By Ashley A. Smith. Community colleges tend to receive the least amount of public financial support compared to other institutions, yet they are asked to push high numbers of low-income students into the middle class with few resources. A report released by the Century Foundation today -- "How Higher Education Funding Shortchanges Community Colleges" -- calls on states to reform funding models to better help two-year institutions jump-start social mobility. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. Sometimes, solutions come easily. After the University of Texas at Austin started holding study abroad-focused receptions for sophomores receiving Pell Grants, the number of students receiving federally funded Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships -- which are only available to students on Pell Grants -- "shot up," said Heather Barclay Hamir, the former director of study abroad at UT Austin and now the president-elect at the Institute for Study Abroad, Butler University. Read more...

By Jacqueline Thomsen. A program aimed at helping adults finish incomplete degrees will be Rhode Island’s newest college.
College Unbound, a degree-completion program and now a private nonprofit college, will be allowed to award undergraduate degrees in Rhode Island, the state's Council on Postsecondary Education ruled unanimously Wednesday. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Most colleges are considering applicants' high school disciplinary records, even without formal policies on what role these records should play in admissions decisions, according to a survey conducted by the Center for Community Alternatives. Read more...

By Jake New. Despite merit-based college admissions, equal opportunity employment regulations and the long-held idea that in America, hard work is the key to social mobility, affluent graduates from elite institutions are still often the ones who find the highest-paying entry-level jobs. In her new book, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton University Press),Lauren Rivera, an associate professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, aims to find out why. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The U.S. Department of Education said Tuesday that its four main federal student loan servicers, including Navient, have mostly followed the law in granting special interest-rate benefits to members of the military. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. The University of Oklahoma raised some eyebrows last year when it announced it was partnering with the History Channel to offer a new U.S. history survey course. The thrust of the initial interest was the university’s decision to pair up with a relatively old-school medium -- cable television -- to offer distance learning in the midst of a digital platform boom. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. What are the root causes of inequality? Why does war break out? What stories can data tell about politics? These are some of the big questions many undergraduates hope to tackle in introductory level political science, only to find that departments on the vast majority of campuses ask them to choose specialized subfields -- heavy on theory and modeling -- early on. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Columbia University’s engineering school is experiencing a surge of interest in its online programs after partnering with a start-up that promises to find universities the online students they should be enrolling in the first place. Read more...