By Michael Stratford. The array of different repayment options on federal student loans should be replaced with a single, income-based repayment system that automatically deducts payments from borrowers’ paychecks, according to a new policy proposal published Monday by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project
The paper argues that the current federal loan system (including its income-based repayment options) does not do a good job of preventing defaults because it is too complicated and burdens young workers with large payments when they are least able to handle them. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Even though colleges have slowed the rate at which they raise tuition, the total grant aid available to students has not been able to keep pace with tuition growth, according to two reports released Wednesday by the College Board. Public four-year institutions, after years of sharp increases, raised in-state tuition by only 2.9 percent this year, the smallest one-year increase in more than 30 years. Private, nonprofit four-year colleges increased their sticker price tag by 3.8 percent, which is slightly lower than recent tuition hikes. Read more...

By David Matthews for Times Higher Education. Slowly but surely, South Africa is moving away from the apartheid era’s ethnically segregated campuses and mainly white academic staff.
But two decades on from apartheid’s end, many have argued that change is happening too slowly, and one vice-chancellor is promoting a controversial ranking system intended to spur progress toward an academy that reflects South Africa’s ethnic mix. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Supporters of open-access journals and massive open online courses have been quick to label their initiatives disruptive, but a recent analysis by a York University professor suggests only one of them has the potential to spark considerable change, while the other is likely to remain an alternative alongside traditional offerings.
"Disruptive” has become one of higher education reformers’ favorite adjectives, jostling with “innovative” and “revolutionary” for the top spot. To mark Open Access Week, Richard Wellen, associate professor of business and society at York University in Canada, examines the degree to which open access alternatives in scholarship and research can change their respective areas within higher education. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. In an e-mail message to Wellesley College students and professors, President H. Kim Bottomly said she hopes the college’s partnership with Peking University can continue despite its controversial dismissal of Professor Xia Yeliang, and that she is supportive of efforts to bring Xia to campus as a visiting scholar. More than 130 Wellesley faculty members have signed a letter objecting to the termination of Xia “based solely on his political and philosophical views” and saying that they would urge the Wellesley administration to reconsider the college’s institutional partnership with Peking in the event that Xia was fired -- as he ultimately was on Friday. Read more...

By Ry Rivard. For years, colleges have sought out applicants who have high test scores or who can throw a football. But increasingly the targets are far more precise, in part because of technology and in part because recruiters are under the gun to meet enrollment goals.
Now, it’s easier for recruiters to use millions of high school students' personal information to target them for certain traits, including family income or ethnicity, or even to predict which students will apply, enroll and stay in college. Read more...

By Jonathan Marks. My first political philosophy teacher was the great Joseph Cropsey who, when we came to a difficult problem in Plato, would sometimes exhort us.
“Courage,” he would say, knowing that we were tempted to quit, not only  because Plato was a hard read but also because there was much in us, from vanity to laziness to fear, that resisted education.
Like Cropsey, Mark Edmundson thinks that education makes demands on a student’s character. In his 1997 Harper’s essay, “On The Uses of A Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students,” he retells the story of a professor who supposedly issued “a harsh two-part question. Read more...

By Carolyn Foster Segal. The news that the BBC-sponsored dog named Pete, using the alias Peter Smith, has procured an online M.B.A. from the American University of London has sent our household into a literal tailspin. It is not the first time that our cat, Finn Segal, has disappointed us by failing to live up to our expectations, but this may be the last straw. Perhaps most disconcerting is that even now he shows no concern and has stubbornly assumed his usual meatloaf position in a sunny spot. Read more...

By William G. Durden. Several decades ago – long before the level of technological sophistication we experience today -- I was part of a movement begun by the late Julian Stanley, a psychology professor, and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (CTY) to save academically talented youth from boredom in the schools. The most controversial instrument to rescue them was a pedagogical practice called, rather prosaically, "Diagnostic Testing Followed by Prescriptive Instruction" or, shorthand, “DT>PI.” It was principally applied to the pre-collegiate mathematics curriculum and relied on just a few key assumptions and practices:
1. Students already know something about a subject before they formally study it.
2. Test students before a course begins and then just instruct them on what they don’t know.
3. Test students again when you as the instructor and they as learners believe they have competency in a subject.
4. Move immediately to the next level of instruction. Read more...

By Scott McLemee. Not long ago, this column took up the perennial issue of academic prose and how it gets that way. On hand, fortunately, was Michael Billig’s Learn to Write Badly, a smart and shrewd volume that avoids mere complaint or satirical overkill.
Bad scholarly writing is, after all, something like Chevy Chase’s movie career. People think that making fun of it is like shooting fish in a barrel. But it’s not as easy as shooting fish in a barrel: to borrow Todd Berry’s assessment of his comedic colleague, “It’s as easy as looking at fish in a barrel. It’s as easy as being somewhere near a barrel.” Besides, it’s gone on for at least 500 years (the mockery began with Rabelais, if not before) so it’s not as if there are many new jokes on the subject. Read more...