that the college did not have “a sound financial base and demonstrated financial stability.” Students can receive federal student aid only if they attend colleges that are accredited, and St. Andrews has managed to maintain eligibility only because of its lawsuit.

Throughout the process leading to its loss of accreditation, St. Andrews officials argued that SACS did not provide adequate notice of its compliance requirements, calling them “so vague that they give no notice to the college as to what it must do to bring itself in compliance.” Officials further argued that the institution was not offered any benchmarks to determine compliance, referring to SACS’s standards as a “moving target” determined by the “subjective opinions of varying peer evaluators.”

SACS officials, on the other hand, argued that even though the agency’s requirement that all institutions have a “sound financial base” and a “demonstrated financial stability” are not determined by objective criteria, the agency’s standards are anything but “vague.” They further stated that it would be “unwise to adopt a universal definition for financial stability,” given the “wide variety of institutions” SACS accredits.

United Stated District Court Judge William S. Duffey, Jr., of the Northern District of Georgia, writes in his opinion that accrediting agencies like SACS “are to be afforded great deference” in their rulings and that “these interpretations should be upheld unless ‘clearly erroneous.’ ” He further notes that “the weight of authority” allows SACS to “maintain flexible standards” to evaluate myriad institutions. Dismissing the arguments of St. Andrews, Duffey states that “SACS’ compliance requirements are not impermissibly unspecific” but “provide sufficient notice to member institutions and thus do not violate common law due process standards.”

Elsewhere in his ruling, Duffey backs away from judicial review of SACS’ decisions again by noting that its “interpretation of its requirements for financial stability and a sound financial base is entitled to deference.” He emphasizes a hand-off approach when the court considers accreditation cases. “The court will not act as a ‘super-accreditation’ body to evaluate whether SACS’ accreditation decision was right or wrong, or whether the court would have ultimately reached a different conclusion,” Duffey writes. “The court necessarily concludes the process was fundamentally fair and that the college was allowed to present sufficiently complete information about its financial condition and operations. That St. Andrews disagrees with SACS’ conclusions and determination does not demonstrate that it was denied due process.” [Inside Higher Ed]

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The U.S. Department of Education today awarded $11.3-million in grants to 29 projects in 20 states that will benefit working adults and displaced workers pursuing degrees or credentials at community colleges. The projects encompass a wide range of activities, including remediation, tutoring, counseling, and support services. Some projects will use distance learning to reach out to adult learners. The grants, which range from $200,000 to $500,000, are administered by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Rebecca Moorman says the first clue that something was amiss with her field trip to Chile came when her professor at The Evergreen State College insisted her payment of more than $3,000 be deposited into his bank account. A subsequent audit by the Olympia university, aided with information that Moorman gathered, revealed that she and 14 other students paid $70 a day for dormitory-style beds and food that should have cost just $14 a day. Some of the money went to a Chilean sanitation company, owned by relatives of the professor, that provided the accommodations, the audit said.

The audit released earlier this year also found that the professor, Jorge Gilbert, can't account for at least $50,000 he collected from students and Evergreen for other Chilean trips since 2005, and that students first began raising concerns about his trips' finances in 1998.

Evergreen spokesman Jason Wettstein said Gilbert, who teaches Latin American studies and who has been on the Evergreen faculty 20 years, has been placed on administrative leave this quarter pending the outcome of university disciplinary proceedings. The college also is exploring options for recovering the $50,000, Wettstein added.

Evergreen's audit said the students were given "very basic" meals and required to pay for transportation and other expenses. "In the month the students were in Chile, they only went on one trip to the north," the audit said, and didn't receive any refund or explanation for the cancellation of an expected second trip to the south. The state conducted its own audit in July and agreed with the university's findings.

Wettstein, the university spokesman, said it was always Evergreen's intent to refund the students. "Sometimes things don't work out as quickly as you'd like when you are dealing with a state agency," he said. [The Seattle Times]

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A federal watchdog agency has called on the Education Department to crack down on for-profit colleges and test administrators after an investigation showed high default rates on student loans and cheating on some exams. The problem lies with an Education Department that has "significant vulnerabilities" in its oversight, the Government Accountability Office told Congress in a recent report.

The GAO called on the department to take several steps, including monitoring for-profit schools and testing programs more closely and ensuring that students don’t get high school diplomas from diploma mills — another problem that was identified. Students can qualify for federal student loans and other aid if they have diplomas or pass these tests. If they default on the loans, federal taxpayers must pick up the cost.

In response, Education Department officials said they expect to implement new rules."We kind of knew we had this issue, and we began to tighten up on our monitoring and test-publishing before the GAO report," said Jeff Baker with the department’s office of federal student aid.

The Career College Association in Washington, D.C., a national group that represents career and for-profit schools, said in a statement that "we share the government’s interest in eliminating any form of fraud and abuse associated with" the federal financial aid program. But the report should be taken in context, the association said. "Nothing in the GAO report suggests that the practice of admitting unqualified students is widespread or indicative of the sector as a whole," the statement said.

Recommendations The federal Government Accountability Office recommended that the Education Department:

-Strengthen its monitoring of for-profit schools and the ability-to-benefit test program. Officials should look at data where test administrators improperly oversaw tests and use that data to identify potential future abuses.

-Require test publishers to conduct an analysis about every 18 months of ATB tests in addition to the current three-year analysis to help better identify irregularities.

-Have an action plan to prevent test administrators who allow cheating from getting additional work from the exam’s publishers.

-Have easily accessible information available — for example on a Web site — that lists state-approved high schools. Officials can then more easily identify diploma mills. [Star-Telegram]

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The Department of Veterans Affairs' problems with the Post-9/11 GI Bill's benefits seem to linger, no matter what the government does.

Tens of thousands of veterans, active-duty service members and their dependents have been waiting for promised higher-education benefits from VA since fall classes began last month. The agency attempted to address the backlog by granting $3,000 in emergency checks, but that has just created a new problem. It turns out that VA was hustling so to get checks in the right hands that officials began distributing benefits checks that had been filled out by hand. Not surprisingly, that sent up alarm bells at banks.

VA contacted banks, university officials and other program participants over the weekend to alert them. Concerned bank employees can call VA at 800-827-2166 to confirm a check's amount and whether it was previously cashed. (Those with the checks might want to write that phone number down, too, just in case there's a question at the bank). The department has distributed roughly $70 million in emergency checks since the payments began Friday, Roberts said. Roughly 30,000 of the 64,000 students enrolled in the Post 9/11 GI Bill are still awaiting payment. VA is authorizing payment for about 3,000 students per day. [The Washington Post]

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The U.S. Department of Education has ordered the Iowa Student Loan Liquidity Corporation, a private nonprofit lender, to repay $15.7-million to the federal government after finding that the organization used illegal cash inducements to drum up more loan business, The Des Moines Register reported. The lender disputes the department's calculations, however, and says it believes the repayment amount should total only $1.7-million. The department's findings involved payments made to the Iowa State University Alumni Association under an agreement that ended in May 2007 and that was the subject of legislative hearings that year. Last fall, the lender was the subject of a scathing report by the state's attorney general, who accused it of giving false and misleading information to borrowers. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Mirroring a nationwide trend, the University of Washington is overhauling how its students and professors interface with foreign countries. The UW study abroad experience today involves much more oversight than it did two years ago when Amanda Knox left on an unsupervised European adventure that quickly degenerated into a nightmare. When Knox, who is on trial for murder in Italy, left her familiar U-district environs in late summer 2007, she embarked on her own independent study in Umbria with very few guidelines or institutional oversight.

As UW college students return to class last week, those intending to go abroad and the professors who advise them found a rapidly changing academic landscape. In the wake of several negative overseas episodes, officials are busy raising awareness about the positive impact the UW is having worldwide and taking steps to improve communications, regulation and emergency preparedness for its students abroad. Compared with two years ago, international education officials are more closely tracking who, where and what study-abroad programs involve. The university has new rules:. The department chair has to sign off on the program. Insurance is required. So is a cell phone. No program money can be used to buy alcohol, just for starters.

New guidelines are being put in place to streamline communications, ease financial transactions and institute mandatory training for faculty taking students abroad. The Global Support Project, a rapid-response team with one person from each branch of the central administration, takes on cross-disciplinary international challenges.

Such reforms aren't unique to UW. Universities across the country are examining how better to organize study abroad to meet blossoming demand from students (and prospective employers) for foreign experience. Many are turning to independent service providers whose business it is to contract housing, health care or niche risk management services dealing with legal, financial or public relations crises when things go haywire abroad. [Seattlepi.com]

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Online education is a growing industry in the United States with estimated revenues of $12 billion at a dozen or so for-profit companies that provide primarily online learning.

Here are some facts and statistics:

- Of more than 18 million U.S. college students, 3.9 million were enrolled in at least one online college course in fall 2007, an increase of 13 percent from 2006. Traditional on-campus enrollment increased 1 percent over that period.

- 85 percent of students who take courses online live in the same region as the campus offering the course.

- 15 percent of kindergarten through high school students may be educated online by 2011, up from 4 percent in 2006.

- 87 percent of children aged 12 to 17 use the Internet. Two-thirds of nursery school children use computers. Just about every U.S. school is connected to the Internet.

- 70 percent of public high school students graduate. Two-thirds of graduates are seen as unprepared for college.

- 47 percent of drop-outs said a major reason for leaving school was "classes were not interesting" and they were "bored." Eighty-eight percent of drop-outs had passing grades. [Reuters]

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The University of North Dakota's controversial "Fighting Sioux" nickname got a 30-day reprieve today, as the state's Board of Higher Education voted, 6 to 1, to extend until October 31 the deadline for the nickname's demise unless a tribal council announces plans to hold a referendum on its use, according to the Grand Forks Herald. The university sued the NCAA in 2006, after the association declined to grant a waiver from a policy banning American Indian imagery in team nicknames and mascots, which the NCAA deemed offensive. In settling the suit, North Dakota agreed to drop the nickname unless it could win the approval of two Sioux tribes. One tribe has endorsed the nickname, but the other has refused to even schedule a vote. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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The Apollo Group, parent company of the University of Phoenix, announced today that it was holding settlement discussions with the parties that have accused it of falsely obtaining billions of dollars in federal student aid while violating rules over how student recruiters are paid. The case, which has been working its way through the courts for several years, is slated for trial in March, but the parties have now agreed to stay all proceedings in the litigation for 45 days. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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When the University of Missouri's athletics department sold 25 old cellphones this past summer at a university auction, athletics officials forgot to do one thing: Erase the phones' memory. A resident of Columbia, Mo., purchased the phones for $190, intending to resell their parts, but discovered contacts, text messages, and e-mail from Missouri's athletic director and head football and basketball coaches. Unfortunately for rivals in Kansas, the recovered messages contained no secret strategies or recruiting tips. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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With the state of the economy, everyone is looking to save a little money. The folks over at onlinedegree.net have posted a list of 50 scholarships that are geared towards the eco-minded student. Ranging from general to specific, this list is helpful for students and administrators. Click here  to see the list and to read more. [Online Degree]

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College governing boards need to get more involved in the accrediting process at the institutions they serve, helping to preserve a longstanding system of self regulation and peer review that is not without its critics, two major advocacy organizations said today. The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation released a joint statement today, urging boards to play an integral role in the accreditation process.

“Beyond the heightened individual, societal, and economic pressures for accountability, American higher education remains collectively responsible to the broader public good,” the statement reads. “As such, governing boards can assure policy makers and the public that the unique U.S. higher education enterprise is operating with integrity and stability, is delivering high-quality academic programs, and is worthy of its autonomous authority and self-regulation by demonstrating their engagement in the accreditation process.”

The accreditation movement, which began for institutions and programs about 100 years ago, has emerged as academe’s standard measure for assuring academic quality. Even so, the process has become a familiar target for critics who say it fails to effectively assess learning outcomes and needs greater oversight from outside academe. Former U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called the current accreditation model “insular” and “clubby,” leaving institutions “accountable to no one but themselves.”

The push for more accountability in higher education has led to the development of a series of new tools, including the Voluntary System of Accountability and the Collegiate Learning Assessment. Those tools can be an important companion to accreditation, but not a replacement, Eaton said.

The AGB/CHEA statement lays out a series of suggestions for both governing boards and chief executive officers. Included in the recommendations are the establishment of an ongoing orientation or accreditation education program for board members; a review of key elements of an institution’s accreditation self study; and participation in the accreditation process. Chief executive officers are also advised to inform the board of specific governance-related criteria that will be evaluated during the accreditation process. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Thousands of veterans who returned to school this semester under the Post-9/11 GI Bill and have yet to receive tuition, housing and textbook payments from the Department of Veterans Affairs will each be eligible for $3,000 in emergency aid, agency officials announced Friday. "Students should be focusing on their studies, not worrying about financial difficulties," Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki said in a statement.

The agency has been overwhelmed by a flood of applications. Of the 251,000 students who have submitted claims this year, 24,186 -- less than 10 percent -- have received checks, according to Veterans Affairs officials. They point out, however, that not all of those students intend to use the benefits this year. Although many universities are deferring tuition payments, the delays have forced students to take out loans, rack up credit card debt and consider dropping out of school in order to meet living expenses, according to veterans and groups that advocate on their behalf.

Now, starting Oct. 2, veterans can request a $3,000 advance on their housing and book allowances by bringing a photo ID, course schedule and eligibility certificate to one of the agency's 57 regional offices, including in the District and Baltimore. The agency said it would also send officials to some college campuses and help coordinate transportation to regional offices. [The Washington Post]

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Boeing employees are about to lose a fabulous perk, and the cost-cutting move could mean a significant financial hit for some local colleges and universities as well. Until now, when a Boeing employee enrolled for any class at any accredited college, the company picked up the tuition — with no restrictions. Boeing currently pays for the classes of about 6,000 employees in the Puget Sound region and 21,000 companywide. But many of those enjoying free classes will lose that benefit at year-end, when Boeing starts limiting its subsidy to cover only courses that further an employee's career at the company.

One local employee, who is entering the second year of Seattle University's four-year evening law-degree program, just learned that beginning in January the company will not pay the $30,000-plus annual tuition."It's a huge blow," said the employee, who asked not to be identified when talking about company policies. "One reason I stayed at Boeing was because of the tuition." Of the 201 law students in Seattle University's part-time evening program, 43 are Boeing employees.

