President Obama gave an interview to ESPN as part of the unveiling of his picks for the N.C.A.A. men's basketball tournament. In the interview he called for the N.C.A.A. to change the rules of the game by shortening the shot clock to 30 seconds from the current 35, as well as to move back the three-point line, which would allow perimeter players to drive inside more easily. Read more...

A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit by a Holocaust survivor against the University of Oklahoma over a painting in the university's gallery that was once stolen by the Nazis from its owner, The Associated Press reported. Read more...

By Eszter Hargittai. Inspired by all of the discussion and controversy over the new PARCC standardized tests for students and as a researcher of people's technology uses, I recently took part of the computerized PARCC fourth-grade math practice test. Even after going through the tutorial explaining the interface, I found myself occasionally as preoccupied with the system as I was with figuring out the math problems. Read more...

By Matthew T. Hora and Ross J. Benbow and Amanda K. Oleson. While touring a factory in northern Wisconsin that makes millions of aluminum cans on a daily basis, we asked the plant manager whether he thought regional colleges and universities were meeting his company’s needs. He looked surprised by the question and answered, “You can’t teach [in a classroom] the way we make cans here.” If he had employees with basic skill sets in the field, he said, his company could train new hires to use their machinery and learn their procedures. Read more...

By Paul Fain. Administrators and instructors at Austin Community College decided to go big when they tried a new approach to remedial math -- like 600 computer stations in the nation's largest learning lab big. Read more...

By Carl Straumsheim. University of Oklahoma President David L. Boren drew praise last week when he swiftly moved to punish members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon caught singing a racist song -- much like he did when members of the same fraternity in 1996 stole a tepee and placed it on a sorority house lawn. Read more...

By Michael Stratford. Kicking off what will likely be months of contentious budget battles, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday released a 2016 funding blueprint that calls for freezing the maximum Pell Grant award. Read more...

By Kaitlin Mulhere. Salary compression is a familiar dilemma to faculty members and administrators. Most campuses conduct regular analyses to measure salary discrepancies across academic departments, across generations of faculty members and between their own professors and those at other institutions. Read more...

By Jake New. For 20 years, some employees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill knowingly steered about 1,500 athletes toward no-show courses that never met and were not taught by any faculty members, and in which the only work required was a single research paper that received a high grade no matter the content. Read more...