By Michael Stratford. From the moment President Obama called for a federal college ratings system some 18 months ago, colleges and universities have criticized the idea and lobbied against it. Read more...

By Paul Fain. The online, competency-based certificate Bellevue College offered last year was a hit with students. In fact, the certificate in business software was so popular that the two-year college in Washington State decided to drop its conventional online version. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Community college students should be able to afford to take two courses every spring, summer and fall semester, a new policy paper from New America argues, but a number of barriers -- especially surrounding financial aid -- “impede the flexibility” those students need to earn a degree. Read more...

By Ry Rivard. In 2010, the Vermont liberal arts college announced it would not raise its sticker price more than one percentage point above the rate of inflation. Last year, the college began to back away from the plan. Now it seems likely to abandon it altogether. Read more...

By Kaitlin Mulhere. Most research on the payoff of attending community college actually doesn’t measure the effect of attending, but rather what happens for those who graduate. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. In a time in which the majority of students going abroad are doing so on highly structured, faculty-led, short-term programs -- some as short as one week -- “How are we guiding students to go beyond their comfort zone?” asked Mary Anne Grant, president and CEO of International Student Exchange Programs (ISEP) at a session Tuesday at the Association of International Education Administrators’ annual conference. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. In international education circles, it’s not uncommon to hear of an institution that has 100 or more partnerships with foreign universities -- several hundred, even. But how should universities assess the value of these partnerships and determine which ones to prioritize -- and which ones, perhaps, to prune? Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. There is wide agreement in North Carolina that Gene Nichol is an articulate and forceful advocate for the impoverished of his state, unafraid to criticize political leaders who in his opinion aren't doing enough about poverty. Nichol does so from an academic perch. He is a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and leads the university's Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Many social scientists believe that their disciplines have never been more important to society -- and yet they feel that they struggle for support from governments and other funding entities. The essays in Why the Social Sciences Matter (Palgrave Macmillan) cover topics such as parenting, climate change, poverty, the Arab Spring and more. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. A common refrain from adjunct professors who get relatively low pay and little institutional support is that their working conditions are students’ learning conditions. But many colleges and universities continue to ignore that message and rely on part-time faculty to deliver the majority of instruction. A new paper is calling out those institutions for their lack of attention to faculty career designs and is demanding meaningful, collaborative discussions to address what it calls an existential threat to American higher education. Read more...