From October, Boeing will pay for new enrollments only in courses deemed "strategic" to its business. So no more free wine-appreciation classes, culinary-arts degrees or soccer workshops. [The Seattle Times]
 

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John Jay College of Criminal Justice was forced Thursday to close one of its buildings because of its bedbug "condition" (not "infestation," a campus spokesman insisted). President Jeremy Travis said the Manhattan college had brought in an outside company to treat North Hall, and that all classes and operations in the building would be moved elsewhere on the campus until Monday. The New York Times reported that campus administrators, especially in the financial aid and registrar's offices, had begun reporting rashes in mid-August, in ever-increasing numbers, and that a team of inspectors brought in on Tuesday had found bugs in more than half the rooms on the building's second floor. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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As Congress and the White House move to alter bankruptcy code to make it more equitable to consumers, a House subcommittee began a reconsideration Wednesday of how bankruptcy law treats private student loan debt. Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law, held a hearing to initiate legislation reversing a 2005 change in federal bankruptcy law that, he said, gave private student loan lenders a “favorable, unusual” advantage over borrowers, as well as in comparison to the issuers of most other kinds of consumer loans.

Bankruptcy law bars virtually all borrowers from discharging their private student loan debt, even as most other forms of consumer debt -- including auto loans, credit card debt and mortgages -- can be discharged through bankruptcy proceedings. The only exceptions are made in cases of “undue hardship.”

The only chance borrowers have to discharge their private student loans during bankruptcy proceedings comes by being able to demonstrate “undue hardship,” a term that has not been concretely defined by Congress and is up for varied interpretations by bankruptcy judges. Rafael I. Pardo, an associate professor at the Seattle University School of Law who has done extensive studies on student loans and their discharge in bankruptcy, called on Congress “to clarify the undue hardship standard.” [Inside Higher Ed]

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In response to Monday's Government Accountability Office report on loan defaults and basic skills tests at for-profit colleges and universities, the chairman of the House education committee, Rep. George Miller of California, has called for hearings on whether such institutions are "gaming the system," Bloomberg News reports. Some higher-education experts, however, noted that the report contains some positive findings about for-profit colleges, including that some of them have among the lowest loan-default rates of all colleges in the country. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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WASHINGTON -- For weeks, spilling into months, those who watch the for-profit sector of higher education most closely (especially Wall Street analysts and some of the colleges' critics) have been speculating about what the U.S. Government Accountability Office was cooking up in a report on the institutions.

Now we know, in the form of some critical findings and a suggestion that the Education Department crank up its scrutiny of the career-related colleges. But Wall Street shrugged off the findings, with stocks for the major publicly traded higher education companies all rising Monday in the wake of what one analyst called the "most positive report we've seen from any government entity" about for-profit colleges.

The most damning aspect of the report -- one of the two that Congress's investigative arm released Monday, with the other on minority-serving colleges -- was the GAO's revelation that officials at a Washington-area branch of one publicly traded for-profit college appears to have violated federal rules when they gave answers to, and "tampered" with answers given by, GAO analysts who posed as prospective students on academic tests designed to measure their "ability to benefit" from a higher education.

The Career College Association, which represents most of the nation's 1,200 for-profit colleges, expressed dismay about the allegations of wrongdoing but noted that the GAO report suggests that they are unrepresentative. "We abhor any practice that breaks the rules or the law to admit unqualified students, whether through fraudulent testing practices or bogus high school degrees. We share the government’s interest in eliminating any form of fraud and abuse associated with the Title IV program," the association said in a prepared statement. "The GAO report describes the actions of a few school personnel and testing personnel behaving in an unethical manner. Nothing in the GAO report suggests that the practice of admitting unqualified students is widespread or indicative of the sector as a whole." [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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That too many young people come out of high school ill-prepared for college or the work force is little disputed. The questions of why that's so and how to fix the situation, however, have too often resulted in finger pointing, with many college faculty members complaining that high schools are asking too little of their students and high school officials saying that colleges send mixed signals about what they want students to be able to do.

Today represents a milestone, though, for a potential breakthrough that could have major implications for higher education. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association have released common standards for core curriculums in mathematics and reading and writing that, because of a confluence of events, could create a set of widely embraced national (but not federal) standards for what high school students need to know to be "college ready" or to have the skills to enter the work force. (Comments are invited through October 21.)

Every state but Texas has signed on to the groups' Common Core Standards Initiative, the federal government has tied participation in the project to qualifying for a huge new pool of federal funds for school districts, and the American Council on Education (in conjunction with scholarly societies) is organizing teams of college faculty members to review the standards.

"This is the first time the K-12 people have stood up and said, 'College readiness is our goal,' " says Kati Haycock, president of Education Trust, which advocates for low-income students. "Higher ed people ought not to underestimate how big a deal this is." [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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After flip-flopping on its admissions policy for nearly a decade, the North Carolina State Community College Board voted Friday to admit undocumented immigrants with one major catch: They must pay out-of-state tuition.

The 21-member board, consisting of a mixture of gubernatorially appointed members and state legislators, overwhelmingly approved the measure, effectively reversing a May 2008 decision to ban undocumented immigrants from the country’s third-largest community college system. This is the fourth time the North Carolina Community College System has changed its admissions policy for undocumented immigrants in nine years. Still, for formal approval, this measure must be voted on by the General Assembly, which does not meet again until next spring.

The revised admissions policy says that the state’s community colleges may only admit undocumented immigrants if they have graduated from a public or private high school in the United States. They must also pay out-of-state tuition -- more than $7,000 a year for a full load of 16 credits per semester. This is nearly five times the in-state tuition. Furthermore, undocumented students admitted to a community college may not receive state or federal financial aid.

“This is a hollow victory,” said Michael Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston and expert on immigration and higher education law. “If students can attend but not establish in-state residency, then it’s just the status quo. These kids cannot afford to pay out-of-state tuition. The board has acted foolishly, and this is just bad policy. There are a number of kids who are otherwise residing in states like North Carolina who pay taxes and put into the system that are still not able to buy and take out of the system at the postsecondary level.”

There are only nine states that have approved legislation explicitly allowing undocumented immigrants to claim residency so that they may pay in-state tuition at their public colleges and universities. On the other end of the spectrum, South Carolina is the only state to explicitly ban immigrants who do not have legal residency from attending its public institutions. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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The Justice Department is expected Friday to outline a range of concerns it has about a settlement that Google Inc. struck with authors and publishers over the rights to distribute digital copies of certain works, according to people familiar with the matter. The Justice Department will submit those concerns in a filing to the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York, which must decide whether to approve agreement, the people said. The filing is likely to discuss the department's concern that parts of the agreement may hurt the interests of other parties, such as Google's potential competitors in the nascent digital-book market, the people said.

Google in October 2008 struck the agreement with authors and publishers to resolve separate lawsuits the groups filed against it for scanning books without seeking permission. The settlement would give Google the rights to distribute digital copies of millions of out-of-print books that it has scanned in exchange for sharing revenue from the services it creates around those books. Many authors, publishers and public-interest groups have endorsed the settlement, saying it will increase access to books and create new business models for authors and publishers. No major U.S. publishers have come out against it, although some publishing associations in Europe have raised concerns.

The settlement has raised objections among others, including Amazon.com Inc. and a number of state attorneys general, who have filed briefs with the court arguing that the deal gives Google an unfair advantage. [The Wall Street Journal]

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WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives on Thursday approved sweeping legislation to overhaul the student loan programs and redirect tens of billions of dollars to student aid and other education programs, brushing aside Republican opposition and handing President Obama a significant legislative victory. The House's approval of the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009, which had been a foregone conclusion for months, shifts the action to the Senate, where the outcome is slightly less predictable.

The student aid bill, a top domestic priority for the Obama administration, would cease all lending from the bank-based Family Federal Education Loan Program and use the savings the government derives from lending more cheaply for a wide array of purposes, only some of which, to the dismay of some college officials, are in higher education. Among other things, the legislation would:

• Provide $40 billion over 10 years to increase the maximum Pell Grant to $5,550 and ensure that it would increase annually by the rise in the Consumer Price Index plus 1 percent.
• Greatly expand and alter the criteria for the Perkins Loan Program.
• Pour $10 billion into community colleges in support of President Obama's American Graduation Initiative, designed to produce 5 million more two-year college graduates by 2020.
• Spend $8 billion over 10 years to strengthen early childhood education.
• Create a College Access and Completion Fund that would give grants to states and institutions with innovative approaches to increasing college going and graduation.
• Provide $4.1 billion to modernize and repair school and college facilities, including those damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
• Make the interest rates on federal student loans variable beginning in 2012, when they are set to rise back to 6.8 percent.
• Simplify the federal financial aid form. [Inside Higher Ed]
   

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On its face, it would seem to be a gift to Barack Obama's conservative critics, who have spent the summer painting the new Democratic President as a socialist who is eager to nationalize the entire health-care system. After all, the Administration's proposal to restructure the student-loan industry is, in many respects, much closer to an actual government takeover than its relatively tame market-driven health-reform plan. But as the House holds hearings and looks likely to pass a student-loan bill this week, it's clear that the education overhaul is not going to be the high-pitched battle that opponents and the White House once expected it to be.

His plan is to do away with a system in which the Federal Government subsidizes banks and other private finance companies like Sallie Mae to lend money to students. The Administration essentially wants to cut such companies out of the game and run the system itself. Democrats claim the move will save $87 billion over 10 years, which can be used for a laundry list of education priorities, including increasing the maximum amount of Pell Grants, expanding Perkins Loans and investing in community colleges and other programs.

Still, the bill could have a hard time in the Senate, where the Administration will need to cobble together 60 votes to prevent the threat of a filibuster. And those in the loan industry certainly aren't giving up. "Ultimately, what they are trying to create here is the Post Office of student lending — you've got no choice," says Jack Remondi, vice chairman and CFO of Sallie Mae, the nation's largest lender, referring to Obama's Aug. 11 comments that questioned the efficiency of American letter carriers. "And this is the President's initiative on health care: if you create competition, that should drive down costs and save people money."

The loan industry estimates that up to 35,000 jobs might be lost by the transfer from FFEL to direct-loan. But the Department of Education (which would run the new and expanded program) maintains that because Sallie Mae and several other companies would be kept on as contractors to "service" the loans — performing administrative tasks such as answering student inquiries and collecting payments — the total amount of jobs lost will actually be much less. [Time]

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A controversial bill that would make it easier for employees of private colleges to unionize is most likely dead for the year, the new chairman of the Senate education committee acknowledged on Thursday. Speaking to supporters of the bill, Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said the measure remains one of his top priorities but may have to wait for next year, when the seat left open by the death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy will be filled by special election. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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Health care is dominating the headlines and consuming most of the oxygen in federal politics these days, and that's likely to remain the case through the fall as President Obama and Congress work to pass legislation to reform the American medical system.

But as lawmakers returned to work this week after their August recess, a flurry of news developments Wednesday served as a reminder that higher education issues remain a top priority for the administration and its Democratic allies on Capitol Hill.

Among the developments:

• The Education Department on Wednesday announced that it would create two committees of college officials, consumer groups and others to propose new federal regulations governing foreign schools and issues related to the "integrity" of the student financial aid programs.
• Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat known for his strong support of the National Institutes of Health, will replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy as chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. The way was cleared for Harkin when Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said he would remain as head of the Senate's banking committee.
• Vice President Joe Biden brought his White House Task Force on the Middle Class (and two Cabinet secretaries) to Syracuse University for a forum on college affordability, in a conversation that featured some tough talk about college tuition and lots of love for community colleges. In conjunction with the meeting, the White House also released three reports, on financial aid simplification, 529 savings plans, and the major barriers to a college education.

[Inside Higher Ed]

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America's flagship public universities are failing to graduate enough students in four (or even six) years and are doing too little to improve the completion rates of low-income and minority students, especially black males, according to a much awaited book being released today.

Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities is based on a database tracking what happened to students who entered 21 flagship universities in 1999, as well as a comparative database with information on several statewide higher education systems. The information available for the study was detailed enough for the authors to track not only graduation rates, but many other issues. For instance, the book raises questions about the value of the six-year emphasis of the federal rate, the inability of public universities to do a better job of graduating some subsets of their students, the role of standardized testing, the use of merit aid and the ability of community college students to transfer.

While the authors include the former presidents of two private institutions, and the book notes the relative success of private, residential colleges in graduating students, the authors are emphatic that the United States cannot improve overall educational attainment unless there are significant changes in public higher education -- because that is where most students enroll. "Public universities have to be the principal engines," the book says. And the "only way" they can succeed at this task, the authors write, is through a renewed push to close gaps in graduation rates that exist among racial, ethnic and economic groups.

At the same time, the authors are calling for attitudinal changes -- by students and those who run universities -- so that four-year graduation is seen as the standard all are expected to meet. In fact, the study found that at less selective flagships, only about a third of students are graduating in four years, and that totals in less selective university systems are about one quarter. In an interview, Bowen cited an anecdote that to him typifies the flawed culture at many institutions that considers it perfectly normal to graduate in six years. "At a very highly regarded flagship university, when you talk there to students about graduation rates, you can be told, as we were told by one person, 'graduating in four years is like leaving the party at 10 o'clock,' " he said. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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At least 2,000 students at Washington State University have reported symptoms of the H1N1 flu virus, university and local health officials said, in what appeared to be one of the largest outbreaks of the virus on a college campus.

“It’s real,” Sally Redman, a registered nurse who works in student health services at Washington State, said Saturday. “We’ve had a constant stream of people.”

So far, the cases at the university have been relatively mild, although at least two people in the area who are not students were hospitalized. The university, based in Pullman, in eastern Washington near the Idaho border, has about 19,000 students at its main campus.

Ms. Redman said the outbreak appeared about Aug. 21, during fraternity and sorority rush but before classes started. After that, she said, “it was rampant.”

As many as 200 students a day have visited or called student health services, reporting sore throats, fevers as high as 104 degrees, muscle aches and coughs.

