By Paul Fain. In recent years the U.S. Senate has done plenty of hand-wringing over “bad actors” in higher education, many of them for-profit and online. And that tension goes back to policy debates on distance education in the 1990s. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Students who participate in federal work-study are more likely to graduate and get a job after college. But those who get the biggest academic benefits from the program -- low-income students at public colleges who would have worked anyhow -- are the least likely to receive the federal grants. Read more...

By Paul Fain. The U.S. Department of Education continues to work on its plan to grant experimental federal aid eligibility to partnerships between accredited colleges and alternative providers, such as job skills boot camps, coding academies and MOOCs. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Presidential hopeful Martin O’Malley this week unveiled his debt-free college plan, triggering a debate across the ideological divide with Jeb Bush. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Most people in higher education agree that the old-school college transcript fails to adequately capture what students learn and do during their time in college. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. The U.S. Supreme Court this fall will hear arguments about whether colleges have the constitutional right in certain circumstances to consider race and ethnicity in admissions decisions. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. Purdue University, like most colleges and universities, evaluates faculty members up for tenure on their accomplishments in research, teaching and service. And as is the case at most research universities, research has tended to be prominent. Read more...

By Scott Jaschik. An essay -- "Why I No Longer Eat Watermelon, or How a Racist Email Caused Me to Leave Graduate School" -- starts by describing that incident, from 2011. The piece is spreading rapidly among graduate students, especially those who are not white, and many are saying that it provides an important perspective on their isolation and the kinds of experiences that encourage so many to leave graduate school. Read more...

By Doug Lederman. Virtually every college, company, advocacy group and other party that commented on proposed new federal rules on campus financial products by last week's deadline asserted that it had students' best interests at heart. Read more...

By Kellie Woodhouse. The same day Sweet Briar College announced its controversial and since-abandoned plan to close, two private New York colleges made public an entirely different plan: a merger. Read more...