A new bill introduced in the U.S. Senate seeks to tackle the rising cost of textbooks by giving states an incentive to experiment with open educational resources. The Affordable College Textbook Act, introduced by U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Al Franken, Democrats of Illinois and Minnesota, respectively, would create a grant program that would fund the creation of new textbooks -- as long as they are made available for free online. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Community college students face long odds of eventually earning a bachelor’s degree. And those odds get worse if they leave college more than once along the way. That is the central finding of a new study that tracked the progress of 38,000 community college students in Texas. Toby J. Park, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at Florida State University, conducted the research. His working paper was presented Thursday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in St. Louis. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Michelle Obama on Tuesday kicked off a new White House push to increase the number of low-income students who apply to and graduate from college. Speaking to students at a high school here, the first lady drew on her own personal experiences as a first-generation college student who earned two Ivy League degrees to encourage students to set high expectations and take responsibility for their own higher education. She also highlighted the president’s oft-stated goal of having the highest percentage of college graduates in the world by 2020. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Test-takers who took the GRE in 2012-13 were more likely to be a bit younger and a bit more science-oriented than those who took the exam the year before. And in the quantitative portion of the exam, in particular, foreign talent appears to be outpacing American. These are some of the findings in the latest “Snapshot” of GRE test-takers, released today by the Educational Testing Service. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Most of the existing research on the employment of adjunct faculty and student success shows a negative relationship, not because adjuncts are bad teachers but because their working conditions prevent them from being as effective as they could be. But earlier this fall, a much-cited study disputed by some, showed the opposite: that students actually may learn more from adjunct faculty members -- at least at research universities that can afford to pay part-timers well and that may discourage tenure-track faculty members from focusing on teaching. Now, a preliminary study is mixing up the literature once again, concluding that employment of adjunct faculty has no impact on student success in community colleges. Read more...