Students who completed an undergraduate program in 2007-8 were more likely to borrow money to pay for college but less likely to be repaying those loans within a year of graduation compared with their counterparts who graduated in 1992-93 and 1999-2000, a new federal report shows.
The report, released Thursday, analyzes the borrowing and repayment trends of bachelor’s degree recipients within a year of graduation for three cohorts of students. Read more...
The U.S. Education Department, citing the partial shutdown of the federal government, has canceled the second round of negotiations over regulations on vocational programs at community colleges and for-profit institutions.
The department will reschedule the negotiated-rulemaking session when the government reopens, Lynn Mahaffie, the acting deputy assistant secretary for policy, planning and innovation, wrote in a letter on Friday to members of the rule making committee. Read more...
Some law school deans thought recent communication from U.S. News & World report indicated that the magazine's rankings were about to ignore the recommendations of the American Bar Association. It turns out that U.S. News is preserving that option, but hasn't decided what to do. At issue is one of the recommendations of a special ABA panelthat last month proposed numerous changes in legal education. One of the focuses of the ABA panel was the widespread criticism that law school is too expensive and that, at many law schools, spending that forces up tuition rates may not be improving the student experience. Read more...
More than three-fourths of recent graduates in professional science master’s degree programs reported finding a job and, of those employed, 91 percent were working in a job closely or somewhat related to their field of study, according to the third annual Council of Graduate Schools’ survey. Read more...
By Maina Waruru. The African Union-backed Pan-African University has reached another milestone with the selection of the first intake of masters students for three of its institutes, in Cameroon, Kenya and Nigeria. The 193 pioneer students from across the continent are to start later this year.By Se-Woong Koo. In all those years I was pursuing a Ph.D. in religious studies, the question of what my profession really stood for rarely came up in conversation with fellow academics, save for occasional moments when the position of the humanities in higher education came under criticism in public discourse. When such moments passed, it was again simply assumed that anyone entering a doctoral program in the humanities knowingly signed on to a traditional career of specialized research and teaching. Read more...
By Doug Lederman. The Obama administration is toughening its regulation of for-profit colleges in numerous straightforward ways, most notably and publicly by taking another shot (after a federal judge blocked the last one) at drafting rules requiring vocational programs to prove that they are preparing students for "gainful employment." But advocates for the colleges and other, more independent observers accuse administration officials of discriminating against for-profit institutions in a less-visible way, too -- and twisting federal statutes to do so. Read more...
By Doug Lederman. A majority of Americans believe online instruction is at least as good as classroom-based courses in terms of providing good value, a format most students can succeed in, and instruction tailored to each individual. But they question the rigor of testing and grading, and whether employers will view such degrees positively, a new survey by Gallup shows. Read more...
By Michael Stratford. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received more than 3,800 complaints in the last year from borrowers of private student loans, the bureau said in a report released Wednesday. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the continuing effects of the economic downturn, the largest number of complaints came from borrowers struggling to afford their monthly student loan obligations who encountered problems when they sought flexibility from their lender. Read more...
By Chris Parr for Times Higher Education. The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) provides a legal basis for the creation of an online marketplace for academic credit that could be exploited by massive open online course providers, conference speakers have argued. Hannes Klöpper, managing director of the new German MOOC platform iversity, also said he believed that Europe's burgeoning community of online providers was better-placed than American organizations to work with universities and offer academic credit to students. Read more...
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