The for-profit sector's primary trade group on Thursday filed suit in federal court to block gainful employment regulations, which the U.S. Department of Education unveiled last week. A federal judge in 2012 halted a previous attempt by the Obama administration to enact rules for vocational programs at for-profits, community colleges and other institutions. Read more...

President Obama, after his party's losses in Tuesday's Congressional elections, said Wednesday that he would seek to find agreement with Republicans on some higher education issues.
Obama said several times during a news conference at the White House that college affordability and student loans are issues on which he was ready to work with Republicans to find common ground during the last two years of his administration. Read more...

University leaders in Norway are working against a government plan to force them to charge tuition to students from outside the European Union, News in English Norway reported. Tuition is free in Norway -- for Norwegians and others -- but the new government has adopted a budget that assumes charges of about $15,000 for those outside the European Union. Norwegian academics note that when Sweden started charging foreign students, its foreign enrollments fell. Read more...

The English department at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Ontario, has announced that all syllabuses will note that the university is built on land that belonged to Native Canadian groups. The statement will say: “We acknowledge that we are on the traditional territory of ‎ the Neutral, Anishnawbe and Haudenosaunee peoples.” A statement from the department chair, Ute Lischke, said, “In many of our classes at Laurier we critique power dynamics and including this acknowledgement on our course outlines certainly helps to raise students’ awareness about the continuing nature of colonialism. Read more...

The Association of American Universities, a group of the nation’s leading research institutions, on Monday criticized an inquiry by the U.S. House science committee into specific National Science Foundation grants. The panel, led by Republican Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, has been requesting information from the NSF about specific grants the agency awarded through its peer review process. Smith has long criticized some NSF research grants as an example of unnecessary or wasteful government spending. Earlier this year, he led efforts in the House to pass new restrictions on how the NSF could fund social science research, a singling out of that discipline that was widely criticized among academic researchers.  It also drew a rare critique by the National Science Board. Read more...