The student government of the Durban University of Technology, in South Africa, has called on the institution to expel Jewish students, although some quotes from student leaders suggest that Jewish students who support the Palestinian cause could remain, The Daily News reported. Read more...

Bryn Mawr College, a women's institution, announced Monday that it would admit certain groups of transgender students. Bryn Mawr's old policy did not ban transgender applicants, saying only that Bryn Mawr was a women's college and that "how an individual self-identifies in terms of gender, or any changes in self-identification while a student is enrolled here, are personal matters and not something the college tracks." The new policy explicitly welcomes some transgender applicants. Read more...

A new report -- funded by the Independent Petroleum Association of America -- argues that colleges that sell holdings in fossil fuel companies are likely to pay a financial price for doing so. Read more...

President Obama said Friday that the popularity of 529 college savings accounts made him abandon a proposal to end the tax benefits of those accounts just days after first proposing it. "It wasn’t worth it for us to eliminate it," he said during remarks at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana. Read more...

New data released by the National Science Foundation show that research and development spending by universities -- from all sources -- edged up slightly, to $67.2 billion in 2013. When adjusted for inflation, that reflects an increase of less than half of a percent. Read more...

University of California at Berkeley is “faced once again with the threat of political interference in academic affairs,” its chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, wrote Friday in the university’s student newspaper. Dirks (photo at right) took exception to California Governor Jerry Brown’s contention that the state’s flagship university has closed its doors to “normal” people. Read more...

It's become fashionable among some pundits and politicians to question the economic value of the bachelor's degree. But the latest unemployment figures, which show good hiring trends across the board, suggest to Bloomberg Business that there is one possible labor market problem for bachelor's degree holders: there may not be enough of them. Read more...

Just in time for tax season, hackers are escalating their efforts to impersonate the Internal Revenue Service in attempts to defraud taxpayers, the Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or REN-ISAC, warned on Monday. In an advisory, the organization warned I.T. executives and business officers to watch for suspicious e-mails and phone calls from people claiming to represent the I.R.S. and to protect personal information. Read more...

An investment banking and consulting firm focused on education, Tyton Partners, is issuing a report today that attempts to create a framework for measuring "evidence of learning." The research, which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded, seeks to take a holistic approach to defining the "body of knowledge, skills and experience" people achieve in both formal and informal activities throughout their lifetime. Read more...

The Competency-Based Education Network (C-BEN) announced Monday that it has added 15 new college members. The Lumina-funded group now features 30 institutions and 4 public college systems, all of which either offer competency-based degrees or are creating them. Read more...