Dr. Timothy J. Moody, the public health officer for Whitman County, which includes Pullman, said that after a few sample tests at the university were found to be positive for swine flu, students with similar symptoms were also classified as having the virus. He noted that since the spring, nearly all influenza viruses tested from people nationwide with flu symptoms had been H1N1. [New York Times]
 

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During the first few weeks of the new academic year, more than half of the 165 colleges and universities responding to a survey conducted by the American College Health Association have documented cases of the flu, which could include swine flu. As of the week ending last Friday, 1,640 cases of "influenza-like illness" had been reported, according to the survey, which will be updated weekly. One student had been hospitalized, and no deaths had been reported. The 165 institutions enroll more than two million students. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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In exploring the uncharted territory of training people for green jobs, community colleges are a modern-day Lewis and Clark. But career colleges – the potential settlers of this brave new world – are waiting in the wings, ready to stake a claim if green jobs prove sustainable. With billions of dollars in economic stimulus funding already in the pipeline and much of it linked to energy conservation, green energy sources and job creation, career college administrators have a keen interest in what develops.

Robert Johnson, Executive Director of the California Association of Private Postsecondary Schools, believes that member career schools on around 120 campuses are watching to see if the job market reinvents itself. “I virtually believe that within each one of them (someone) is planning some training program as we speak,” Johnson said. But observing how things shake out and starting new programs aren’t one and the same. For one thing, Johnson and others say, career college decisions are dictated by the real-world needs of employers.

Things green are prominent on the national radar as well. Included in Magazine’s “Future of Work” cover story/special feature on May 25 was a half-page sidebar with the headline “Green Jobs: It Will Pay to Save the Planet.” The article notes that, by 2018, the number of new green jobs in the U.S. – the estimate is 2.5 million – would be a 233 percent increase over what exists now.

But articles in newspapers and magazines don’t create new career college programs; CEOs and campus administrators do. And they’ll require tangible demand from employers before they hire teachers, create curricula, purchase technology and recruit students. “We’re hearing interest, but as you know, in the career sector you have to hear about the market,” said Harris Miller, President and CEO of the Career College Association. “The employers have to define what they want. So I think right now, while people like the rhetoric of green jobs, no one has defined exactly what those are.” [Career College Central]

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A summer of anticipation and worst-case-scenario planning has given way to a new academic year of inevitable illness as the H1N1 flu virus appears at colleges and universities across the nation.

As many institutions ratchet up to full capacity with students, faculty and staff returning for fall classes, campuses from Kansas to California and just about everywhere in between are beginning to report handfuls to hundreds of cases, mostly among students. Though it’s still too early to predict how widespread and severe H1N1 will be this fall and winter, administrators are taking cues from state governments and the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services in anticipating outbreaks much larger and more dangerous than those seen among students during the spring and summer.

The University of Kansas prepared for an outbreak by creating handouts to help students diagnose themselves with the virus and to figure out how to deal with being sick while living in on-campus housing. As students have reported having flu-like symptoms, Todd Cohen, director of university relations, said the cases peaked on August 29 with 313 sick students that day.

The International Association of Emergency Managers has been doing the same thing on a much larger scale, mapping cases and safety precautions at colleges and universities since May (The link shows a map of U.S. activity from May through August.) Dave Bujak, chair of the group’s Universities and Colleges Committee and emergency management coordinator for Florida State University, said that while the map was created to track when the virus “showed up on campuses and how it spread,” it has since evolved into a way for emergency managers and other administrators to see how dozens of other institutions have tackled cases on their own campuses or how they’ve planned for the possibility of widespread illness. [Inside Higher Ed]

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They worry about the quality of online courses, say teaching them takes more effort, and grouse about insufficient support. Yet large numbers of professors still put in the time to teach online. And despite the broad suspicion about quality, a majority of faculty members have recommended online courses to students.

That is the complicated picture that emerges in "The Paradox of Faculty Voices: Views and Experiences With Online Learning," part of a two-volume national study released today by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities—Sloan National Commission on Online Learning.

The debate about the quality of online instruction is nothing new. But the scale of this study makes it significant. Responses came from more than 10,700 faculty members at 69 public colleges and universities across the country, a sector that accounts for much of the rapidly growing online market.

Jack M. Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts and chairman of the commission that issued the report, described the findings about online support for such learning as "a call to action." when asked about them in a conference call with reporters. "Institutions are going to have to do a better job of providing the support to the faculty—and, by the way, to the students as well," said Mr. Wilson. The report also punctures the prevailing notion that older professors aren't as involved with online instruction. Veteran professors—those who have taught for more than 20 years—are teaching online at rates equivalent to less-experienced faculty members, it found.

More than 36 percent of faculty members have experience either teaching or developing an online course, according to the report, fresh evidence of the mainstreaming of online education. A large majority of survey respondents pointed to student needs as a "primary motivator" for teaching online. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Beneficiaries of the new Post 9/11 GI Bill may be more likely to attend four-year universities and enroll in college full time than were their recent veteran counterparts, who typically enrolled at community colleges and attended part time, according to a new report from the American Council on Education.

“Veterans and service members who are eligible for the new GI Bill will receive more generous benefits that will broaden the choices they have when pursuing higher education,” Alexandra Walton Radford, the report’s author and a research associate at MPR Associates, an educational consulting firm, said in a statement. “While these students have previously been concentrated at public two-year colleges, these new benefits may encourage them to seek entry into more expensive colleges, particularly if those institutions demonstrate responsiveness to their needs.”

In 2007-8, veterans and active-service military members made up only 4 percent of undergraduates enrolled in American institutions of higher education. Of that group, 43 percent attended community colleges, 21 percent attended public four-year colleges, 13 percent attended private four-year colleges and 12 percent attended for-profit institutions. The rest attended more than one type.

Given the expansion of benefits now available through the new GI Bill, Jacqueline E. King, assistant vice president of ACE’s center for policy analysis, said she believes it is “reasonable to assume” that veterans will “make use of these benefits in a way they have not in the past.” As a result, she and others argue that this full-time/part-time data from the 2007-08 cohort of veterans make the case that, as many more veterans will benefit from the new GI Bill, more of them will seek to attend college full time. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Rebecca Attwood looks at the student bloopers that reduced their tutors to tears. William Spooner - he of the spoonerism - would have been proud. The egregious errors that prompted academics' happiest - and most worrying - moments during weeks of marking have been flooding in for Times Higher Education's "exam howlers" competition.

Alongside classic cases of catachresis, marvellous malapropisms, and terrifying typos, this year's entries include students who confused science with folklore, conflated famous figures who lived centuries apart, and came up with startling new interpretations of great literary works. The "Google generation" finds it hard to imagine life before the world wide web, it seems. A student of Leo Enticknap, lecturer in cinema at the University of Leeds, explained that a political group "used the internet to publicise their cause, just like the French Resistance did during the Second World War".

On the other side of the pond, when David Null, an emeritus professor at California State Polytechnic University, asked his class to write about the person they most admired, he was impressed to receive an essay on Martin Luther. It turned out to be a mishmash of facts about a 16th-century Protestant reformer, who miraculously also managed to head up the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, some four centuries later.

A student at the University of Brunel told Gareth Dale, senior lecturer in politics and international relations, that the United States had the most powerful and advanced military in the world, possessing "highly-developed and powerful marital equipment".

When David Null, an emeritus professor at California State Polytechnic University, showed members of his class a film about a boy found in a forest in 1797, several thought they had watched a documentary about recent events. "The fact that there are no automobiles or electricity in the film did not shake one student's belief that the film was a recent documentary. He explained that he had never been to France and assumed it was just a very backward place," Professor Null said. [Times Higher Education]
 

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Kristen Schaefer spent $260.95 on her textbooks this semester -- and she didn't even purchase the full set. "I couldn't bring myself to buy the other two because they were too expensive," Schaefer (sophomore-kinesiology) said.

Twelve universities -- including the California State University, the Florida State University and the University of Kentucky -- have implemented Rent-a-Text, a textbook rental program, at their campus bookstores. Students using Rent-a-Text are required to give their name, e-mail address and credit card number when renting a book. If the books are not brought back by the date given in sellable condition, the student is then charged 75 percent of the book's price and a processing fee. [The Daily Collegian]

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President Obama, vacationing this week at Martha's Vineyard, has taken along five books: a Washington-based crime novel by George Pelecanos, Manhattan-based fiction by Richard Price, a Colorado prairie drama by Kent Haruf, David McCullough's biography of John Adams, and Thomas Friedman's book on the environment. Here's Slate's take on how to interpret (or over interpret) the list. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Historically, zombie attacks have been the dominion of science-fiction fanatics and Hollywood producers, not scholars. But in a paper scheduled to be published this year, three Canadian graduate students expose the popular sci-fi trope to some long-awaited academic scrutiny.

For the paper, set to be included in the book Infectious Disease Modeling Research Progress, Philip Munz and Ioan Hudea of Carleton University, in Ottawa, and Joe Imad, of University of Ottawa, used advanced mathematical modeling to examine the chances of mankind surviving a typical zombie epidemic.

“It kind of came as a crazy idea on my part while doing math homework with a movie on in the background,” Munz said.

In the end, the authors conclude that unless “extremely aggressive” countermeasures are taken promptly after an outbreak, little could be done to prevent zombies from transforming the human race. Two popular solutions -- quarantine and the discovery of a cure -- are unlikely to stem a zombie uprising, the researchers say, since an effective quarantine would require an unlikely level of human organization and infrastructure, and a treatment would leave patients susceptible to re-infection.

But as silly as studying a hypothetical zombie attack might seem, Munz said the project required the same considerations and rigorous mathematics as scientists are currently using to model the spread of the H1N1 flu virus “The principles that are illustrated in this paper -- they could be used to fight real world disease. You first want to find out the biology of the people you’re studying, the method of transmission,” he said. [Inside Higher Ed]

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The Federal Trade Commission is joining many universities in criticizing the "fan can" promotions of Bud Light beer, The Wall Street Journal reported. Janet Evans, an FTC lawyer who oversees alcohol advertising, told the newspaper that the agency has "grave concern" about the promotion. Many colleges have said the campaign encouraged irresponsible drinking, and Evans suggested that she agreed. "This does not appear to be responsible activity," she said. "We're looking at this closely. We've talked to the company and expressed our concerns." Company officials have said they only want to sell the beer to those of legal age. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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As the Obama administration and Congress consider new legislation that could dramatically reshape the federal student aid programs, the Education Department is putting the finishing touches on carrying out the last set of major changes to federal laws governing higher education. The department on Friday proposed a set of regulations for a broad range of provisions -- on such topics as campus safety, illegal sharing of digital files, and educating students with disabilities -- that Congress enacted as part of last year's renewal of the Higher Education Act.

The regulations proposed Friday resulted from one of five negotiating teams that the Education Department established last winter to negotiate regulations to implement the Higher Education Opportunity Act. Two others related to loan issues, one to grants, and one to accreditation. This one, the fifth, was described by college lobbyists as the "cats and dogs committee," as it dealt with a wide array of issues -- many of them narrow -- of the sort that the Higher Education Act has increasingly come to be filled with. Depending on one's perspective, those issues are seen either as piling regulations on colleges or seeking to hold them increasingly accountable.

The designated negotiating team of college officials and others for this set of issues reached agreement on proposed regulatory language for all but 2 of the 31 issues they debated. But under federal guidelines, that failure meant that the agency in question (in this case the Education Department) had essentially free rein to propose whatever rules it wanted.

Comments on the proposed regulations may be submitted until September 21; final rules are due by November 1. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Michael Bevis, business school chairman at the University of Phoenix, San Diego, is looking forward to a higher enrollment this year compared to last.  “We don’t receive state funding like traditional schools, so we’re not cutting programs and laying off faculty,” he said. “That’s probably why our popularity is growing in comparison to other universities.”   As of June, the student count at the local campus was 5,200 against 4,300 at the same time last year. That number takes into account enrollments at what the private, nationwide university calls “learning centers.”

While the downturn in the economy has prevented some people from entering college for the first time or returning to complete degrees, that number is being offset by those “who want to come back to retool their careers.”

One change observed, however, is that more students are opting to take classes online versus in regular classroom settings. This year, for the first time, more than 50 percent are taking a course online. [San Diego Business Journal]

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The Education Department is preparing to publish new rules governing federal grants to students. The rules, which will appear in the Federal Register in the coming days, largely mirror changes proposed by the department during negotiations that wrapped up in May. Those discussions ended in a stalemate after panelists failed to reach agreement on regulations governing year-round Pell Grants and the reporting of job-placement information. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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College participation in U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings increased this year, after reaching its lowest level ever last year. Forty-eight percent of college leaders who were sent the peer-assessment survey responded this year, up from 46 percent.

The peer survey—the most controversial part of the rankings formula—asks presidents, provosts, and admissions deans to rate institutions on a scale of 1 to 5. The response rate has dropped from 68 percent in 1999, amid a steady drumbeat of anti-rankings rhetoric.

A controversy this year over how some public-college presidents filled out the peer survey might affect their participation in future years. Clemson University found itself on the wrong end of bad headlines in June after a staff member publicly accused it of gaming the rankings. In the aftermath, the college handed over its president's survey responses to several newspapers. And a handful of other public colleges had to do likewise, after their local papers filed open-records requests.

In the future, the magazine may add survey responses from high-school counselors into the mix. Last year, it introduced a separate ranking based solely on a survey of 1,600 high-school counselors. The counselors were not surveyed again this year, but Mr. Morse said the magazine plans to survey a larger group, perhaps 2,000, for next year's college guide.  [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Financial-aid officials dislike the U.S. House of Representatives' plan to eliminate the Perkins loan's in-school interest subsidy, the proposed allocation formula, and the requirement that colleges provide matching funds, a new survey by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators has found. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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H1N1 flu may have two surprising symptoms: innovation and empathy. At least that’s the hope of University of Michigan officials, who are encouraging faculty to make broader use of technology to help sick students keep up with class work.

As faculty create syllabuses for the coming semester, Michigan officials want them to consider the possibility of an outbreak infecting large numbers of students in the coming months. That means finding ways to work with students who may be absent for days by putting greater emphasis on distance learning tools like listservs, e-mail and Web-based teaching platforms. To that end, the university’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching has laid out a series of guidelines to help faculty prepare for what could be a challenging year of illness.

