By Kaitlin Mulhere. Officials with the U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday revealed a slightly earlier estimate for when colleges may get a glimpse of the Obama administration's controversial college ratings. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Doubts about the labor-market returns of bachelor’s degrees, while never serious, can be put to rest.
Last month’s federal jobs report showed a rock-bottom unemployment rate of 2.8 percent for workers who hold at least a four-year degree. The overall unemployment rate is 5.7 percent. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Performance-based funding in higher education is spreading, with 35 states either developing or using formulas that link support for public colleges to student completion rates, degree production numbers or other metrics. The resulting debate over whether performance funding works is heating up, too. But a new report from HCM Strategists makes the case that there is great variation among the policies in those 35 states. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. It seems, all of a sudden, that there’s a rush among policy makers in Washington to chop off questions from the 108-question Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. To the delight of many colleges and universities, Senator Lamar Alexander plans to approach the upcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act as a gardening activity. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Community college leaders arrived here this week for their annual legislative at a time when the political chattering about their institutions appears to be at a fever pitch. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Massive open online course providers such as Coursera have long pointed to the benefits of the data collected by the platforms, saying it will help colleges and universities understand how students learn online. Now Coursera’s data is telling the company that learners are particularly interested in business administration and technology courses to boost their career prospects -- and that they want to take MOOCs at their own pace. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. The University of California Press is building a new open-access publishing model around the idea that reviewers and researchers in the hard sciences can support new forms of scholarly communication by "paying it forward."
The university press last month introduced Collabra and Luminos, an open-access journal and monograph publisher, respectively. While Luminos is hoping to publish about 10 monographs this fall, Collabra is in beta testing and aims to accept submissions in a few weeks. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. By now, the secret is out in some disciplines: if you want to land a tenure-line faculty job, you’d better attend a highly ranked graduate program -- not necessarily because they’re better but because the market favors prestige. But a new study suggests that “social inequality” might be worse than previously thought, across a range of different disciplines. Read more...

By Colleen Flaherty. Academic deans straddle two realms: those of the administration and the faculty. While they’re supervisors to faculty members in a sense, they’re also colleagues and collaborators, and many professors view deans as representing academic interests up the hierarchy to provosts and presidents. Read more...