By Ry Rivard. In a sign that college regulators may be struggling to cope with mergers and acquisitions, a regional accrediting agency has gone back and forth on whether two California colleges are able to ably govern themselves despite having board members with potential conflicts of interest. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Starbucks announced Monday that it is doubling the size of its program to provide employees with support for tuition for Arizona State University's online programs. The changes will now cover the first two years of a degree program, not just the last two years, as has been the case. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. The National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education is facing the same existential question as the liberal arts colleges the organization serves: What’s the way forward?
NITLE (pronounced “nightly”) has for more than a decade served as a resource for liberal arts colleges interested in expanding their use of technology in the classroom, evolving alongside that particular sector of higher education. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. ProQuest's investments in the discovery stage of research continued this week as the company acquired the Silicon Valley-based start-up SIPX. Read more...

By Kaitlin Mulhere. Despite increasing attention on diversity issues within academe, colleges and universities still have a ways to go in broadening the repertoire of research on L.G.B.T.Q. studies, according to a book published earlier this year. Read more...

By Kaitlin Mulhere. The best-laid plans often go awry. And in the case of Florida’s performance-based funding model, even the most formula-based system can turn, at times, into something less than an objective process. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Political support is building for a system to encourage and oversee higher education upstarts that don't look or act like colleges, such as online course providers and coding boot camps. And these emerging players soon may have a pathway to accreditation and even federal financial aid eligibility, albeit in limited or experimental form. Read more...

By Paul Fain. LinkedIn has become a company to watch in higher education. This week the job networking site announced it would spend $1.5 billion to buy lynda.com, an online course portal. Read more...

By Ashley A. Smith. As scrutiny of for-profit institutions increases, direct private loans from those institutions to students are becoming rarer. One reason is that states have joined federal agencies in scrutinizing the sector over its lending, recruitment and advertising practices. Read more...

By Ashley A. Smith. When the Community College of Philadelphia announced it was launching a tuition-free program for incoming students, the emphasis was on low-income, Pell Grant-eligible families. When Harper College in suburban Chicago made its tuition-free announcement a week earlier, it didn't have an income limit but focused on academic requirements, community service and attendance. Read more...