“If the circumstances actually come to a head where a lot of students can’t make it to class then I could picture people who had been reluctant and not using these kinds of techniques and tools will be more receptive, and might have a very fast ramp-up getting familiar with them,” said Ed Durfee, a professor of computer science and engineering who regularly posts his PowerPoint slides online. [Inside Higher Ed]

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A federal judge on Monday rejected one of the first legal attempts to roll back the 2003 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the consideration of race and ethnicity, in some circumstances, in admissions decisions by public colleges and universities.

The decision by Judge Sam Sparks strongly upheld the admissions policies at the University of Texas at Austin as consistent with the Supreme Court ruling -- and rejected the argument that Texas had failed to meet the tests set out by the Supreme Court. In so doing, Judge Sparks shut down (for now) one strategy of those who oppose affirmative action -- namely trying to say that colleges' policies go beyond what the Supreme Court permitted. But the legal group that brought the case vowed Monday night to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and, if necessary, to the Supreme Court.

The arguments in the suit against Texas generally attempted to use the Grutter v. Bolllinger decision, which upheld the use of race at the University of Michigan law school, to limit affirmative action. The Texas lawsuit, filed on behalf of a white high school senior who was rejected by UT Austin, noted that Grutter was premised on a link between diversity goals and educational goals, and that the decision did not envision the consideration of race as open-ended. The suit argued that because Texas didn't define a specific percentage goal and continued to use affirmative action after having success at attracting many minority students, the university was going too far.

But Judge Sparks disagreed. "The court finds both the plaintiffs' arguments unpersuasive and finds UT has a compelling interest in student body diversity as articulated in Grutter. First and foremost, nothing in Grutter suggests a university must establish a specific percentage, or range of percentages, the achievement of which would satisfy critical mass," Sparks wrote. He goes on to say that if UT did establish a specific percentage, it might be creating a quota of the sort barred by Grutter.  [Inside Higher Ed]

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The Federal Reserve Board has published final rules governing private student loans. The "Truth in Lending" rules, which take effect in February 2010, add a series of new disclosure requirements to private loans; give consumers up to three days to cancel a consummated loan; and prohibit lenders from using colleges' names, mascots, or logos in their marketing materials. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Zakiya Williams had found a perfect fit at Spelman College. But when the tough economy hit the sophomore and her family hard, she packed her bags, ready to drop out.

"I was not able to get loans, nor were my parents," she said. "It became really difficult because I felt all my avenues were exhausted."

"Every college and university is asking the question, 'What will our enrollment be next year?' not because of a change in institution, but because families are really being hit by the economy every day," Spelman College President Beverly Tatum said.

Since 2004, $238 million in federal funding has been earmarked annually for historically black colleges. In the last two years, those institutions benefited from an extra $85 million each year under the College Cost Reduction and Access Act. When that program ends in May 2010, the institutions may feel the squeeze even more.

The White House budget office says Obama's proposed budget calls for a 5 percent increase in permanent funding for historically black colleges. But many in the black college community wanted more. [CNN]

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For several years, federal policy makers have been battling intensely over whether colleges discriminate in their transfer of credit policies against students from institutions that are accredited not by one of the six regional accrediting agencies, but instead by what are known as "national" accreditors. National accreditors focus on specific types of institutions rather than on colleges in a region, and by and large they are newer and less established than the regional accreditors.

In that skirmishing, most of the attention focuses on for-profit colleges, both because a majority of the national accrediting agencies focus on for-profit career-related colleges and because those institutions are growing and politically muscular. But several of the national accreditors work with faith-based institutions, and they, too, complain that their students sometimes face discrimination when they try to transfer their academic work because the receiving colleges say they accept credit only from regionally accredited institutions.

Being accredited by an agency that is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education is essential if a college wants its students to qualify for federal financial aid, as the government provides grants and loans only to students at such institutions. The federal government grants recognition to accreditors using a process in which a federal panel reviews their work every five years and makes recommendations to the education secretary, who rules thumbs up or down. Both types of accreditors, national and regional (and a third category, programmatic, but that's a story for another day) earn their recognition through the very same process, using the same standards. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Paralegalschoolsonline.org posted "50 Fascinating Law Lectures for Professionals and Laymen" which is a compilation of a series of free webcasts, podcasts, and lectures covering a wide range of legal issues. The website describes the collection: "With laws constantly changing, lawyer fees increasing, and interest in law building, the internet has become a virtual library of legal resources. Below are the 50 best law lectures for anyone with a passing or professional interest."

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The push to simplify the process of applying for federal financial aid has been steadily building momentum, with federal officials (in both of the last two administrations) joining advocates for students and financial aid experts in a show of near unanimity on the idea that procedures and documents (like the Free Application for Federal Student Aid) should not be discouraging students from seeking financial help for college.

The National Association of State Student Grant and Aid Programs, which represents officials who oversee the awarding of state-based financial aid, released a survey of its members on Tuesday that might be seen, at the extreme, as trying to put the brakes on the simplification runaway train; at the least, it's a call for their needs and those of their students to be considered as policies evolve.

But problems emerge in the eyes of state aid officers when talk turns -- as it has in proposals from financial aid experts and a College Board-organized panel of researchers and policy makers -- to dramatically altering the types of financial information collected about aid applicants. The most aggressive simplification proposals have recommended basing the awarding of federal Pell Grants on adjusted gross income and family size, wiping out other aspects of the current federal methodology used to calculate a student's expected family contribution.

Going that direction "would have financial, administrative, statutory and regulatory consequences to state need-based financial aid programs," because almost all states use the expected family contribution to allocate their own need-based aid, the state aid group says in its survey.

"A technological solution that reduces appropriately the basic FAFSA to a minimum, but also provides a means for obtaining data needed by individual states, would be ideal," the NASSGAP report concludes.  [Inside Higher Ed]

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Although about a third of the students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2007-8 graduated with no debt, nearly the same as four years earlier, the average amount students borrow has increased, according to a policy brief released Tuesday by the College Board.

For bachelor’s degree recipients who did borrow, the median loan debt was $19,999, up 5 percent from $18,973 four years earlier, adjusted for inflation. The data, the latest available, come from the federal Department of Education’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, which is conducted every four years.

About 6 percent of those who completed a degree or certificate — and 10 percent of those who received a bachelor’s degree — borrowed more than $40,000, the brief said.

But the brief does not include parents’ borrowing, credit-card debt, informal loans from relatives or friends, or loans for graduate school.

Over all, the median student loan debt of borrowers in 2007-8 was $15,123, up 11 percent from $13,663 in 2003-4. But debt levels rose far more sharply for students at for-profit colleges, and those earning certificates and two-year degrees.

For example, students who received certificates in a for-profit program carried a median debt load of $9,744 in 2007-8, a 30 percent increase from 2003-4. And bachelor’s degree recipients in for-profit institutions had a median debt load of $32,653, up 23 percent four years earlier.

For-profit colleges acquire much of their revenue from federal aid. The authors of the brief say for-profit colleges had about 7 percent of the nation’s undergraduates in 2006, but received about 19 percent of the federal Pell grants. [The New York Times]

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Posted by Jonathan Kaplan, president of Walden University: A few weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Education released a report that looked at 12 years' worth of education studies, and found that online learning has clear advantages over face-to-face instruction.

The study, "An Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies," stated that “students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.” Except for one article, on this Web site, you probably didn’t hear about it -- and neither did anyone else.

But imagine for a moment that the report came to the opposite conclusion. I’m sure that if the U.S. Department of Education had published a report showing that students in online learning environments performed worse, there would have been a major outcry in higher education with calls to shut down distance-learning programs and close virtual campuses.

I believe the reason that the recent study elicited so little commentary is due to the fact that it flies in the face of the biases held by some across the higher education landscape. Yet this study confirms what those of us working in distance education have witnessed for years: Good teaching helps students achieve, and good teaching comes in many forms.

Recently, we examined the successes of Walden graduates who are teachers in the Tacoma, Wash., public school system, and found that students in Walden teachers’ classes tested with higher literacy rates than did students taught by teachers who earned their master’s from other universities. There could be many reasons for this, but, especially in light of the U.S. Department of Education study, it seems that online learning has contributed meaningfully to their becoming better teachers.

Recently, President Obama remarked, “I think there’s a possibility that online education can provide, especially for people who are already in the workforce and want to retrain, the chance to upgrade their skills without having to quit their job.” As the U.S. Department of Education study concluded, online education can do that and much more. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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David Lounsbury's problems at Florida Gulf Coast University began last fall when two female students accused him of sexually groping a lifelike mannequin in front of a class. Last month the associate professor of criminal forensics was fired, but for allegedly mishandling money, not mannequins.

The students complained that Mr. Lounsbury had lifted a female mannequin's skirt and groped its breasts and genitalia. They also alleged that he had told the class that a person could have "realistic intercourse" with a mannequin if its body had been warmed with a heating pad.

Mr. Lounsbury was suspended from his job in January after university investigators concluded that he had made "inappropriate, sexually related comments and engaged in inappropriate behaviors that appear devoid of educational purposes or content," Provost Ronald Toll wrote in a letter to him.

Mr. Lounsbury disputed the groping accusation in an interview with the Naples Daily News. He said he was teaching how evidence is gathered from victims' genitalia, which he said was relevant to the death-investigation course.

The university was going to allow Mr. Lounsbury back this fall until it determined that he had mishandled money that students had paid for a certification he administered through the university's Institute of Forensic Excellence.

Mr. Lounsbury was fired after acknowledging that he had told some students to make their checks payable to him instead of the university. He received $15,210 from students over a five-year period, but he reportedly said in a memorandum to Mr. Toll that he was recouping money he had spent out of his own pocket for the forensics program.

Meanwhile, Mr. Lounsbury may have other ways of making his problems disappear. As a sideline to his academic career, he performs magic tricks in the Naples area as "Dr. Chimera." [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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TUI University inappropriately gave out an estimated $923,000 in financial aid funds to students who either were ineligible for the money or did not earn it because they withdrew from the institution, the U.S. Education Department's inspector general said in an audit released Thursday.

The inspector general's audit recommended that the Education Department's Federal Student Aid office require the for-profit university, which was the online arm of Touro University until its sale to private equity investors in 2007, to repay a minimum of $200,000 to the government and lenders for the money that it has already found should not have been distributed -- a figure that could climb if its recommendations are upheld by department leaders. The IG's office also suggests that the department "consider" taking much more serious action, to "fine, limit, suspend or terminate" TUI's ability to participate in the federal student aid programs.

University officials vigorously disputed the audit's findings and its recommendations, saying they were based on the misinterpretations of federal laws and rules by the inspector general itself. "The university believes that it has properly accounted for all of its Federal student financial aid funds, is taking steps to resolve issues raised in the OIG report, and does not anticipate there will not be any significant repayment liability or adverse impact on the institution upon resolution of this matter," Tom Finally, the vice president for administration, said via e-mail. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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Finding an online-education program can feel like shopping at a used-car lot. Students often struggle to get reliable information amid a barrage of in-your-face marketing.

A new Web site that debuts today, featuring 12 colleges that largely offer online education to adults, intends to change that. It's called College Choices for Adults. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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A new project is measuring the educational needs of states and regions by combining and comparing existing census data, such as degree completions, poverty rates, and population growth.

Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, New Mexico, Nevada, and Georgia are the states where the education system faces the greatest challenges in meeting the economic needs of a fast-growing population, according to data from the Educational Needs Index.

The states with the least challenges in that area are North Dakota, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Minnesota, the project found.

See how your state measures up. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student-loan company, spent $2-million on lobbying in the first half of this year in an effort to persuade lawmakers to consider alternatives to President Obama's plan to end bank-based lending to students and replace it with direct lending, according to an analysis by The Huffington Post.

The lender, which is pushing a counterproposal that would allow student-loan companies to originate loans before selling them to the government, has hired several Washington-based lobbying firms, including a group led by Tony Podesta, a top Democratic fund raiser with longstanding ties to members of Congress. But its key hire was Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration and partner in the law firm of Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr. The firm billed Sallie Mae $270,000 for its work in the first half of 2009, according to the analysis.

Sallie Mae spent $3.4-million lobbying last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It also showered campaign contributions on individual members of Congress, including $26,150 for Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and a key Democratic ally, and $10,000 on moderate "Blue Dog" Democrats. Among Democrats, the Blue Dogs have been the most vocal in their opposition to the president's plan, warning of job losses that could result from a switch to 100-percent direct lending. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Logan Stark's classmates scramble for courses with professors who top instructor-rating Web sites. But when the California Polytechnic State University student enrolled in a biochemistry class on the San Luis Obispo campus, he didn't need to sweat getting the best.
It was practically guaranteed.

That's because much of the class was built by national specialists, not one Cal Poly professor. It's a hybrid of online and in-person instruction. When Mr. Stark logs in to the course Web site at midnight, a bowl of cereal beside his laptop, he clicks through animated cells and virtual tutors, a digital domain designed by faculty experts and software engineers.

By the time Mr. Stark steps into the actual lecture hall, the Web site has alerted his professor to what parts of the latest lesson gave students trouble. That lets her focus class time on where they need the most help.

Mr. Stark's class is one of about 300 around the world to use online course material—both the content and the software that delivers it—developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative. If the Obama administration pulls off a $500-million-dollar online-education plan, proposed in July as one piece of a sweeping community-college aid package, this type of course could become part of a free library available to colleges nationwide.

The government would pay to develop these "open" classes, taking up the mantle of a movement that has unlocked lecture halls at universities nationwide in recent years—a great course giveaway popularized by the OpenCourseWare project's free publication of 1,900 courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Millions worldwide have used these online materials. But the publication cost—at MIT, about $10,000 a course—has impeded progress at the community-college level, says Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare.

The plan coincides with Mr. Obama's goal for the United States to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. But Marshall S. (Mike) Smith, senior counselor to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, feels that won't happen simply by moving middle- and high-school students further through the system. Higher education also needs to rope in older students who never went beyond high school, or who abandoned college before finishing a degree, he says. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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OnlineColleges.net has posted a list of "100 Free Cutting-Edge Courses that Didn’t Exist When You Were in School" The website states "Whether you’ve been out of school for 10 years or 20, chances are it’s pretty different today than when you were in school. Advances in technology, new information about the world around us, and changes in society have added many new classes to college offerings. You can help keep yourself up-to-date on what is going on in the world by taking cutting-edge and free courses online that touch upon the latest developments in technology, science, the Internet and much more."

