By Michael Stratford. Colleges in recent years have increasingly turned to outside companies to manage parts of the financial aid process and provide other services to students. And the boom in outsourcing now has federal regulators racing to keep up. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. As a guarantor of student loans that specialized in collecting from students on the precipice of bankruptcy, the Educational Credit Management Corporation saw up close the “impact of students taking on debt, dropping out of school and being no better off than when they started college in terms of being able to find well-paying jobs,” says David Hawn, the nonprofit guaranty agency's chief executive officer. Read more...

By Kellie Woodhouse. Larry Singell saw the writing on the wall well before his college was hit with a possible $8 million deficit.
Though the College of Arts and Sciences is by far the largest college at Indiana University’s Bloomington campus, more and more students were enrolling with credits earned through high school programs and community colleges. Students, worrying about employability after college, were leaving majors like English and anthropology behind and picking professional colleges instead. Read more...

By Kellie Woodhouse. It didn’t take long for the criticisms to begin rolling in after Harvard University announced a $400 million donation to its engineering college. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Many scholars complain that institutional review boards unreasonably delay or block studies involving human research subjects. A new book, The Censor's Hand: The Misregulation of Human-Subject Research (MIT Press), doesn't see IRBs as fixable, but as an inherently flawed system. The author -- Carl E. Schneider is Chauncey Stillman Professor of Law and Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan -- responded via email to questions about his book's themes. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. When the Islamic State released gruesome videos of hostages being beheaded this year, one of those doing the killing, dubbed Jihadi John in the British press, was identified as Mohammed Emwazi, an alumnus of Britain's University of Westminster. The news focused scrutiny on the university. In the United States, when authorities in April charged six Somali-Americans with preparing to join the Islamic State, the news provoked soul-searching at Minnesota Technical and Community College, where five of the men had studied. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. In “Mobile Phones in the Classroom: Examining the Effects of Texting, Twitter and Message Content on Student Learning,” Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff, assistant professor in the department of integrative studies at Miami University (Ohio) at Middletown, explores if texting, tweeting and note taking can be combined. The article appears in the most recent edition of Communication Education, a journal of the National Communication Association. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. Are colleges and universities getting savvier about pitching their programs to the private sector, or are corporations increasingly turning to higher education to train their employees? The answer, according to workforce researchers, corporate education providers and companies themselves, is somewhere in the middle. Read more...

By Jacqueline Thomsen. The College Board and Khan Academy are today announcing a new partnership offering free online test preparation resources for students looking to take a new version of the SAT next spring. Read more...