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The cost of a college education in Virginia is going up … again.
According to the State Council of Higher Education, undergraduates at the state’s public four-year universities will pay 5.2 percent more in tuition and mandatory fees in 2015 than they did a year ago. This year’s increase is up from 4.3 percent last year and 4.1 in the 2012-2013 academic year. Between 2008 and 2012, state tuition increases averaged 8.4 percent, with a high-water mark of 10.6 percent in 2011. More...

U.S. President Barack Obama says he wants to make sure that obtaining a higher education is affordable.
The U.S. leader said Saturday in his weekly address that paying for a higher education is a "constant struggle" for too many families and he wants to reverse that with new initiatives. More...

By Patricia A. Gentile. Derrick Z. Jackson got it half right — Massachusetts is not a two-tiered public higher education state (“Pricing out state university students”). It has three tiers, and they include community colleges, where the most at-risk, lowest-income, greatest-minority students receive the least amount of public support and shoulder the highest percentage of financial burden to pursue their dreams. The 15 Massachusetts community colleges enroll 57 percent of the total undergraduates in public higher education, more than UMass and state colleges and universities combined. Yet our sector only receives 25 percent of the total higher-education pie. UMass student support is three times higher per student, with public colleges and universities two times higher. More...

By Scott D. Gerber. A new academic year is upon us. Students, parents, and faculty are excited. But they are also nervous. These are difficult times for higher education in America. At all but the nation's top colleges and universities, enrollments are down and budgets are strapped. Many explanations have been offered about why higher education is floundering: wasteful administrative bloat and a reckless construction frenzy make almost every critics' list. Rightly so. After all, how many assistant deans and new athletic fields does a college really need? Far fewer than academic bureaucrats seem to think, in my humble opinion. More...

By Eric Schulzke. Only 5 percent of people who start a free online "massive open enrollment course," or MOOC, finish the course. This a fact often cited as an indictment of MOOCs. But is that really the measure of success?
MOOCs are courses provided by some of the world's best universities free online to anyone who wants to sign up, watch the lectures, read the materials and participate in online forums. Some classes provide completion certificates to participants who pay a small fee and complete all the assigments. More...

By Matt Krupnick. An increasing number of schools are unable to balance their books. Make sure yours is not one of them.
When Corinthian Colleges Inc. agreed in July to sell off or close nearly all of its 107 campuses, it left 72,000 students wondering about their futures—and whether they should have seen the writing on the wall. More...

By Christine Kern. Technology is becoming an invaluable tool in today’s classrooms. Yet, there is a lot more to education technology then just ensuring every student has access to a computer. Teachers need to be adequately trained in incorporating technology into the daily curriculum and instruction. Students will be better served if they are using technology as an on-going part of the learning process, rather than a separate activity. More...

By Debra Erdley. Trustees at many American colleges and universities abandoned the public trust and allowed standards to slip even as costs soared and public confidence in higher education declined, a report says. Governance for a New Era, a scathing report issued Tuesday by a panel of 22 college presidents, academics, trustees, policy makers and business leaders, challenged college governing boards to reclaim their responsibilities, press for reforms and demand results from the institutions they oversee. Read more...

By Bob Woods. When the 10 members of the American Association of Community Colleges' (AACC) 21st-Century Implementation Team 7 — nine of them community college presidents — sat down last year to talk about reforming institutional roles and functions at the nation’s two-year career and technical colleges, everyone in the room knew the work before them would be difficult. More...