By Ry Rivard. Georgia State University President Mark Becker hosted a dinner with faculty leaders Monday night to tell them about the plan to merge their up-and-coming research university with a nearby college that graduates fewer than 10 percent of its students and struggles to balance its books. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. President Obama traveled here Friday to make his first full-fledged pitch for tuition-free community college, as White House officials confirmed that the ambitious proposal would cost about $60 billion over the next decade. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. As Republicans formally take control of a new Congress this week, one of the party’s top priorities is pushing through a change to President Obama’s health care law that many colleges are cheering but that adjunct faculty have criticized. Read more...

By Paul Fain. President Obama is going big with his higher education announcement in Tennessee on Friday. He wants to make the first two years of community college as free as high school.
“To make sure that community college is accessible for everybody,” Obama said in a video message released Thursday, “put simply, what I’d like to do is to see the first two years of community college free for everybody who’s willing to work for it.” Read more...

By Paul Fain. Lawmakers will continue to look for ways to measure the value of a college degree. Acknowledging this, a group of three higher education associations say they want to help that conversation be more informed and comprehensive. The groups, which represent the various sectors of public higher education, on Thursday released a draft discussion guide for how to track what happens to students after college. Read more...

By Paul Fain. After eight years of work and $640 million in federal spending, state data systems that seek to link education and the workforce remain riddled with holes. That was the conclusion of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a report released in November. The GAO looked at two federal grant programs to support states’ development of “longitudinal" data systems that try to follow students as they move from early education to K-12, college and employment. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Admissions essays are thought of by many as less scientific than other parts of the college application process -- a chance to share a personal story, to inject personality into the process, to become more than just a grade-point average or test score. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. MLA leaders make no claims that the job market is in good shape, and their recent survey found that the number of faculty jobs in English appears to be down 8.4 percent from a year ago. (The MLA reports that the picture isn’t much different for foreign language Ph.D.s, but the new paper is on English Ph.D.s.) Read more...

By Jake New. In her 16 years as the head women’s hockey coach at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, Shannon Miller has won five national championships. Miller, a former coach for the Canadian Olympic team, is the fourth winningest college women’s hockey coach in Division I. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of the best online programs are growing more robust with each iteration, its critics acknowledge, but the publication is exaggerating by calling them the “only resource students can turn to for unbiased information on online programs.” Read more...