By Tracy Lorenz. A few weeks ago, I came upon a radio program where the host and a caller were debating the benefits of pursuing a college degree. The volley of opinions covered the angles of the current debate on the value of education. They expressed thoughts such as: "An education is always worth pursuing...," "But do the costs always offer a good return on investment...," "You must have a degree to compete in today's workforce...," "Many students, though, are graduating with degrees but with limited job prospects, significant debt or both."
Sound familiar? This is precisely the kind of debate I hear more and more, not only as the president of Western International University (West), a part of Apollo Education Group, but also as a parent of kids who will be college bound in the next few years. More...

By Mary Beth. Small but growing numbers of community colleges are moving to drop the word "community" from their name, inspiring a sometimes passionate parsing of its meaning.
The move comes as more states allow two-year colleges to confer bachelor's degrees, which typically take four years or longer to complete.
Alert drivers in the Seattle area will notice over the next few months that 10 highway signs for three Seattle community colleges are being replaced with signs that say Seattle Colleges. Henry Ford College in Dearborn, Mich., just unveiled its new, shorter-by-a-word logo and marketing campaign. Nearly all of Florida's community colleges have changed their names; several now call themselves state colleges. More...

The Federal Trade Commission is warning that personal information about high school and college students could be put at risk in the pending sale of property owned by ConnectEDU, which is going through a bankruptcy proceeding. ConnectEDU, which offered college and career planning services, filed for Chapter bankruptcy protection last month. Read more...

A group of Congressional Democrats last week introduced a new legislative push to crack down on campus banking products, including student debit cards. Representative George Miller, the top Democrat on the House education committee, and Senator Tom Harkin, the chair of the Senate education committee, along with 63 other Democrats introduced a bill that would ban revenue-sharing agreements between colleges and student debit card providers. The bill would also prohibit gifts from campus card providers to college officials. Read more...

By Nick DeSantis. The number of controversies over speakers on college campuses has risen sharply in the last 15 years, says a report released on Wednesday by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group known as FIRE. More...

By Megan O'Neil. The University of Maryland at College Park has a new Ferrari of a supercomputer, and it’s students who are taking it for a test drive. Some 60 students enrolled in the university’s high-performance-computing boot camp, now in its second of two weeks, are the first to make use of Deepthought2, the newest supercomputer in higher education. The $4.2-million machine has a processing speed of about 300 teraflops, meaning it can complete up to 300 trillion operations per second, and it has a petabyte of storage. It is the equivalent of 10,000 laptops working together simultaneously, university officials say. Read more...

By Jonah Newman. The Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics released on Thursday its enormous annual report on the state of education in the United States. “The Condition of Education 2014” is based on 42 national indicators, from preschool enrollment to degree attainment to labor-force participation. More...

By Goldie Blumenstyk. The for-profit-college industry’s trade association, backed by a 100-page report by economists, is coming out swinging against the U.S. Department of Education’s draft "gainful employment" regulation. The proposal is "flawed, arbitrary, and biased," and will deny educational access to as many as 7.5 million students over the next decade, contends the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, or Apscu, in documents it is filing on Tuesday. Read more...

By John Warner. I despair. 
As reported by Michael D. Shear at the New York Times, Obama administration deputy undersecretary for education Jamienne Studley told a group of college presidents that when it comes to evaluating colleges, “It’s like rating a blender.” 
I despair because apparently Jamienne Studley is an important person in directing federal higher education policy. Read more...

By Matt Reed. Having worked in the community college world for the past eleven years, I’m used to a certain tone-deafness about community college from “opinion leaders” in and around higher education.  I’ve heard it referred to in lists of “alternatives to college.”  I’ve read the pieces on “undermatching” that equate community college attendance with failure. And normally I content myself with simple rebuttals, because I see the admirable truth on the ground every single day.  Most of the time, I’m content to put the information out there, and let it make its way on its own merits. Read more...