A group of five higher education associations and other organizations are collaborating on a study of the retention and graduation rates of five million students who are not first-time college students. The American Council on Education, InsideTrack, NASPA -- Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, and the National Student Clearinghouse last month announced the research project, which is slated to be wrapped up this fall. Read more...

A group that represents consumer banks is pushing back against warnings by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that undisclosed arrangements between banks and colleges to market financial products may pose a risk to consumers. The CFPB has, in recent months, warned financial institutions as well as colleges that their failure to disclose such agreements “may pose potential consumer protection risks.” Read more...

By Paul J. LeBlanc. Last month the U.S. Department of Education announced a new round of experimental sites to test new competency-based education (CBE) models. There is a lot of excitement in the CBE community about this development, which will provide welcome regulatory space for aid distribution formulas, an important structural component to any new form of delivery.
However, buried further down in the department’s press release was an additional announcement that has received scant attention. Read more...

By Judith Shapiro. Regular readers of the higher education press have had occasion to learn a great deal about digital developments and online initiatives in higher education. We have heard both about and from those for whom this world is still terra relatively incognita. And, increasingly, we are hearing both about and from those commonly considered to be to be “digital natives” –- the term “native” conveying the idea of their either having been born to the culture in question or being so adapted to it that they might as well have been. Read more...

By Julie Hare for The Australian. A call by the leader of an Australian state for its three universities to consider a full or partial amalgamation comes just two years after the idea was rejected for being too expensive and for the likelihood that the costs would outweigh the benefits. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Students are most likely to be successful in transferring academic credits when they have higher grade-point averages and move between community colleges and four-year institutions, according to a new federal study released Wednesday. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Professors sometimes bemoan their students' writing skills. But how good are professors at creating quality writing assignments? There's no recent, national study of how and what professors are asking their students to write, despite lots of research suggesting that rich, varied writing assignments and opportunities for feedback mean better student papers. A new book seeks to fill that data void, and argues that what professors are asking their students to write is as important as what students end up writing.
“Writing assignments are revealing classroom artifacts,” says Dan Melzer, reading and writing coordinator at California State University at Sacramento in his book, Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing (Utah State University Press). Read more...

By Paul Fain. In the debate over the value of attending a for-profit college, the rubber hits the road in corporate human resources departments. And now, for the first time, researchers have looked at how employers respond when for-profits are listed on a résumé. The newly released working paper by five economists tracked callbacks by employers in response to 8,914 fictitious job applications. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Citing a "failure of higher education governance," a group convened by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has called on trustees to play a much more active role in overseeing their institutions. The group issued a report suggesting serious erosion in the quality of American higher education. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. "Hard Times" is the theme for this year's annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. Many sessions -- including those on higher education -- focus on issues of income inequality. Sociologists presented numerous studies on various ways that policies and practices in American higher education hinder the success of low-income students. Several of the papers suggested that key inequities are not that hard to find, but don't necessarily attract attention. Read more...