By Charles Huckabee. Florida is poised to join the growing list of states that allow students who were brought into the United States illegally as children to qualify for lower in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities, according to reports by The Miami Herald and The New York Times. On Thursday the State Senate approved an amended version of a bill that has previously passed the House of Representatives and that Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, supports. More...

By Beckie Supiano. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators released on Thursday updated versions of its Statement of Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct. The revised documents incorporate member feedback from draft versions released in February. The association also plans to add enforcement provisions, said Justin Draeger, its president. Those will be available in draft form for member feedback before the group’s annual meeting, in late June. More...

By Heidi Landecker. Condoleezza Rice, who served as secretary of state under President George W. Bush and is now a professor at Stanford University, has decided not to speak at the graduation ceremony at Rutgers University, following a protest by students and the faculty. The objections involved Secretary Rice’s role in the war in Iraq, waterboarding, and other controversies of the Bush administration. More...

By Nick DeSantis. Fifty-four percent of business leaders believe the American higher-education system is falling behind developing and emerging countries in preparing students for the work force, according to a poll released by Northeastern University. The survey is the third in a series by the institution. More...

By Nick DeSantis. Michelle Obama on Friday introduced a public campaign encouraging students to pursue and complete a higher education. In a speech at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she participated in a citywide “College Signing Day,” the first lady unveiled a name for her recent efforts to promote college attainment. More...

By Steve Kolowich. In a pilot program with Coursera, the New York Public Library plans to organize meet-ups at which people taking massive open online courses can gather and discuss the courses with help from “trained facilitators.”
The partnership is part the MOOC company’s effort to build an infrastructure for in-person learning around its free online courses. Research has suggested that MOOC students who receive offline help earn higher scores on their assessments. More...

By Steve Kolowich. Under pressure from privacy advocates, Google announced on Wednesday that it had permanently removed all ads from its Apps for Education, including its email service, so the company can no longer harvest students’ information for advertising purposes. Google had previously given college administrators the option of allowing the company to scan student Gmail accounts for key words and to deliver targeted advertisements to those students. More...

By Danya Perez-Hernandez. Blackboard, the company that produces a leading learning-management platform, has announced a partnership with Discovery Education Higher Ed, an arm of Discovery Communications, the Discovery Channel’s parent. The two companies aim to engage students and faculty members through the use of digital media. More...

By Danya Perez-Hernandez. The open-source textbook publisher OpenStax College, based at Rice University, has cut a distribution deal with a subsidiary of the National Association of College Stores that will lower prices on print versions of OpenStax textbooks. OpenStax, a two-year-old nonprofit venture, offers open-source textbooks that are free online and that cost from $30 to $54 in print versions. More...

By Danya Perez-Hernandez. Last year Coursera announced partnerships with international organizations to expand the number of its massive open online courses available in foreign languages. Now the for-profit MOOC provider is going a step further by establishing a Global Translator Community in which individuals will volunteer to help translate lectures. More...