By Wick Sloane. To: President Barack H. Obama 
Subject: Missing from Your College Plan: 45 Million Peanut Butter Sandwiches. Per Week. 
Forty-five million peanut butter sandwiches a week? 
This 45 million idea came to me the other day, at a sink. I was washing peanut butter from the wooden paddle hungry students use every day to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at the Boston community college where I work. Bread donated via Panera and the Minute Man High School Parents Association. PB&J bought with donor funds. Why not, I thought, one peanut butter sandwich per school day for each of the nine million students (source) on a Pell Grant? Read more...

By Dan Greenstein. That college you have your eye on for your teenager? It may be going out of business. Your alma mater, too. Here’s why: we keep seeing reports that the financial model undergirding much of higher education is weak and getting weaker. The way colleges are financed is out of date with the demands of a much larger student population. Few people outside higher education are aware of this, but college and university leaders are deeply concerned. Read more...

By Stephen Burd. In the fall of 2011, Career Education Corporation (CECO) revealed that a significant number of its schools had cooked the books on the job placement rates they were disclosing to prospective students and regulators. Now investors in the giant for-profit higher education company are about to earn a nice profit for these misdeeds. A federal judge has given his preliminary approval to a $27.5 million settlement that CECO has reached with shareholders to put an end to a lawsuit they brought accusing the company of deceiving them about its record of placing graduates into jobs. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. A group of Senate Democrats announced Thursday a new push to provide student loan borrowers with more protections and hold colleges more accountable for loan defaults. In a call with reporters, Senators Richard Durbin of Illlinois, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts highlighted a package of new and existing proposals aimed at reducing the burden of student debt. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has a message for the federal government and regional accreditors: Go easy on the MOOCs. In a report released on Wednesday, the council of engineers and scientists recommends the federal government not interfere with vendors and providers experimenting with massive open online courses and other forms of distance education. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. In response to the uptick in journals with questionable editorial practices that have followed in the wake of the open-access movement, several publishing associations are banding together over a new set of principles to tell the legitimate journals from the crowd. The Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association and the World Association of Medical Editors on Thursday announced the “Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.” Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Colleges and universities that offer distance education are increasingly building their courses to conform with widely accepted best practices for all of higher education, but a study by the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies shows many institutions fail to collect crucial data needed to track the effectiveness of programs. The cooperative, founded by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, regularly polls its members to understand how institutions are providing distance education. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Patricia Adler stunned her students in a popular course on deviance Thursday by announcing that she would be leaving her tenured position teaching sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Adler said that officials told her that one of the highlights of the course -- popular year after year -- had to go. That is an annual lecture on prostitution (a topic covered in deviance courses nationwide). Read more...

By Paul Fain. The U.S. Department of Education’s rulemaking session on “gainful employment” regulations ended Friday in a stalemate. A panel of department-appointed negotiators was unable to reach consensus on the proposed standards for vocational programs at for-profit institutions and community colleges. Dissent came from representatives of both the for-profit and consumer-group camps. Read more...

By John Ross for The Australian. Marketing practices employed by almost half of Australia's 4,900-odd training colleges could jeopardize their government approval to operate, a new report suggests. 
A review of about one-tenth of college websites, conducted by the national vocational training regulator, has found that 45 percent may be in breach of registration standards. Read more...