The Association of Community College Trustees released two white papers today. One examines how leaders from the two-year sector can partner with local school districts to close the gap in college readiness. The other paper tracks how Latino students are faring at community colleges. Read more...

Are many academic job ads discriminatory to people with disabilities? That’s what David Perry, a professor of history at Dominican University, alleges in a new op-ed in Al Jazeera called “Disabled People Need Not Apply.” Perry argues that academe, despite its focus on inclusion, is a regular offender when it comes to job ads that exclude large groups of people. Read more...

Roughly one in four of the 1.9 million high school students who graduated in 2015 and took the ACT are from low-income backgrounds, meaning their annual family incomes are less than $36,000. This group continues to lag in college readiness, according to the latest version of an annual report from the testing organization and the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships. Read more...

The U.S. Department of Education this week introduced several new requirements for accreditors, adding to the slightly beefed-up new rules it announced in November. The department has pushed more aggressive reforms to the accreditation process, including a request for the U.S. Congress to drop its ban on imposing specific standards on accreditors. Read more...

Brown University, by a vote of its faculty on Tuesday, has designated what was once Columbus Day at the university as Indigenous People's Day. In 2009, the university dropped the Columbus Day name and designated that day off as the "fall weekend holiday." Tuesday's vote replaces that name. Read more...

The Obama administration plans to ask Congress to approve $2 billion in new funding to help communities fund efforts to prevent students from dropping out of high school and to get them into postsecondary education. Read more...

Higher education needs to reconsider the use of crowdsourced labor in research, an article in last month's issue of PS: Political Science & Politics argues. Read more...

Students at the University of California at Berkeley are launching a class action lawsuit against Google over the company's automatic scanning of emails for advertising keywords. Read more...

The Saudi government approved more restrictive eligibility rules for its foreign university scholarship program on Monday, Reuters and the Saudi Gazette reported. Details of the new rules are vague, but they would appear to make the scholarship program more academically elite. Read more...

The world is not lacking for reports on how to restructure the federal student financial aid programs. But here's a new one to chew over, from the Urban Institute and its researchers Sandy Baum and Martha Johnson: "Strengthening Federal Student Aid." Read more...