The courses cover a wide variety of topics including engineering, computer systems, and software and programming. Click here to view the entire list.

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By now, everyone knows that the Obama administration's stimulus bill is designed to get the economy moving again. However, you may not know that most of the bill's $70 billion for education will go to low- to middle-income individuals.

A major part of the bill is a $13.8 billion tuition tax credit boost called the American Opportunity Tax Credit. This tax credit reimburses 100 percent of the first $2,000 of educational expenses for lower income students. For the next $2,000, students will receive a 25 percent reimbursement. In short, lower income students will receive $2,500 in education reimbursements per year.

The bill also features other benefits for low-income students. Families that do not earn enough to pay income taxes can receive a $1,000 education refund. [Career College Central]

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Few parts of their jobs seem to annoy professors more than grading. The topic consumes gripe sessions, blog posts and creates plenty of professorial angst (not to mention student angst).

Cathy Davidson has decided that the best way to change grading is to take herself out of it. Davidson, a Duke University English professor, announced on her blog last week that she was going to give students the power to earn A's or some other grade based on a simple formula in which she wouldn't play much of a role.

Her approach? "So, this year, when I teach 'This Is Your Brain on the Internet,' I'm trying out a new point system. Do all the work, you get an A. Don't need an A? Don't have time to do all the work? No problem. You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart. You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points. Add up the points, there's your grade. Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system. Clearcut. Student is responsible."

That still leaves the question of determining whether students have done the work. Here again, Davidson plans to rely on students. "Since I already have structured my seminar (it worked brilliantly last year) so that two students lead us in every class, they can now also read all the class blogs (as they used to) and pass judgment on whether they are satisfactory. Thumbs up, thumbs down," she writes.

"If not, any student who wishes can revise. If you revise, you get the credit. End of story. Or, if you are too busy and want to skip it, no problem. It just means you'll have fewer ticks on the chart and will probably get the lower grade. No whining. It's clearcut and everyone knows the system from day one. (btw, every study of peer review among students shows that students perform at a higher level, and with more care, when they know they are being evaluated by their peers than when they know only the teacher and the TA will be grading)."

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Students frequently rent DVDs to watch in their dorm rooms, but soon they may start checking out something much heavier and pricier: textbooks.

Saying they offer an alternative to the textbook industry's bloated prices, a growing number of companies are renting new and used titles at reduced prices. Among them are Chegg, BookRenter and the Follett Higher Education Group, which will test drive a rental service at campus bookstores this fall. They join a number of colleges that have already started their own on-campus programs.

With all of them, the concept is essentially to pay to check out textbooks as if they're out of a library -- only there are more copies and titles, and they can be used for longer periods of time. Through Chegg, for instance, a student searches for a book and rents it for up to a certain number of days, such as up to a quarter or a semester. Users are promised discounts of 65 to 85 percent off the list price, but if they don't return a book on time, they are charged full price. The same punishment applies to doodling in the margins, since the books are meant for reuse. As a disclaimer on Chegg warns: "Highlighting in the textbook is OK -- to a certain extent. Writing in the book is not accepted.

Studies have shown that textbook prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, but not as much as tuition and other higher education costs. Last year's Higher Education Opportunity Act mandated that institutions report annually how much they spend on essentially reducing the costs of textbooks and other instructional fees. It also required textbook publishers to expand the information they provide about pricing and changes from past editions. Most significantly for companies like Follett and Chegg, a bill outlining the U.S. Education Department's budget, crafted in February, mandated that $10 million be reserved for a "new college textbook rental initiative" to "provide competitive grants to colleges to expand opportunities for students to rent college course materials." [Inside Higher Ed]

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BANGALORE (Reuters) - President Barack Obama's $12 billion community college initiative could have an impact on the fortunes of for-profit education companies that offer associate degrees, but analysts say funding for the program is not big enough to make much difference.

Obama's 10-year program, unveiled last week, focuses on associate and vocational degree programs at government-funded community colleges and is aimed at getting people back to school and have them ready for "21st century jobs." Analysts said the program for community colleges could make them more competitive against firms such as Apollo Group Inc, Corinthian Colleges, ITT Educational Services Inc and Lincoln Educational Services Corp. However, they said the amount of money earmarked for the program would result in only a marginal increment in budgets for community colleges and have a small impact on these companies in the short term.

Analysts say community colleges lack facilities and flexibility that companies like Apollo offer. "One of the reasons Apollo was successful with its two-year programs was they make it so easy for someone to continue to work full time and enroll in school," Urdan said. "Community colleges are not good at that. They have a more rigid schedule." "We think for-profits will continue to outshine community colleges on student support services, flexible schedules, and lower teacher to student ratios," J.P. Morgan Securities' Andrew Steinerman wrote in a note dated July 14. [Reuters]

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Shanghai — Amid concern over equity in its higher-education system and rising interethnic political tension, China has raised enrollment quotas for students from less-developed western provinces, the China Daily reported today.

The country closely regulates enrollment by region and ethnicity, with policies that have traditionally favored residents of developed cities like Beijing and Shanghai for admission to elite universities in those same cities. Under the new policy, the number of slots reserved for students from central and western China will each increase by around 7 percent.

All told, 60,000 spots will open up for students from poor provinces like Anhui, Henan, and Guizhou — as well as, presumably, western regions inhabited primarily by ethnic minority groups like Xinjiang and Tibet. As justification for the change, the newspaper explained that western China suffers from “historic underdevelopment” and “complicated geographic situations” that block local students’ access to education.

A majority of the new places will be at universities that are administered directly by the education ministry, receive more resources, and are mainly located in prosperous cities in eastern China. To open up those slots, the institutions will cut positions open to more-privileged local students. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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New Delhi — In an unprecedented move at the behest of India’s new education minister, the country’s main investigative agency has launched a sweeping crackdown on its regulator of engineering and management colleges, filing charges of corruption against the regulator’s chairman and arresting a top official in the act of taking a bribe to grant recognition to an engineering school, The Hindustan Times reported.

The regulator, one of 16 in India, has often been accused of corruption, and its officers across India have been accused of approving colleges with poor facilities in exchange for money. Many engineering schools have also been started by politicians who, it is alleged, are complicit in the bribery process. Many colleges themselves have been accused of taking money, euphemistically referred to here as “capitation fees,” to admit students to engineering courses that are in high demand. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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Every kid knows you can only suck so much liquid through a straw. That simple lesson seems to be lost on adults, particularly when it comes to trying to do more with the same infrastructure. Higher education is a case in point.

President Obama is challenging the nation to regain its global leadership in the percentage of adults with college degrees. The plan he unveiled this week to invest in community colleges is a reminder that human capital is the iron ore of the knowledge age.

Yet, today, only one of every two working adults in America has a college credential, and as Baby Boomers retire, this situation will get worse because Boomers have a higher percentage of college degrees than their children.

Impediments in the existing higher education system exacerbate attempts to improve the situation, including:

-- A high school system in which only three of every four students graduate
with their class;

-- A university system where only about three of every five students
graduate with an associate's degree in three years or a
bachelor's degree six years;

-- A volatile funding environment in which most states have either proposed
or enacted major cuts to higher education subsidies in response to their
current revenue shortfalls;

-- An academic environment in which 40 percent of students seek transfers
from one school to another, but where many transfer of credit requests
are unfairly rejected;

-- A skills gap where high-demand career fields like nursing have waiting
lists of months, even years to enter the educational programs.

The United States leads the world in higher education spending per student and higher education resources as a percentage of GDP. Disappointingly, though, we rank eleventh in terms of degree attainment rates by those 25-34 years of age, a key measure of the return on this investment.

The bottom line? Higher education must reach more Americans with varying educational needs and aspirations. To be relevant to many of those who are currently not being served will require greater emphasis on subject matter immersion, more hands on application, more course scheduling flexibility, and more concentrated delivery than is often found in college programs. For many students it also means a clear path to employment. And for colleges and for our students a significant improvement in rates of program and degree completion will be required.

Yet expanding college access and educational attainment is not about improving our national rankings or winning some academic steeplechase with other countries.

"Countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow," the President told a joint session of Congress. We won't get new results trying to drink from the same old straws. When it comes to higher education, it's time to emphasize innovation in all sectors and to supplement traditional approaches with real, workable alternatives. [Career College Association]

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Measuring value and productivity in higher education can be a complex and controversial topic: Lawmakers, taxpayers, and people paying tuition want to get the most for their money, while college administrators and faculty members argue that the quality of their educational product is directly tied to the amount of public support they receive.

Now, a new report from the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability attempts to rank which states are getting the most college bang for their bucks.
Florida, Colorado, Washington, Utah, and North Dakota are the most productive states because their cost per credential is the lowest in the nation, the Delta Project concludes. The report, which was released today, then goes a step further, saying that the less-costly degrees also provide a greater economic value to their states.

Degrees are most expensive in Alaska, Wyoming, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, which the report says are the least-productive states. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives on Wednesday formally introduced legislation to restructure the federal student aid programs and signaled their intention to move with lightning speed to pass it. The Committee on Education and Labor announced that it would take up the $87 billion legislation next Tuesday, and given the strong Democratic majority on the panel, as well as in Congress, passage is assured. The legislation got a strong endorsement Wednesday from the Obama administration, whose student loan proposal the House legislation closely mirrors. On a telephone news conference with Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, Education Secretary Arne Duncan offered his "clear support" for the House bill despite some differences with President Obama's original plan, and said it was fully consistent with the administration's plan's "fundamental principles."

Duncan and Miller also both went out of their way -- in discussing the money the House bill would make available to fund President Obama's proposed $12 billion community college initiative -- to emphasize how the legislation would turn up the pressure on colleges to ensure that they are not just admitting students, but getting them to degrees. Discussing community college graduation rates, Miller said that the "statistics are currently not acceptable to the administration or the Congress," and said the legislation was designed to ensure that "community colleges change and adapt to the needs of our society and our families. That test will be on the community colleges." [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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More than 75,000 members of the U.S. National Guard will not be eligible for benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill unless Congress passes corrective legislation, the independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported today.

Guard members called to active duty since September 11, 2001, in Iraq and Afghanistan do qualify for the benefits. But Guard members called to active duty within the United States do not qualify, the newspaper reported.

Members of the National Guard with domestic assignments include those who responded to Hurricane Katrina and those who have been deployed to the United States-Mexico border. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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A hot topic in Washington this week is the Obama administration's student-lending plan that could eliminate the need for guarantee agencies. While Congress is set to being debates on the plan, a new report from the New American Foundation calls the 35 guarantee agencies that currently administer student loans inefficient middlemen that waste taxpayer money. An overview of the report appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education can be found here.

While many are critical of the current system, some smaller schools have concerns about the new program. It could cost some institutions hundreds of thousands of dollars, adding to demands for resources as colleges are already grappling with a bad economy. Retraining of staff, acquiring new software, and hiring new employees are just some of the costs that colleges could incur if the plan is passed. Click here to read more about the impact on smaller colleges and universities.

While many in Congress, including Rep. George Miller of California, the Democratic chairman of the education committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, support the plan, others haven’t given up on the guaranteed-loan program. Read more here about Rep. Miller's proposed legislation and here about opposition to the new plan. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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LENEXA, Kan. – (July 9, 2009) – Beauty Schools Marketing Group (BSMG) has announced the debut of “The Beauty School Lounge”, a first-of-its-kind social network for students, educators and professionals in the beauty and cosmetology field. The lounge is an interactive boutique where beauty enthusiasts around the globe can network, access helpful tools, and follow the hottest styles and discussion topics in the beauty industry as they evolve.

Linked with www.BeautySchoolDirectory.com, the social network offers users access to hundreds of beauty schools located across the entire nation. Members of the site already include beauty students, educators, professionals and influential beauty bloggers. Recent conversations and tutorial topics have ranged from proper nail care, new salons that are going green, and three ways stylists and beauty salons can support soldiers and their families. [Career College Central]

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Washington — The U.S. Education Department announced today that it had awarded $9.7-million in grant money to 26 colleges and universities to improve their campus emergency-management plans.

Ranging from $167,343 to $768,334, the individual awards will be disbursed with assistance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The grant recipients will be required to focus on four phases of emergency management: prevention-mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. They can also use the funds to update existing plans, conduct assessments of campus facilities, provide training to staff members and students, organize large-scale drills, team up with local emergency personnel and community partners, and work with students with mental-health needs who may be at risk of violent behavior on the campus. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Washington — Congress has yet to decide whether to adopt President Obama’s proposal to end the bank-based guaranteed-loan program and move all colleges to direct lending by the 2010-11 academic year. But the U.S. Education Department is already preparing for just such a transition.

Mr. Obama has said the government would save $4-billion annually by eliminating the guaranteed-loan program — which provides government subsidies to banks that issue the loans — and moving all colleges to the direct-loan program, under which the Education Department issues loans directly to students through their colleges. The president plans to use the savings to bolster the popular Pell Grant program, which provides money to low-income students.

On Wednesday the department began sending letters to colleges outlining steps it is taking to ease the switch to direct lending.

Congress is set to decide on the president’s proposal this month. Several Republicans have voiced strong opposition to the plan, saying it would cost thousands of jobs and prevent colleges from choosing among competing loan programs. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Margaret West, a longtime adjunct at Edmonds Community College, in Washington State, was set to become the first part-time faculty member to lead the union at her college about a year ago when administrators decided not to renew her contract.

But the American Federation of Teachers reports that Ms. West — who worked for 21 years at Edmonds — is on the way to getting her job back.

The Washington State Public Employment Relations Commission ordered the college to stop discriminating against Ms. West in retaliation for her union activities, to immediately reinstate her in her old job or an equivalent one, and to give her back pay and the benefits she lost when her contract wasn’t renewed. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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The University of Colorado at Boulder is not required to reinstate Ward Churchill to his faculty post, a state judge ruled today, even though a jury found in April that the controversial ethnic-studies professor had been fired unjustly, in violation of his free-speech rights.

