By Gintautas Dumcius. The Massachusetts Legislature should pass a higher education borrowing bill to meet $4.2 billion in deferred maintenance needs, add $95 million a year for five years to public higher education institutions' coffers, and boost student financial assistance by $210 million, a state higher education commission said in its report Tuesday. The report also called for state higher education officials, including the commissioner, the chair of the board of higher education and the secretary of education, to work with community college representatives to refine a performance-based funding formula, and create one for the state universities. Read more...

By Brent Staples. The United States set out 40 years ago to ensure that people who qualified academically for higher education would not be turned away for financial reasons and would have access to college degrees that allowed them to move up on the social ladder. This plan required the states to subsidize public colleges and universities to keep tuition affordable, while the federal government furnished the poorest students with Pell Grants that largely covered the remaining costs. More...

By Alice Culp. In 2012, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education set a goal that 60 percent of Hoosiers obtain credentials or degrees beyond high school by 2025. It based its goal on a Georgetown University study, which suggested that more than 60 percent of expected Indiana job vacancies in 2020 would require postsecondary education. More...

By Kyla Calvert. State funding for higher education isn’t what it used to be. The fact that most public colleges and universities took a significant hit when state revenues fell during the recession is well documented. Five years into the economic recovery, 31 states have yet to return to funding higher education at the same levels they did in 2007. Even in many states where funding has bounced back, increasing enrollment has kept per-student spending from rising. More...

By Chris Kirkham. The Obama administration on Thursday will publish new regulations intended to target for-profit career colleges that leave students with debts they cannot repay.
The U.S. Department of Education rules will sanction schools with students who carry too much debt compared with their earnings after graduation. Programs that fail to meet debt-to-income requirements for two out of three consecutive years would lose eligibility for federal student loans and grants -- the primary revenue stream at for-profit colleges. More...

When the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) enrolled over a hundred thousand students from all over the world, it started an education buzz about how technology could revolutionize higher education. A few years later, MOOCs haven’t exactly replaced expensive college degrees, but edX CEO Anant Agarwal says the MIT experiment with MOOCs has given educators important insights into how students learn. More...