By Nick DeSantis. President Obama on Wednesday announced the creation of two institutes in the Detroit and Chicago areas that will pair universities with private companies and nonprofit organizations in an effort to spur innovations in manufacturing. The new institutes are being supported by $140-million in federal money and an additional $140-million from nonfederal sources. More...

By Nick DeSantis. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, the American Osteopathic Association, and the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine on Wednesday announced that they had reached an agreement on a unified system of accreditation for graduate medical-education programs in the United States. The agreement builds on a preliminary pact the three groups announced previously, in 2012. More...

By Nick DeSantis. The number of students enrolled in college will grow by 14 percent from the fall of 2011 to the fall of 2022, but that rate of growth will be considerably smaller than the 45-percent increase during the previous 14-year period, according to projections in a U.S. Department of Education report released on Thursday. More...

By Eric Hoover. Rob Killion, the Common Application’s executive director, has left the organization he led for nearly 10 years, but he insists he did not do so willingly. Late Wednesday afternoon, the Common Application announced that Mr. Killion had stepped down. In an interview, Thyra Briggs, president of the Common App’s Board of Directors, said Mr. Killion had decided to leave following conversations about the organization’s future. “Ultimately, it was Rob’s decision to step down,” she said. More...

By Libby Sander. Will allowing students to register in advance for a year’s worth of courses keep them enrolled and on track to a degree?
That’s the question Sandy McGlothlin and her colleagues at California’s West Hills Community College District hope to answer with Reg365. This spring, the district will roll out the new policy, which will give students at the district’s three colleges a chance to sign up during spring registration for classes in the following summer, fall, and spring. More...

By Lawrence Biemiller. In the wake of a 2013 ruckus that cost a top Harvard University dean her job, a committee appointed by Harvard’s president has recommended that the university adopt institutionwide standards for gaining access to email and other accounts used by students, faculty members, and employees.
“At present, the university lacks a clear, overarching policy in this area,” says the committee’s report. More...

By Lawrence Biemiller. Next time you’re at the diner for breakfast, try ordering “Zeppelins in a cloud.” That’s slang for sausages and mashed potatoes, inspired by the airships used for spying and bombing during World War I, according to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. The distinctive flying machines “must have captured the imaginations of soldiers,” the editors say. But Oxford’s word sleuths have been able to trace the use of the phrase only back to 1925, when it turned up in Edward Fraser and John Gibbons’s Soldier & Sailor Words. So the OED’s lexicographers have put out an appeal to the public, asking for help in hunting down earlier uses of “Zeppelins in a cloud” and a handful of other terms “related to or coined during the war.” The Great War appeals list includes “shell shock,” “camouflage,” “trench foot,” and “demob,” along with words not often heard by modern ears: “conchie” (a conscientious objector), for instance, or “jusqu’auboutiste” (someone who fights to the bitter end, from the French “jusqu’au bout”). Another featured word, “skive” (“to avoid work”), remains in circulation in Britain but doesn’t seem to have invaded American English. More...

By Lawrence Biemiller. The nonprofit online-learning organization edX will work with Facebook and two other companies to provide free, localized education to students in Rwanda on “affordable” smart phones, Facebook and edX said on Monday.
edX, a provider of massive open online courses that was founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will help create a mobile teaching app that is integrated with Facebook and “optimized for a low-bandwidth environment.” As part of the program, called SocialEDU, edX will also work with the Rwandan government to adapt materials for a pilot course. More...