After a bitter four-week trial, the jury found for Mr. Churchill, rejecting allegations that he had committed research misconduct, but it awarded him damages of only $1. The professor subsequently asked the presiding judge in the case to order the university to restore him as a tenured professor. The university replied that Mr. Churchill was not welcome back.

According to The Denver Post, the judge, Larry J. Naves of the Denver District Court, ruled today that “reinstating Professor Churchill would entangle the judiciary excessively in matters that are more appropriate for academic professionals.”

In a 42-page decision, Judge Naves said that the courts may refuse to reinstate a fired worker, even if the worker prevails in a lawsuit, if  “the employer-employee relationship has been irreparably damaged by animosity caused by the lawsuit.” Based on the depth of the dispute, Judge Naves said, “a productive and amicable working relationship would be impossible.” [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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When the new GI Bill kicks in Aug. 1, the government's best-known education program for veterans will get the biggest boost since its World War II-era creation. But the benefit is hardly the "Government Issue," one-size-fits-all standard the name implies.

In fact, depending on where service members and veterans decide to attend college, they could receive a full ride, or very little.

An Associated Press review of state-by-state benefits under the new bill shows huge discrepancies in the amount veterans can receive.

For example:

Veterans attending New Hampshire colleges like Dartmouth might get $25,000 from the government each year, and in Dartmouth's case essentially a free ride, thanks to an additional grant from the Ivy League school. But in neighboring Massachusetts, it is a different story. At that state's numerous private schools — many just as expensive as Dartmouth — the government's baseline tuition benefit is only about $2,200 a year.

Veterans who choose a private school in Texas could get close to $20,000 a semester from the government for a typical course load. Those picking schools in California will get nothing for tuition.

The explanation stems from the formula the government created, as well as a much-criticized decision by the Department of Veterans Affairs on how to implement the law. The new GI Bill covers full in-state undergraduate tuition and fees at any public college. That's far more generous than the old GI Bill, which provides a monthly stipend that is the same from state to state. But Congress also wanted to help veterans attend often pricier private schools. So the new bill offers them an amount equal to the tuition at the most expensive public college in the same state. That penalizes veterans going to private colleges in states that have kept their public university tuition low.

About 80 percent of veterans tapping the new bill are expected to attend public institutions. But some of the remaining 20 percent — those planning to attend private colleges, graduate schools, and the for-profit institutions that are hugely popular with veterans — are angry. [San Francisco Chronicle]

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Washington — Dozens of student-loan entities today proposed an alternative to President Obama’s plan to overhaul the federal student-loan system and move to 100-percent direct lending. The groups include banks, nonprofit state agencies, state-based guarantee agencies, and Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest provider of student loans, among others.

The groups’ consensus proposal would preserve a significant role for private and nonprofit lenders and guarantors in the federal system. It is being released as the U.S. House of Representatives education committee prepares to consider the president’s student-loan plan, action that could be scheduled as soon as this week. In recent weeks a number of lenders and guarantors have been furiously circulating various counterproposals to the president’s idea.

Instead, it would create a fee-for-service system to pay providers for originating, servicing, and collecting on student loans. The plan would allow colleges to pick the providers they want to originate and service federal loans for their students. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Washington — A total of 1,165 colleges have joined the Yellow Ribbon Program, a federal effort to help military veterans attend college, a spokesman for the Department of Veterans Affairs told The Chronicle today.

Under the Yellow Ribbon Program, the government matches the amount of financial aid pledged by participating colleges above the base educational benefits provided in the new GI Bill. Qualifying veterans receive an amount equal to the cost of attending an in-state, public four-year college.

The number of participating colleges has more than doubled since June 11, when the department announced that 573 colleges had committed to the program.

Participating colleges can limit the aid they offer. Last week two student-veteran advocates criticized institutions that had limited the number of veterans they will support through the program to only a portion of their overall student-veteran population. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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The folks over at TeachingDegree.org have posted a handy list of over 100 "cheat sheets" on their website. The site lists them as 100 Terrific Cheat Sheets for K-12 Teachers, but a lot have application past the K-12 classroom. Like "The Teacher’s Cheat Sheet: Getting Students to Write Good Research Papers in Any Subject." Or, "Technology Integration Cheat Sheet" which gives tips on how and what to include when teaching and integrating technology in the classroom.

While cheat sheets have a bad rap, as the website points out, "it’s time for them to have a more positive place in education. Cheat sheets can offer a succinct way for students to study their lessons and provide an excellent boost to what you are already teaching them in class. Cheat sheets can provide helpful information for teachers too."

Access all the cheat sheets here.
 

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The Council for Higher Education Accreditation and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization put out a joint statement today with suggestions for combating diploma mills around the world.

The statement is short on details, instead outlining a set of general goals. For instance, it says that higher-education leaders should confirm that providers are “in good standing with recognized accreditation and quality-assurance bodies” in other countries. But often the rub is knowing which bodies are recognized and which are bogus.

It also suggests developing “an international network for information and alerts about degree-mill activity.” But how such a network would work — and who might run it — is left to the imagination.
[The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Students bent on cheating should steer clear of Simon Fraser University. If they are caught, they could end up with a grade that breaks new ground in the realm of academic failure.

The British Columbia university’s Board of Governors and Faculty Senate approved the new grade — “FD,” meaning failed for academic dishonesty — and students will receive the dismal distinction for plagiarism and other forms of academic cheating, according to the Simon Fraser University News, a university publication. The “FD” policy went into effect last month. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Washington — Congress has approved a bill to patch holes in the Higher Education Act, including a glitch that would have forced thousands of veterans to return federal student aid they had been awarded for the coming academic year.

The House passed the measure for a second time yesterday because the Senate version of the bill added a scholarship program providing the maximum Pell Grant award to any student who had a parent die while on active military duty in Iraq or Afghanistan. Both the House and Senate approved the measure unanimously.

The legislation, which President Obama is expected to sign, would allow loan-guarantee agencies to sell rehabilitated student loans to the Education Department, a policy that had appeared in the version of the bill the House passed in March. The change would allow thousands of borrowers who have been stuck in default to escape from their debt and clear their credit histories.

The bill also would ensure that the Education Department’s “experimental site” program will continue for another year. The program allows participating financial-aid offices to use experimental approaches when awarding aid to students, with a goal of identifying innovative approaches that would work for the entire federal student-aid program. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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June 25, 2009

WASHINGTON -- Like many a politician, Education Secretary Arne Duncan is at his best when he's talking off the cuff.

"This damn form was killing us," Duncan said to a small group of reporters after a more formal presentation Wednesday to the White House press corps about the Obama administration's plan to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. He was talking about how big a deterrent the federal form was to getting students from low-income families to apply to college, when Duncan, as superintendent of Chicago's public schools throughout this decade, was trying to increase the district's college-going rates.

As Duncan and the Education Department trumpeted the proposal Wednesday with the high-profile appearance at the White House, along with IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman, the information they provided left many details to be determined. It seems clear, though, that as with many policy initiatives important to Obama, the administration seems intent on making forward progress even if it can't go as far as some think it should. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," Obama has taken to saying about health care and other matters, and the administration's approach on FAFSA simplification seems to follow that approach, too.

As Duncan laid out the plan Wednesday, the Education Department will, right now, make several changes that do not require Congressional approval. This summer, the department will take advantage of existing technology on the Web-based FAFSA to allow married or independent students to skip questions about their parents, among others. In January, the department will stop requiring students with low incomes to answer questions about their financial assets, and only returning students will be asked about prior drug convictions, since the question does not affect first-year students. Department officials said they would work closely with state officials to set up the electronic form to "make it easier to answer questions that the states need but the federal government does not."

Other changes the department seeks would require Congressional approval. Department officials said they would ask Congress to eliminate a total of 29 questions about students' and families' finances that are not on the federal tax form. Several of those relate to families' assets ("As of today, what is the net worth of your (and spouse’s) investments, including real estate (not your home)?"), and eliminating the consideration of assets for most students by abandoning those questions would be among the more controversial steps the Obama plan calls for. [Inside Higher Ed]

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On Monday, a procession of career college lobbyists urged the U.S. Department of Education officials to give their schools more discretion to limit the amount of federal loans students can take out to cover their living expenses. The industry representatives made their remarks at a public hearing the Education Department held at the Community College of Philadelphia to gather ideas for strengthening federal student aid rules to improve the integrity of the programs.

"Schools are trying to limit borrowing," said Richard Dumaresq of the Pennsylvania Association of Private School Administrators, which advocates for proprietary institutions in the state. "But it's not enough to stem the tide of over borrowing, especially in a down economy." His comments were echoed by Harris Miller, the president of the Career College Association, and lobbyists for some of the largest publically traded chains of for-profit colleges, such as ITT Educational Services Inc. [The New America Foundation]

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Less than a quarter of colleges regularly assess how they could prevent or respond to threats such as criminal acts, environmental catastrophes, and financial misconduct. And half of colleges plan for such risks only after receiving an audit, experiencing a campus crime, or seeing the fallout from such a problem on another campus.

Those are the key findings of a survey released today by United Educators, a higher-education insurance company, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. The survey incorporated the responses of more than 600 college administrators, including presidents, chief financial officers, trustees, and provosts.

“This data is certainly a wake-up call for higher-education leaders that they need to make enterprise risk management a priority now so they can avoid such pitfalls,” said Janice Abraham, chief executive of United Educators, in a news release. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Elsevier officials said Monday that it was a mistake for the publishing giant's marketing division to offer $25 Amazon gift cards to anyone who would give a new textbook five stars in a review posted on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. While those popular Web sites' customer reviews have long been known to be something less than scientific, and prone to manipulation if an author has friends write on behalf of a new work, the idea that a major academic publisher would attempt to pay for good reviews angered some professors who received the e-mail pitch.

Here's what the e-mail -- sent to contributors to the textbook -- said:

"Congratulations and thank you for your contribution to Clinical Psychology. Now that the book is published, we need your help to get some 5 star reviews posted to both Amazon and Barnes & Noble to help support and promote it. As you know, these online reviews are extremely persuasive when customers are considering a purchase. For your time, we would like to compensate you with a copy of the book under review as well as a $25 Amazon gift card. If you have colleagues or students who would be willing to post positive reviews, please feel free to forward this e-mail to them to participate. We share the common goal of wanting Clinical Psychology to sell and succeed. The tactics defined above have proven to dramatically increase exposure and boost sales. I hope we can work together to make a strong and profitable impact through our online bookselling channels."

Cindy Minor, marketing manager for science and technology at Elsevier, said that the e-mail did not reflect Elsevier policy. She called the request for five star reviews "a poorly written e-mail" by "an overzealous employee." Minor said that the concerns over the marketing pitch have been discussed "at the highest levels" in the company and that nobody favors paying for good reviews. The situation "is not being taken lightly," she said. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, is buying a stake in a company that is forming a new online university, and the university is putting his name on its M.B.A. program, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The company, Chancellor University System LLC, is converting the former Myers University, a Cleveland institution that went bankrupt, into Chancellor University, according to the Journal. Mr. Welch is paying more than $2-million for a 12-percent stake in the business, it said, and the university will name its M.B.A. program the Jack Welch Institute.

Mr. Welch does not plan to teach any courses at the institute that will bear his name, but he and his wife, Suzy, are involved in recruiting faculty members and planning the curriculum. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced grants to 15 community colleges and five states. The gifts total $16.5 million (with each college receiving $743,000 over three years), and are focused on strengthening remedial education programs to improve retention and graduation rates.
The foundation is seeking to empower institutions to tailor their instruction to struggling students, thereby increasing students’ chances of completing coursework and degree requirements. The program is called the Developmental Education Initiative.

State grants (to Connecticut, Florida, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia) are intended to support implementation of new data collection systems that will help gauge the effects of these remedial programs. [The New York Times]

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If you’re thinking of heading off to a community college next year to either pick up an associate’s degree or save some money on your core credits for a bachelor’s degree, expect company. Similarly, if you’re planning to attend a for-profit career college to up your chances of landing a decent job, you are definitely not alone. During recessions, people typically flock to college, often choosing cheaper or quicker degree programs to help them get on their feet and be more competitive on the workforce. Enrollment is up at career colleges and community colleges are expecting a similar increase.

One group of students may actually see less competition, though. The number of students taking the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) this year is down, suggesting that fewer students may be planning to apply for graduate programs. [Career College Central]

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ORLANDO -- The increasing push by federal and state governments alike to tie financial support for colleges to their success in retaining and graduating students concerns officials at institutions with large numbers of students who are from low-income backgrounds or are the first in their families to go to college. It's not that they mind being held accountable, say officials at open-access four-year public universities, community colleges, and for-profit institutions; they just don't want to be punished for admitting and trying to educate those who have historically had the least access to higher education and who enter college with the most risk factors that tend to drag students down.

A study previewed this week at the annual meeting of the Career College Association here seeks to make the case that any assessment of colleges' success in getting students to the finish line must take into account the students' attributes when they start. And perhaps unsurprisingly, the study, which was financed by the Imagine America Foundation, which works on behalf of for-profit colleges, also asserts that commercial career colleges have more success graduating high-risk students than do other types of institutions. [Inside Higher Ed]
 

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U.S. News & World Report is on the verge of officially announcing a major expansion of its rankings Web site. The announcement will focus on the new "University Directory" that has been in beta. The directory has a broader focus than the rankings -- with extensive listings in distance education and adult continuing education, not just the four-year residential colleges that are the focus of the rankings.

Brian Kelly, editor of U.S. News, stressed that the expansion of the magazine's education Web site was related to serving students. "The idea is to go beyond the four-year brick-and-mortar college," he said. Many adult students are enrolling online, and the approach the magazine takes to its rankings isn't meeting their needs. U.S. News, he said, recognizes that for many potential students, the colleges that top the rankings aren't the places they are considering and the new directory will help them. (Along the same lines, but still in development, U.S. News is exploring the idea of a community college directory and rankings, but the rankings are unlikely to be similar to those of four-year institutions, he said.)

