By Eszter Hargittai and Brayden King. This week, the U.S. Department of Education announced changes to the PLUS loan underwriting standards that may help previously denied PLUS loan applicants obtain loans. This will be welcome news to previously approved loan applicants who found themselves unexpectedly denied last year. But federal PLUS loans can be risky business for graduate students and parents of undergraduates who can use them to borrow up to the full cost of attendance at college. Much more can be done to protect consumers from getting too deeply into debt. The Department of Education recently added PLUS loan underwriting standards to its list of items to potentially consider during negotiated rule-making, the process where students, advocates and colleges work with the federal government to hash out new regulations. Read more...

By Martin H. Krieger. Stephen Spielberg's "Duel" (1971), one of his first films, is about a truck that keeps coming. You really don't want to be the character, played by Dennis Weaver driving a red Plymouth Valiant, who is being pursued by an actual truck. 
1. I often say, in my new book The Scholar's Survival Manual and in everyday discourse: A truck is coming, and you better not say: What truck? Trucks are real and if they are coming, you had better get out of the way. Otherwise you will become academic roadkill. Read more...

By Andrew M. Pena. What happens to an organization when its best, brightest, most experienced and knowledgeable employees are walking out the door? What do they take with them, and what do we lose? Part of it is the organization’s institutional knowledge or history. Obviously not all employee turnover is “bad” turnover; there are some employees that we’d like to leave sooner rather than later. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Community college students face long odds of eventually earning a bachelor’s degree. And those odds get worse if they leave college more than once along the way. That is the central finding of a new study that tracked the progress of 38,000 community college students in Texas. Toby J. Park, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at Florida State University, conducted the research. His working paper was presented Thursday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in St. Louis. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. Indiana Wesleyan University has an entrepreneurial bent: the evangelical Christian institution is well-known for having expanded beyond its 3,000-student residential undergraduate campus to develop online programs and a network of 17 regional centers for adult and graduate education throughout Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. Now the university is eyeing an expansion Down Under through the planned acquisition of the Wesley Institute, a Christian performing arts-focused college in Sydney that also offers programs in education and counseling. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Michelle Obama on Tuesday kicked off a new White House push to increase the number of low-income students who apply to and graduate from college. Speaking to students at a high school here, the first lady drew on her own personal experiences as a first-generation college student who earned two Ivy League degrees to encourage students to set high expectations and take responsibility for their own higher education. She also highlighted the president’s oft-stated goal of having the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by 2020. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Test-takers who took the GRE in 2012-13 were more likely to be a bit younger and a bit more science-oriented than those who took the exam the year before. And in the quantitative portion of the exam, in particular, foreign talent appears to be outpacing American. These are some of the findings in the latest “Snapshot” of GRE test-takers, released today by the Educational Testing Service. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Most of the existing research on the employment of adjunct faculty and student success shows a negative relationship, not because adjuncts are bad teachers but because their working conditions prevent them from being as effective as they could be. But earlier this fall, a much-cited study disputed by some, showed the opposite: that students actually may learn more from adjunct faculty members -- at least at research universities that can afford to pay part-timers well and that may discourage tenure-track faculty members from focusing on teaching. Now, a preliminary study is mixing up the literature once again, concluding that employment of adjunct faculty has no impact on student success in community colleges. Read more...

By Cary Nelson. Over the last decade there has been a rapid evolution toward increased scholarly publishing online. Much of it remains proprietary publishing available only through paid access, but there are now a number of peer-reviewed gold access online scholarly journals, and book publishers commonly make a table of contents and a sample chapter freely available. Google meanwhile has made the complete texts of millions of public domain books available for free. And there are countless websites devoted to more narrowly defined online publishing projects. Read more...

By Devin T. Hagerty. The liberal arts are dead, or — at best — dying. That's the theme of story after story in today’s news media. Professional skills training is in. The STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields are in. Practical, vocational higher education is in. The liberal arts are out, relics of a “traditional” way of thinking that has been overtaken by the pressing demands of our dizzyingly complex digital age. As new students arrived on college campuses this fall, the message many of them heard is that majoring in history, or English, or anthropology is a surefire recipe for a life of irrelevance and poor job prospects. Read more...