House Republicans on Thursday released a package of three bills that kick off their step-by-step approach to rewriting the Higher Education Act.

• The first bill aims to boost financial counseling for students who take out federal loans or grants. Read more...

The California State Auditor on Thursday issued a scathing report on the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), the regional accreditor that has come under fire for its handling of the City College of San Francisco crisis. The auditor's office said the commission acted in an inconsistent manner with its decision to terminate City College's accreditation. Read more...

By Wade Dyke. There is a pattern of dishonesty taking place in some of the criticism of for-profit colleges. Too frequently, opponents of the sector take advantage of students and use an individual as a “straw man” to try to prove a point about student debt and tuition. Read more...

By Ry Rivard. Elizabeth City State University faced a brief existential crisis last month when North Carolina lawmakers toyed with the idea of closing the historically black institution. The lawmakers backed off, but the episode was just one in a series of challenges facing the country’s 40 public historically black four-year colleges and universities. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. Hardly a day goes that doesn't bring the release of some analysis or another about higher education. But an unusually large number of reports and studies about college financial aid and finances were released Tuesday (or are being made public today). The following are brief summaries of them, with links for those who want to dig deeper. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. The efforts to preserve digital humanities research are as numerous as the definitions of the catchall term, according to a report that urges institutions to develop their own strategies to preserve resources that can’t simply be bound and stored in a library. The report, “Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host Institution Support Beyond the Start-Up Phase,” represents an effort by co-authors Nancy L. Maron and Sarah Pickle, a program director and analyst at the consulting firm Ithaka S+R, respectively, to study how institutions support digital resources created on their campuses. The work builds on an earlier report that looked at similar efforts in the United Kingdom. Read more...

By Isabel López Ruiz for Times Higher Education. Over the past few years, there have been growing attempts in Spain to increase discussion in academe about plagiarism, and establish official policies and remedies to combat the problem. A trail has been blazed by academics at the University of Granada; in 2008 they launched a teacher-led initiative named Plataforma contra el Plagio (Platform Against Plagiarism). Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Good graduate student advising is both an art and a science. But what books there are on good advising tend to focus on the science: how to tackle the dissertation, part by part, or how to help a student secure funding. So what about those more nuanced, personal aspects of advising, such as how to help a student through a major life transition? Or what to say when he discloses something private, such as the fact that he has a learning disability?
While some will say the art of advising can’t be taught outright, a new book aims to outline the human side of business. Bruce M. Shore, professor emeritus of educational psychology at McGill University, wrote The Graduate Advisor Handbook: A Student-Centered Approach (University of Chicago Press) to pass on what he learned over more than 40 years as a professor and to fill a perceived gap in the literature. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Many lower-income students wrestle with doubts about belonging in college -- particularly first-generation college students. Yet while experts say doling out positive reinforcement could improve graduation rates, systematic methods of giving students a pat on the back remain rare. Read more...

By Charlie Tyson. Minutes into a State Department-backed presentation on online courses, department officials tried to load and play a short video about the merits of MOOCs. The sound system seemed to be out, and the video wasn’t streaming properly. One panelist experimented, holding a microphone to the central computer. Read more...