By Glenn C. Altschuler. For decades now, email has been the preferred form of communication for individuals in large and small organizations, including colleges and universities. The impact of the use of email on the need for vital primary sources for institutional histories, however, has been little noticed, let alone addressed. And the clock is ticking. Read more...

By John F. Ebersole. "Competency-based” education appears to be this year’s answer to America’s higher education challenges, judging from this week's news in Washington. Unlike MOOCs (last year’s solution), there is, refreshingly, greater emphasis on the validation of learning. Yet, all may not be as represented. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday approved an overhaul of higher education tax breaks and passed legislation changing how federal student loan counseling works. The tax measure, which is part of the House Republicans' overall effort to make changes to the tax code, contains some provisions that colleges and universities strongly support. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. The U.S. House on Wednesday unanimously passed legislation boosting competency-based education and overwhelmingly approved an overhaul of how the Education Department discloses college data. Read more...

By Elizabeth Redden. The debate about whether North American colleges should host Confucius Institutes – centers for Chinese language and culture study funded by an entity of the Chinese government – has intensified in recent weeks. About 90 American universities and eight Canadian higher education institutions house Confucius Institutes, which are run in collaboration with Chinese partner universities and staffed, in part, by visiting language instructors hired by Hanban, the Chinese government agency that oversees the Confucius Institutes as well as a parallel program at the K-12 level, the Confucius Classrooms. Hanban also supplies Confucius Institutes with Chinese language textbooks and teaching materials. Read more...

By Charlie Tyson. Testifying at a Thursday Senate hearing on how states could promote college affordability, Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, told senators that the federal government wasn’t doing enough for student borrowers. But it was hard to find agreement on whether to focus on that issue, state appropriations for higher education, for-profit colleges or issues such as health care policy as senators and higher education experts considered how federal and state governments could work together to reduce college costs. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Litigation and political battles about affirmative action tend to focus on undergraduate or professional school admissions, which are supervised by admissions professionals. In Ph.D. admissions, faculty members are the key players. And although they too must weigh the relative value of various measures of merit, and how much diversity should be considered a form of merit, a separate qualification or not considered at all. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Community colleges across the country that don’t offer access to federal student loans are imperiling nearly one million students who may turn to riskier forms of credit to fund their education, according to a report released Monday by the Institute for College Access & Success. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. If students in a face-to-face course emailed their provost with concerns that their professor had stopped lecturing, chances are that someone -- a department head or an administrator -- would intervene. But what if the students were scattered across different countries and time zones in a not-for-credit massive open online course?
The issue of MOOC quality control has resurfaced in the wake of the #MassiveTeaching debacle, the MOOC-turned-social experiment that last week inspired a scavenger hunt across the internet. Read more...