The Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which certifies universities to host foreign students and scholars and maintains a database that tracks international students’ whereabouts in the United States, will continue to operate in the case of a possible Department of Homeland Security shutdown, though its activities may be hobbled due to reduced manpower in administrative offices. Read more...

The American Association of University Professors on Tuesday joined a chorus of other organizations and academics that have criticized a controversial recommendation that the board of the University of North Carolina System shutter the Chapel Hill campus's Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity. Read more...

A federal panel on Tuesday began a set of negotiations aimed at drafting new regulations to expand the availability of income-based student loan repayment to more borrowers. The negotiated rule-making committee, which the U.S. Education Department announced in December, is charged with carrying out President Obama's June 2014 memorandum that would make an additional 5 million existing student loan borrowers eligible for the federal government’s most generous income-based repayment program, Pay as You Earn. Read more...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation recruited a University of South Florida business professor and former head of its Confucius Institute as a spy, Bloomberg reported. The article recounts how Dajin Peng, a Chinese-born U.S. citizen, agreed to provide information on his home country. Read more...

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center this week released state-level student completion data. The nonprofit center tracked 2.7 million students who first enrolled in college in the fall of 2008, following them for 6 years. The report builds on the center's previous research, which found more encouraging graduation rates than other studies had identified. Read more...

British people see academic careers as desirable -- and as more desirable than careers that might strike many Americans as more attractive, according to a new poll from YouGov. The poll asked Britons whether they would like to do various jobs, and 51 percent said they would like to be an academic. Read more...

The University of Missouri at Kansas City on Friday announced that John Norton has resigned as a faculty member of the Henry W. Bloch School of Management. He is the second faculty member to quit who was involved in efforts to provide false information to the Princeton Review for its ratings of business schools. Read more...

Wei-Hock Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, regularly publishes articles and makes appearances to dispute the scholarly consensus on climate change. The New York Times reported that Soon took $1.2 million of fossil-fuel industry support for his work, and in numerous cases didn't cite the funding source, as required by journals in which he has published. Read more...

The U.S. Education Department is today proposing rules for carrying out the First in the World Program, the Obama administration's effort to stimulate innovation in higher education. The notice, published in Monday's Federal Register, lays out the priorities the department will use in awarding the program's grants in 2016. Read more...

By Marie Norman. I’ve been working recently with a faculty member who is turning his thermodynamics course into a massive open online course, or MOOC. Working on this project, I’ve noticed that MOOCs have distinctive features that can help instructors avoid certain instructional pitfalls while simultaneously steering them in the direction of others. Read more...