By Paul Fain. Colleges need to demonstrate the value of their product with hard numbers, an increasingly popular maxim holds, or lawmakers will try to do it for them. That prediction is now truer than ever, as the nation’s highest elected official has joined state policymakers in pushing performance-based funding for higher education. The sweeping, ambitious proposal President Obama unveiled Thursday seeks to tie all federal financial aid programs to a rating system of colleges on affordability, student completion rates and the earnings of graduates. The U.S. Department of Education will hold public hearings to develop the ratings before fall 2015. Then the White House will go to Congress to pursue legislation that would link aid levels to colleges’ performance. For example, students who attend standout institutions could receive bigger Pell Grants and more affordable student loans. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim and Ry Rivard. Advocates of disruptive college business models and carrot-and-stick accountability measures were excited Thursday to hear President Obama back their work in his effort to curb the rising cost of college. The president, in a speech on college costs, praised a new public-private partnership between the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Silicon Valley start-up, name-checked a performance-based college funding formula in Tennessee and praised programs that award degrees to students based on how well they test rather than how much time they spend in a classroom. All of this, Obama said, could help “shake up the current system, create better incentives for colleges to do more with less and deliver better value for students and their families.” Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. President Obama appears to be making good on his vow to propose a "shake-up" for higher education.
Early Thursday, he released a plan that would:

• Create a new rating system for colleges in which they would be evaluated based on various outcomes (such as graduation rates and graduate earnings), on affordability and on access (measures such as the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants).
• Link student aid to these ratings, such that students who enroll at high performing colleges would receive larger Pell Grants and more favorable rates on student loans.
• Create a new program that would give colleges a "bonus" if they enroll large numbers of students eligible for Pell Grants.
• Toughen requirements on students receiving aid. For example, the president said that these rules might require completion of a certain percentage of classes to continue receiving aid. Read more...

By David Matthews. A London-based private provider is to offer pathway programmes with a consortium of Northern universities, enabling international students to get on to degree courses.
The London School of Business and Finance has said it will take on around 150 students to “provide students with the academic and English skills needed to progress to a leading university”. 
These courses offer guaranteed progression to degree courses at 11 institutions, including the universities of Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield. More...

By Chris Parr. The US government is to develop a new system of ranking colleges and universities in a bid to ensure the “best value” institutions have access to the most federal funding.
In an extensive speech on college affordability, delivered at the University at Buffalo, US president Barack Obama said the new rating system would be introduced by the start of the 2015-16 academic year. It would, he claimed, take into account measures such as graduation rates, quality of tuition, and whether colleges were “helping people from all backgrounds to succeed”.
“A higher education is the single best investment you can make in your future,” Mr Obama said, adding that colleges should be ranked “not just by which are the most selective”, but in order of those offering “the best value”. “Colleges that keep their tuition down…are the ones that will see their taxpayer funding go up,” he said. More...

By Elizabeth Gibney. Half of scientific papers published in 2011 can be accessed online for free, a new study has suggested.
The level is about twice that previously estimated and is likely to cheer advocates of the movement to make the results of publicly-funded research freely available. 
According to the study – published on 21 August by Montreal-based research evaluation consultancy Science-Metrix – Brazil, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the US have the highest rates of open access publishing. 
In Europe, 20 out of 27 countries, including the UK, are likely to have tipped towards a majority of papers published in 2008-2011 being made available for free, it adds. More...

By David Matthews. Student numbers at private higher education institutions will be capped from 2014-15, the government has confirmed, while private providers will also be granted unlimited recruitment of high-grade students.
At present there is a limit on the total number of students publicly-funded institutions can recruit, but this does not apply to private institutions. As a result, the number of students at private providers has “risen rapidly” in recent years, says draft guidance on the planned cap published by the Department for Business Innovation and Skills.
The number of students at private providers making use of taxpayer funded loans has risen from 4,300 in 2009-10 and 5,860 in 2010-11 to 9,360 in the first six months of 2011-12. More...

By Nick Anderson and Philip Rucker.For decades, magazines have rated colleges to help families navigate the higher education market. On Thursday, President Obama proposed that the federal government rate the nation’s schools to hold them accountable for performance and help bring soaring tuition under control. By the 2015 school year, Obama said, his administration will begin evaluating colleges on measures such as the average tuition they charge, the share of low-income students they enroll and their effectiveness in ensuring students graduate without too much debt.
The president also will seek congressional approval — which could prove difficult — to steer more federal student aid toward colleges that score highly in the ratings. A student in financial need at such schools might qualify for a larger Pell grant or a better interest rate on a federal loan. The result, officials hope, will be relief for families from college bills that are in many cases three times as high as they were 30 years ago even after adjusting for inflation. More...

By Michael Alison Chandler. The controversy over academic testing has spread to an unlikely new frontier in Washington: preschool. Some D.C. parents are protesting a plan by the city’s public charter school board to rank preschools based largely on how children as young as 3 are performing on reading and math tests.
The board set out to provide parents with a clearer picture of how charter schools compare with one another. It also wants to provide educators with a way to measure progress toward the goal of better preparing children for school, a goal that led city leaders to make a historic investment in universal preschool for 3- and 4-year olds. But as of Saturday, more than 200 parents had signed a petition asking the board to take a broader look at school quality and put more emphasis on the social and emotional development they want to see emphasized in their children’s schools. More...

By Robert Smith.The pressures on children to perform and succeed are becoming ever greater, and starting younger. The sudden death of a Bank of America intern last Thursday was not only a tragic loss of a life, but a timely reminder of the constant pressure young people feel to impress and succeed. It is chilling to read Moritz Erdhardt’s resumé now, whether or not his lifestyle contributed to his death: “I had a tendency to be over-ambitious…I was striving for excellence and trying to be the best all the time,” he wrote. “I felt somehow pressurised.”
Pressure, for the 15- and 16-year-olds collecting their GCSE results yesterday, is nothing new. The obstacle course which is the British education system – 11-plus, internal exams, SATs, GCSEs, A-levels, bachelors' degrees, masters – means that this crop are well versed in the trials and tribulations of late-night revision cramming, nervy two-hour tests in mundane sports halls, and the sickening experience of collecting those all-important small brown envelopes. Yes, testing is essential – and the "prizes for all" culture was flawed. But now not only are tests taken more often, they’re now taken at younger age too. This year’s results highlighted the escalating trend of pupils being entered into GCSEs early; a policy which not only heaps more pressure on slender shoulders, but distorts academic outcomes. More...