Democrats in the U.S. House of Representative on Wednesday unveiled their response to the Republican 2015 fiscal year budget released last week by Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Read more...

A day after the American Association of Community Colleges said it would not have anything to say about hiring a Bill Clinton impersonator to appear at the annual meeting, the association is apologizing and blaming the comedian. The performance stunned and angered many attendees, many of whom walked out of the event. Many considered the jokes sexist, vulgar and inappropriate for a gathering of community college leaders. Read more...

Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday defended the Obama administration’s proposed college ratings system to several Republican lawmakers, who criticized the plan. Testifying before the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees the department’s budget, Duncan said that the college ratings system was needed to provide students with better information and to provide more accountability for taxpayer money. The department’s 2015 fiscal year budget request seeks $10 million to help develop the ratings system. Read more...

By Jerome P. DeSanto and Robyn L. Dickinson. The higher education chief information officer role continues to evolve rapidly, struggling to keep pace with the technology innovations that are continuing to speed to market. Higher education CIOs wrestle with a long list of priorities that consume their time. Cloud computing, virtualization, teaching and learning technologies, risk management, information management and security, enterprise resource management (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, business process improvement, disaster recovery, and on and on. Read more...

By Bryan Alexander. American higher education now seems to be recovering at last from the 2008 financial crisis. Some states are increasing their support for public universities and colleges. Backlash against the impact of budget cuts seems to have the idea of austerity down a peg, if not discredited it entirely, which might free up more budgetary room for governmental support of education. On the private side, institutional endowments are finally rising after years of stagnation and decline. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The idea of "undermatching" -- the view of education researchers that many talented high school students never apply to competitive colleges that might well admit them -- has captured widespread attention among researchers and policy makers in the last two years. The Obama administration, many elite colleges and educational organizations have all announced initiatives to combat undermatching. And, as is the case with many hot scholarly ideas, other researchers have questioned some of the assumptions behind those who have promoted the undermatching idea. Read more...

By Paul Fain. More than half the nation’s most vulnerable college students are in courses taught by part-time, adjunct faculty members who lack the job security, credentials and experience of full-time professors – as well as the campus support their full-time peers receive. Community colleges rely on part-time, “contingent” instructors to teach 58 percent of their courses, according to a new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement. Part-time faculty teach more than half (53 percent) of students at two-year institutions. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Many a would-be graduate student has debated whether to enroll in a top-ranked program or another one that -- for reasons fair or unfair -- isn't so highly ranked but may seem a better fit. A study released here at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association suggests that there could be quantifiable evidence that prestige pays off. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. An almost countless number of ideas for revamping accreditation have pinballed around Washington in recent years, as higher education's system of peer-reviewed institutional accountability has been bashed on the one hand for lax oversight of poor-performing institutions and on the other for overregulation and quashing innovation. Many of the ideas are either impractical (because they would cost too much to replace the volunteer-dependent system that is in place now) or politically unfeasible (because they would entail even more government involvement). Read more...