Formation Continue du Supérieur

The Education Department on Friday announced the negotiators who will hammer out new rules for PLUS loans, campus debit cards, state authorization for distance programs and other topics on the administration’s sweeping second-term regulatory agenda. The negotiated-rulemaking panel will convene for the first time on February 19 and meet several times over the next several months to address a range of regulations for institutions that receive federal student aid and the companies the handle the disbursement of that money. Read more...

A new study (abstract available here) from the National Bureau of Economic Research tracks 10 year student loan default rates for those who earned bachelor's degrees in 1993. The study warns against common assumptions about who may default. "Given the importance of post-school earnings for repayment, it is natural to expect that differences in average earnings levels across demographic groups or college majors would translate into corresponding differences in repayment/nonpayment rates, but this is not always the case," the report says. Read more...

An electronic textbook pilot has, once again, reported lukewarm interest among college students -- this time at the University of Iowa. Sponsored by Educause and Internet2, the fall 2012 pilot involved about 600 students across 17 different courses, comparing results of students using e-textbooks from McGraw-Hill Education and Courseload to students in similar courses who used print books. Most students preferred the print books, calling them "easier to access and more useful for learning," and few students used the e-textbooks' bookmarking and note taking features. Read more...

Britain's home office has suspended the administration of English language tests run by the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service after the BBC news program, "Panorama," uncovered “systematic fraud” at British test centers. As summarized in this BBC article, Panorama recorded instances of Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) examinees being replaced by “fake-sitters” who completed the test for them, and of a proctor reading the correct answers aloud to test takers. Read more...

The Common Application announced Tuesday that it is keeping the current essay prompts (and word limit of 650 words). When the prompts were introduced last year, they received mix reviews, but the Common Application announcement said that a survey found that 70 percent of member colleges and 90 percent of school counselors approved of the prompts. Read more...

It will take significant cooperation among state and federal policy makers, traditional educational institutions and others to improve American adults' work force and literacy skills, the American Council on Education argues in a new report. The report examines data released last year as part of Survey of Adult Skills from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which showed U.S. adults lagging behind those in many other countries on literacy and numeracy, and asserts that colleges and others will need to adopt new approaches to change that picture. Read more...

By Andrea Watson. The extensive marketing that some for-profit colleges use to woo prospective students and the intense criticism voiced by some Democratic politicians have largely dominated the national discussion about the college sector. A new survey from Public Agenda seeks to insert a set of missing voices into the dialogue -- those of students and alumni -- and their assessment is mixed. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. Everywhere you look, politicians are asserting that the public and taxpayers are questioning the value of higher education – and that their disappointment stems primarily from the fact that increasingly pricey college degrees aren’t leading to jobs. Governors in states such as Florida and North Carolina have asserted that their investments in higher education should be focused like a laser on degrees that lead directly to jobs. Read more...