By G. Rendell. It's cold season here in Backboro. It;s cold, even for February. And it's stayed cold pretty much all month. And so people have colds (go figure!).
By Jane Robbins. I have come out of my hiatus from this Sounding Board blog to respond to an anonymous question I received (and apologizes for how long it has taken). The questions is:
The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday voted to regulate the Internet as a public utility, a major win for the "net neutrality" advocates -- including higher education groups -- that lobbied the agency to ban paid traffic prioritization on the Internet. Read more...
The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved legislation to expand the tax benefits of 529 college-savings accounts, less than a month after the Obama administration's failed bid to raise taxes on such accounts. Read more...
The Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which certifies universities to host foreign students and scholars and maintains a database that tracks international students’ whereabouts in the United States, will continue to operate in the case of a possible Department of Homeland Security shutdown, though its activities may be hobbled due to reduced manpower in administrative offices. Read more...
The American Association of University Professors on Tuesday joined a chorus of other organizations and academics that have criticized a controversial recommendation that the board of the University of North Carolina System shutter the Chapel Hill campus's Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. Read more...
A federal panel on Tuesday began a set of negotiations aimed at drafting new regulations to expand the availability of income-based student loan repayment to more borrowers. The negotiated rule-making committee, which the U.S. Education Department announced in December, is charged with carrying out President Obama's June 2014 memorandum that would make an additional 5 million existing student loan borrowers eligible for the federal government’s most generous income-based repayment program, Pay as You Earn. Read more...
The Federal Bureau of Investigation recruited a University of South Florida business professor and former head of its Confucius Institute as a spy, Bloomberg reported. The article recounts how Dajin Peng, a Chinese-born U.S. citizen, agreed to provide information on his home country. Read more...
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center this week released state-level student completion data. The nonprofit center tracked 2.7 million students who first enrolled in college in the fall of 2008, following them for 6 years. The report builds on the center's previous research, which found more encouraging graduation rates than other studies had identified. Read more...
British people see academic careers as desirable -- and as more desirable than careers that might strike many Americans as more attractive, according to a new poll from YouGov. The poll asked Britons whether they would like to do various jobs, and 51 percent said they would like to be an academic. Read more...