At least initially, there are no plans to rank the adult and distance programs. "We just don't think the data are available," Kelly said. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Washington — Community colleges and the job-training programs they provide are already among the big winners under President Obama’s higher-education and economic-recovery policies. Now word comes from the White House that they may benefit again, reports The Swamp, a blog operated by the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune.

Rahm Emanuel, the president’s chief of staff, told the Democratic Leadership Council today that Mr. Obama would soon announce plans for a sizable increase in federal support for job-training programs at community colleges. “In the next couple of weeks, you will see a major announcement by the president on community colleges and job training,” Mr. Emanuel was quoted as saying. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]
 

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A judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by a former Regent University law student who was suspended after posting a picture on the Internet of school founder Pat Robertson making what appeared to be an obscene gesture.

U.S. District Judge Jerome B. Friedman of Norfolk rejected Adam Key’s claims that Regent and Robertson, the school’s chancellor and president, violated his free speech and due process rights.

Key, a Houston native, was suspended from Regent for one year in 2007 for violating the school’s code of conduct after posting the picture. The picture was a frame of a YouTube video in which Robertson was scratching his face.

Although Regent is a private university, Key said the school received some state and federal funds and therefore was subject to the free-speech and due process standards that apply to the government. Friedman disagreed, writing in his June 5 ruling that a school’s receipt of public funds alone does not make its decisions acts of the state.

Along with the constitutional claims, Key alleged that Robertson defamed him by saying Key had manipulated the photo, and that the school broke its contract with him by not living up to promises made in recruiting materials.

The judge rejected those arguments as well. He said that by presenting a single frame of a video out of context, Key did manipulate the image — and since Robertson’s statement was true, it could not be defamatory.

Friedman also said the “generic recruiting correspondence” received by Key did not amount to a binding contract. [Richmond Times-Dispatch]

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Washington — Rep. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon of California will give up his post as the top Republican on the House education committee to become the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, Congress Daily reports.

His departure will create a vacancy at the top of the education committee at a time when the panel is considering legislation to overhaul the federal student-loan programs and make Pell Grants an entitlement.

While a successor for the education post has not been picked, the next in line for the job, in terms of seniority, is Rep. Thomas E. Petri of Wisconsin, an avid supporter of direct lending. Mr. Petri has been a member of the committee since 1979 and helped create the direct-loan program in the 1990s.

If Mr. Petri replaces Mr. McKeon, the committee’s Democrats could face less opposition from Republicans to President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the guaranteed-student-loan program. Congress has until mid-October to decide whether to abolish the bank-based program or make less drastic changes in student lending. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Nearly two years after being indicted, a former admissions director at Touro College, in New York, was found guilty on Tuesday of forging student transcripts and granting undeserved degrees in exchange for cash, the New York Daily News reports.

Andrique Baron, 36, sold degrees, including master’s degrees to three city teachers, for up to $25,000 each and deleted the names of actual students from college records in order to create transcripts for buyers.

A jury in Manhattan convicted Mr. Baron on 36 counts, and he now faces a sentence of up to 16 years in prison. He rejected a deal last year that would have resulted in only five years of jail time.

Mr. Baron was one of 10 people caught in a cash-for-grades scandal at the college in July 2007. They were charged with crimes of computer trespass, computer tampering, and falsifying business records. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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College officials need to begin planning now to comply with a new federal requirement that they post on their Web sites within roughly two years the net price to attend their institutions, panelists said at a meeting of institutional researchers here this week. 'This is going to end up being more complex as you get into it than people realize,' Mary M. Sapp, assistant vice president for planning and institutional research at the University of Miami, told members of the Association for Institutional Research. Congress mandated the new feature last year to give prospective students a clear idea of the actual cost to attend each institution. The net figure will be derived from total cost - tuition, fees, room, board, and other expenses - minus average aid from all sources of grants (but not loans). [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Most of us have had the experience of receiving e-mail with an attachment, trying to open the attachment, and finding a corrupted file that won't open. That concept is at the root of a new Web site advertising itself (perhaps serious only in part) as the new way for students to get extra time to finish their assignments.

Corrupted-Files.com offers a service -- recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern -- that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"

The site promises that students can stop using "lame excuses" like the deaths of grandmothers or turning in poor work.

While the Web site attempts to distinguish its service from cheating, it also advises students on how its services could make it easier for them to get away with turning in a file they know won't open. "This download includes a 2, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 page corrupted Word file. Use the appropriate file size to match each assignment. Who's to say your 10 page paper didn't get corrupted? Exactly! No one can! Its the perfect excuse to buy yourself extra time and not hand in a garbage paper. Cheating is not the answer to procrastination! - Corrupted-Files.com is!" [Inside Higher Ed]

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Even as colleges nationwide celebrate commencement season, hundreds of schools are failing to graduate a majority of their students in six years, a report says today.

Nationally, four-year colleges graduated an average of just 53% of entering students within six years, and "rates below 50%, 40% and even 30% are distressingly easy to find," says the report by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. It's based on data reported to the Education Department by nearly 1,400 schools about full-time first-time students who entered in fall 2001.

Examples from the study, which grouped schools by categories in Barron's Profiles of American Colleges:

Among schools that require only a high school diploma for admission, Heritage University and Walla Walla University, both in Washington state, reported graduation rates of 53% and 17%, respectively.

In the "most competitive" group, Amherst College in Massachusetts and Reed College in Portland, Ore., graduated 96% vs. 76%, respectively.

The data have limits: They don't account for students who transfer, for example. And they should not be used as a sole measure of quality, the report says, because "schools should not be unfairly penalized for maintaining high standards." [USA Today]

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College students were given the chance to ditch a traditional classroom for an online virtual world. Fourteen out of fifteen declined.

In her recently published study, “Student Perceptions of a Course Taught in Second Life,” Ms. Cheal wrote that the 15 undergraduate students enrolled in the course raised concerns that too much “play” in the assignments inhibited learning. The students also cited problems with the program’s slow speed and with challenges acclimating to virtual life.

“While there is potential for interactive and engaging education in virtual worlds, those possibilities may be negated if students feel lost with a difficult interface and hardware problems or if students characterize the virtual world as a venue for play incompatible with learning,” she wrote. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Washington — President Obama told a joint session of Congress in February that the United States should have the world’s highest proportion of college graduates by 2020. An author of a new report on how the nation fares in higher education compared with other developed nations says that the United States is not really that far back because of how other nations measure degree attainment.

However, there are still some challenges to meeting the president’s goal, said Arthur M. Hauptman, an independent higher-education consultant and one of the new report’s authors. The nation spends the most in the world per-student on higher education, with the lion’s share flowing to four-year institutions. Instead, more money should be focused on helping students complete community college, Mr. Hauptman said.

While the United States is second only to Norway in the percentage of its working-age population with a bachelor’s degree, it is ninth among countries in the proportion of two-year degrees that its residents hold. In addition, the report recommends, the money should be given to institutions based on their degree completions, not their enrollment. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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Seniors at for-profit colleges are more than twice as likely to have accumulated dangerous amounts of education loans as seniors at other kinds of four-year colleges, according to a new report.

Almost 30 percent of seniors at for-profit universities in 2008 owed at least $40,000 in college loans, an amount that could be excessive, according to a new analysis of the latest federal data by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.org and Fastweb.com. For comparison, only about 11 percent of seniors at private nonprofit colleges—many of which charge higher sticker prices than typical for-profits—graduate with excessive debt, Kantrowitz found. And excessive debt was a problem for only about 6 percent of seniors at public universities, which are typically comparatively lower priced. That means new graduates of for-profit schools are about five times as likely to have borrowed heavily as new graduates of public universities.

Robert Cohen, a spokesman for the Career College Association, which represents many for-profit colleges such as DeVry University, ITT Technical Institute, and Kaplan University, said there are several reasons why their students tend to borrow more. Their students tend to be older and thus don't have parents willing to contribute to tuition. And for-profit schools generally serve lower-income students, who are more reliant on federal grants, most of which haven't been keeping pace with inflation. But, Cohen added, "the vast majority of career college students are able to manage their loans and to pursue better, more professionally rewarding careers." [U.S. News & World Reports]

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Washington -- It’s the end of free pizza as we know it, and consumer advocates feel fine.

The U.S. House passed a bill Wednesday that will place limits on credit card companies' marketing to students, preventing them from handing out free food and T-shirts on college campuses, and requiring many students to have a co-signer before they receive a card.

The Credit Card Act of 2009, which passed the Senate Tuesday and is now headed to President Obama, who is expected to sign it, was heralded by those who say students have been exploited by credit card companies. But some fear that students, in having their access to credit cards limited, will be denied a chance to build up credit in college and barred from accessing a viable -- albeit vexed -- tool for financing their educations.

Colleges and universities have taken their own share of criticism for getting overly cozy with credit card companies, offering the industry entrée to students and alumni in exchange for sometimes lucrative deals. Michigan State University, for instance, had an $8.4 million contract with Bank of America, granting it access to students’ names and addresses and allowing use of the university’s logo, The New York Times reported last December.

The federal legislation passed this week won’t end colleges’ relationships with credit card companies, but it will make the agreements more transparent. Creditors will be required, for instance, to issue annual reports regarding their business relationships with colleges, alumni organizations or affiliated foundations. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Washington — Colleges often complain that they are overburdened with well-meaning but costly and duplicative federal regulations. Now they have a chance to do something about it.

The Higher Education Act that Congress reauthorized last year more than doubled colleges’ reporting requirements, but it also required a study of redundant and unnecessary regulations. The law put the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, an independent panel that advises Congress, in charge of the study.

Now the committee has created a Web site where the public can offer recommendations for streamlining federal student-aid regulations. Priority will be given to comments received before July 15. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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(Chronicle of Higher Education) The jokes began orbiting the Internet almost immediately after Blackboard Inc. announced its plan to buy yet another competitor in the course-management software market this month. This time the target was Angel Learning, which had lured away dozens of Blackboard clients in recent years with a friendly, approachable corporate culture that stood in stark contrast to Blackboard’s reputation for pushiness.

One college administrator said the company should now be called “Dark Angel.” Another said a better name would be “Blackborg.”

The Star Trek reference to characters who seek to assimilate everyone into a collective “borg” rang true for several college leaders, who had chosen to work with Angel in part because it was not Blackboard but found themselves right back in the larger company’s gravitational pull.

Outsiders might ask, Why all the fuss?

The answer is that course-management software has become a new kind of campus building—a virtual one where online classes are held and new kinds of “hybrid” courses take place. The unsettled question is who controls what these classrooms look like and how stable their foundations are.

About 7 percent of colleges with campus wide course-management systems use Angel software, according to the 2008 Campus Computing Survey of college information-technology leaders. The survey found that about 57 percent run Blackboard. [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

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In an unpublished opinion, Division Three of the Washington Court of Appeals dismissed all claims made by a former tenured professor of Columbia Basin College. The parties executed a separation agreement containing two separate provisions where the professor agreed that he released all claims against the college. Despite this language, the professor filed litigation after the college took disciplinary or adverse employment action against three faculty members who were plaintiff's former colleagues.

After reviewing the separation agreement, the Court concluded that it was unambiguous and precluded plaintiff from suing the College. The Court also upheld the lower court's award of attorney fees and sanctions based on the frivolous nature of the litigation. The text of the full opinion can be found here.

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[LOS ANGELES TIMES] For two decades, every attempt to overhaul the $85-billion-a-year student loan industry by eliminating subsidies to lenders has faced insurmountable opposition from one of the most powerful institutions in the business: Sallie Mae, the world's largest student loan company.

But in a dramatic reversal, the lending behemoth now supports President Obama's efforts to kill the subsidies it has tried to protect for so long. Instead, the company has offered a proposal that calls for the government to hold on to the loans and pay private companies for originating and servicing them.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Obama's plan to eliminate the subsidies would save as much as $94 billion, which the administration would then direct to Pell Grants for low-income students. Sallie Mae and outside analysts have estimated that the company's plan would save 80% to 90% as much as the president's proposal. [Los Angeles Times]

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WASHINGTON – With President Obama talking a big game about boosting support for community colleges, some educators have released a specific plan to do so in an ambitious way.

Thursday, the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program released a report chock-full of recommendations for the federal government to bolster its commitment to the country’s community colleges and help transform them into “engines of opportunity and prosperity.” Among the report’s key recommendations, it challenges the federal government to double its current direct level of support to America’s community colleges so that federal funds would account for more than 10 percent of their budgets. The report also calls for the government to guarantee that community colleges receive at least half of the $2.5 billion “College Access and Completion Fund” – a debated section of the 2009-10 federal budget that would support state efforts to boost the college completion rates of low-income students.

The report also calls for the government to guarantee that community colleges receive at least half of the $2.5 billion “College Access and Completion Fund” – a debated section of the 2009-10 federal budget that would support state efforts to boost the college completion rates of low-income students. [Inside Higher Ed]

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Yesterday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan started a fifteen state tour dubbed "Listening and Learning: A Conversation About Education Reform." Duncan's goal is to solicit feedback from a broad group of stakeholders and to start a "national dialogue about how to best deliver a complete and competitive education to all children—from cradle through career." Duncan will be gathering input on all aspects of education, including early childhood, higher standards, teacher quality, workforce development and higher education. Scheduled stops in the Pacific Northwest include Alaska and Montana. [U.S. Department of Education]

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The Seattle Times reported today that community colleges across the state are turning away unemployed workers because there's no money left to retrain them.

With Washington's unemployment rate hitting 8.4 percent in February, up from 4.7 percent a year earlier, demand for the popular, state-funded worker-retraining program has skyrocketed to the point where it's gone bust — at least until the next fiscal year, which begins in July.

The program paid up to two years' worth of tuition, transportation and books for people who had lost jobs and were looking to upgrade their skills or find another line of work. . . . [Seattle Times]

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With attorneys fees and fines of up to $100 per day for improperly following the Public Records Act, every public school in Washington needs to keep up to speed on the law.  Earlier this year, the Washington Supreme Court clarified that if an agency withholds records pursuant to an exemption from the Public Records Act, the agency's response is not complete until it provides a privilege log identifying the individual records it was withholding.  Until a response is complete, the one year statute of limitations to challenge the response does not start to run.

In Rental Housing Association of Puget Sound v. City of Des Moines, the Rental Housing Association (RHA) made a request to the City of Des Moines, WA for records relating to a crime free rental housing program that the City adopted.  In August 2005, the City responded with documents and a cover letter generally describing the records that it was withholding pursuant to exemptions.  It did not provide a privilege exemption log describing individual documents.

The RHA responded, demanding disclosure of some of the documents that it did not believe fell under exemptions.  The RHA also demanded a privilege log describing each withheld document and the basis for withholding the document.  After several months of communication and additional requests for information, the City produced a privilege log regarding the withheld documents from the RHA's first request.  The RHA responded, claiming that the City's log was missing necessary details including authors, recipients, and other details.  The RHA claimed, too, that several documents were not eligible for exemption under the Public Records Act.  When the City refused to provide any additional records, the RHA filed suit in January 2007.  More wrangling and an additional records request ensued.

The trial court granted the City's motion to dismiss the lawsuit on the basis that the RHA failed to timely challenge within the one year statute of limitations set forth in RCW 42.56.550(6).  The trial court reasoned that the statute of limitations was triggered when the City sent the first letter to the RHA in August 2005.

The Washington Supreme Court disagreed and reinstated the lawsuit.  Relying, in part, on its decision in Progressive Animal Welfare Soc'y v. Univ. of Wash., 125 Wn.2d 243, 884 P.2d 592 (1994), the Court reaffirmed its position that agencies cannot engage in "silent withholding" or "failing to reveal that some records have been withheld in their entirety."  Such practices give requesters the "misleading impression that all documents relevant to the request have been disclosed" and do not allow courts to evaluate the claimed exemption.  The Court then pointed out that the Washington Administrative Code requires a brief explanation of withholding when an agency claims an exemption.  One way to meet that requirement is to provide a detailed privilege log that "identifies the type of record, its date and number of pages, and the author or recipient of the record (unless their identity is exempt).  The withholding index need not be elaborate but should allow a requester to make a threshold determination of whether the agency has properly invoked the exemption."  WAC 44-14-04004.

Examining whether the City met its burden and thereby started the statute of limitations period, the Court ruled that it did not:

The City's reply letter to the RHA on August 17, 2005, was insufficient to constitute a proper claim of exemption and thus did not trigger the one-year statute of limitations under RCW 42.56.550(6).  The City's August 17, 2005 reply letter did not 1) adequately describe individually the withheld records by stating the type of record withheld, date, number of pages, and author/recipient or (2) explain which individual exemption applied to which individual record rather than generally asserting the controversy and deliberative process exemptions as to all withheld documents.

The Court rejected the argument raised by the Attorney General's office that the requirement of a privilege log to trigger the statute of limitations would generate uncertainty because the claim of exemption would rest on whether the requester deemed the description sufficient, not on the bright line date that the exemption was asserted.  The Court responded that the Public Records Act, not the requester's preference, controls when a claim of exemption is validly made:

Without the information a privilege log provides, a public citizen and reviewing court cannot know (1) what individual records are being withheld, (2) which exemptions are being claimed for individual records, and (3) whether there is a valid basis for a claimed exemption for an individual record.  Failure to provide the sort of identifying information a detailed privilege log contains defeats the very purpose of the [Public Records Act] to achieve broad public access to agency records.  RCW 42.56.030.  In this regard, requiring a privilege log does not add to the statutory requirements, but rather effectuates them.  See RCW 42.56.210(3).

Accordingly, the City did not state a proper claim of exemption to trigger the one-year statute of limitations until it provided a privilege log to the RHA.

Privilege logs are not difficult to create, but do require some skillful crafting when describing the subject matter of the documents being withheld.  A good description must contain the proper balance of providing enough information to support the claimed privilege, but not so much information that the privilege is waived.  It is apparent from this recent lawsuit, however, that public entities face increased exposure if they fail to provide a privilege log (artfully drafted or not) when responding to a records request.  The costs of non-compliance are high -- attorneys fees and costs will be awarded, and the court may also impose fines of $5-$100 per day -- schools should review their policies and make sure that they are prepared to meet this challenge.

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As an education law attorney and an attorney who assists clients with managing their email systems, I found this story to be particularly poignant.  It is a reminder to all of us to double check before pushing the "send" button.

According to a local news affiliate, UC San Diego's communication office sent an email welcoming to campus all 46,000 students who applied for admission.  The office discovered approximately 1/2 an hour after the email was sent that they had mistakenly congratulated nearly 29,000 applicants who had previously been rejected admission to the school. [NBC San Diego]

Roger Matus' wonderfully entertaining blog Death by Email.

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Justin Bathon at the Edjurist blog posted a good piece this morning that provides resources for laws relating to open meetings. Anyone in the public sector is encouraged to bookmark these resources and utilize them often. The Washington Supreme Court recently issued an opinion, Rental Housing Association of Puget Sound v. City of Des Moines that clarifies the exemptions available under Washington's Public Records Act. A summary of that case is posted here.

School boards really struggle with the Open Meeting Laws (sometimes called Sunshine Laws).  Here is a compendium of every state's Open Meetings laws.  Like any secondary source, this compendium is not a substitute for primary sources.  I have noticed errors in the compendium.

Also, most states have a handbook on Open Meetings/Records laws for new board members and most are online. NSBA has some of them here.  Follow these links to guides for Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.  I was not able to find a guide for Alaska, but the statues are here.

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March 23, 2009
By Amy Lavalley, Post-Tribune correspondent
After 31 years as a welder at Union Tank Car in East Chicago, David Alicea lost his job in May when the company shut its doors.

In January, the Valparaiso resident, 51, started at Portage Adult Education to brush up on his skills.

These days, he has his commercial drivers license permit. He hopes to get his full license and begin driving sometime this year.

"That's my plan," he said, adding though he already had his high school diploma, adult education helped him refresh his math and reading skills so he could move on to another career.

Alicea is part of an influx of students seeking to further their education through the adult education program, as more people return to school to retool their skills and find new jobs in today's tough economy.

"We have 21 sites and we have about 2,400 students right now, because our enrollment has been increasing very rapidly," said Frank Vernallis, director of adult education, which has sites in Porter, Lake, LaPorte, Newton, Jasper and Starke counties. "Particularly in the GED program, we are getting a lot of people who have been employed a number of years."

Adult education has gained about 120 students since December, as more people lose their jobs and return to get their diplomas or the equivalency, Vernallis said. The growing number of students further increases the financial burden on the already struggling program, which Vernallis said is seeing new students almost on a daily basis.

Though a full analysis of the new students is not yet available, Rebecca Reiner, director of the Portage Adult Learning Center, the largest site in the system with about 350 students, said the largest increase has been in students between the ages of 35 and 55.

"The biggest increase that I'm seeing is people who have worked since they were 16 years old and because of downsizing, lost their jobs," she said. "They've worked full-time, raised families and are now unemployed for the first time ever, and they're competing with 18-year-olds, 20-year-old, for the same jobs."

Like Alicea, Johanna Castellanos, 61, of Portage, enrolled at the learning center, though with a different goal. Married at 16, she never finished high school. She decided to open a day care center with her daughter-in-law and granddaughter and found out that, for the facility to be state licensed, she would need her GED.

Castellanos took the equivalency test 20 years ago when she was studying to be a beautician, and fell short by 1.5 points toward her GED. Her instructor in cosmetology told her not to bother trying again then, a decision that Castellanos still regrets.

"I should have went right back and taken it," she said.

She expects to complete the GED this spring, something she wouldn't have done without the learning center, or the encouragement of Reiner and others on the staff.

"It's going to help me because my husband is going to retire in March 2010. It's really going to further my career," she said. [Post-Trib]

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According to the Seattle Times, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will offer increased financial aid to low- and middle-income students this year. The changes are temporary, though, and the future is uncertain. The stimulus bill offers the following changes:

• Pell Grants: Funding has increased and eligibility requirements have changed. The maximum allowance for 2009-2010 is $5,350; the maximum allowance for 2010-2011 is $5,550. Eligibility requirements have changed, too, meaning that an additional 800,000 students will be eligible to receive a Pell grant. In 2011-2012, the maximum allowance drops to $5,250, unless new legislation is enacted
• Tax Credits: Under the American Opportunity Tax Credit, the maximum tuition tax credit is raised from $1,800 to $2,500 (100% reimbursement for the first $2,000 spent on higher education and 25 percent of the next $2,000 spent on qualified educational expenses). Income levels will vary the amount of credit that can be claimed.  After 2011, the credit reverts to 2009 levels.
• School-specific Aid: Work-study funding is increased by $200 million, providing approximately 81,000 more students with work-study jobs. Absent new legislation, work-study funding will go back to 2009 levels after the 2010-2011 school year.

[Seattle Times]

See the related stories 10 Tips for Getting the Best College Financial-Aid Package and Economic stimulus offers relief to career college students.

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President Obama spoke to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and outlined his plan for improving education, listing five pillars of reform: 

1) Raise the quality of early learning programs;
2) Encourage better standards and assessments;
3) Recruit, prepare, and reward outstanding teachers;
4) Promote innovation and excellence in America's schools; and
5) Provide every American with a quality higher education (college or technical training)

See the President's remarks here.

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$49 Billon More to Be Available within 6 months

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced Saturday that $44 billion in stimulus funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) will be available to states in the next 30 to 45 days. The first round of funding will help avert hundreds of thousands of estimated teacher layoffs in schools and school districts while driving crucial education improvements, reforms, and results for students.

"These funds will be distributed as quickly as possible to save and create jobs and improve education, and will be invested as transparently as possible so we can measure the impact in the classroom," said Duncan. "Strict reporting requirements will ensure that Americans know exactly how their money is being spent and how their schools are being improved."

Guidelines posted by Duncan today authorize the release this month of half the Title I, Part A stimulus funds, amounting to $5 billion, and half the funds for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), $6 billion, without new applications.

By the end of March, governors will be able to apply for 67 percent of the State Fiscal Stabilization Funds (SFSF) and discretionary SFSF, totaling $32.5 billion. These funds will be released within two weeks after approvable applications are received.

In the next 30 days, nearly $700 million more will be available for various programs including vocational rehabilitation state grants and impact aid construction, Duncan said. Another $17.3 billion for Pell Grants and work-study funds is available for disbursement for the next academic year beginning July 1.

An additional $35 billion in Title 1, IDEA, and State Fiscal Stabilization Funds, as well as monies for other programs will be distributed between July 1 and September 30.

ARRA funds must be used to improve student achievement. To receive the first round of state stabilization funds, states must commit to meet ARRA requirements, including making progress on four key education reforms, sharing required baseline data, and meeting record-keeping and transparency requirements. To receive the second round of funding, they must provide evidence and plans for progress on these assurances. All four education reforms were previously authorized under bipartisan education legislation—including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the America Competes Act of 2007:

• Raising standards through college- and career-ready standards and high-quality assessments that are valid and reliable for all students, including English language learners and students with disabilities;
• Increasing transparency by establishing better data systems tracking student progress over time;
• Improving teacher effectiveness and ensuring an equitable supply and distribution of qualified teachers;
• Supporting effective intervention strategies for lowest-performing schools.

Finally, a $5 billion fund has been established under the law for the Department of Education. This includes a $4.35 billion "Race to the Top" fund to help states with bold plans to improve student achievement—including these four reforms—and $650 million to assist school districts and non-profit organizations with strong track records of improving student achievement State grants will go out in two rounds over the next year, beginning in October 2009. Applications will be available later in the spring.

"These investments will save and create jobs in the short term, while raising achievement in the long term," Duncan said. “We will need a strong commitment on the front end and even stronger proof on the back end that states are making progress."

Duncan also said that states should work hard to avoid "funding cliffs" by investing ARRA funds in ways that minimize "the tail"—i.e., ongoing costs after the funding expires.

"These are one-time funds, and state and school officials need to find the best way to stretch every dollar and spend the money in ways that protect and support children without carrying continuing costs," Duncan said.

Additional details, including a category-by-category list of all ARRA funds appropriated to the Department of Education, as well as requirements and plans for their distribution are posted at www.ed.gov/recovery.

"Our goals are to save jobs and improve education. Today's guidelines show exactly how we can do both—balancing the need for a speedy release of funds with the need for aggressive and thoughtful school improvements and reform to improve results for our children," Duncan said.

United States Department of Education
 

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On February 27, Idaho Governor Otter received legislation that, if signed into law, “will revise the current criteria and process for school surety bonding and student tuition recovery funding. These changes are necessary to ensure against loss of tuition previously collected, so that appropriate student reimbursement can be made in the event of a school closure or default. The new language will be easier for students and school administrators to understand and for the state staff to manage and implement. No change to the current staffing level or appropriated funding will be required.”

Specifically, the legislation would amend existing law to increase the State Board of Education's discretion in determining annual registration fees and grounds for submitting demand upon Proprietary Schools' sureties. "Postsecondary Educational Institutions" (schools offering course of studies leading to degrees (including degree-granting private career colleges)) and "Proprietary Schools" (schools providing courses of study, but not degrees) annual registration fees will be determined entirely by Board rule, rather than previous criteria which provided that such fees would not exceed $5,000.

The proposed law also adjusts the existing law’s surety bond requirement to provide that the Board may submit a demand upon Proprietary Schools' bonds for any "failure by such proprietary school to satisfy its obligations pursuant to the terms and conditions of any contract for tuition or other instructional fees," eliminating the former limitation that such bonds would only be collected upon for "fraud or misrepresentation."

The legislation brings further changes to the manner in which Proprietary Schools may solicit students. Agents of Proprietary Schools will be required to obtain "certificates of identification" issued by the school the agent works for, rather than the former "permits" issued by Board. Proprietary Schools must annually review agent applications and reissue certificates of identification only where appropriate. If an agent will have unsupervised contact with potential students who are minors, before issuing a certificate of identification the Proprietary School must perform a complete criminal history check on that agent, which will be valid for five years. Proprietary Schools will be required to maintain records of application, issuance, denial , termination, suspension and revocation of agents' certificates of identification for five years. In addition, as a new component of the annual registration process, Proprietary Schools must release to the Board the names and results of criminal history checks for each agent to whom the school has issued a certificate of identification.

For further review of these and other changes introduced by the new legislation, click here.