department of education

The U.S. Education Department is creating a new office to protect federal student loan borrowers and to investigate scams in higher education. It sounds like something out of a Law & Order episode: the Student Aid Enforcement Unit. Among other things, the $13.6 million unit will probe schools that lie to prospective students about their graduation and job rates.

The U.S. Department of Education is dismissing a claim that Harvard shows bias against Asian-American applicants, because a similar lawsuit has already been filed in federal court.

The Obama administration is making it easier for students who attended a now defunct college to get their money back.

The Department of Education announced Monday that former students of the for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges may be able to have their outstanding student loans forgiven. If a student believes they were the victim of fraud, they can also make a claim for debt relief.

After coming under intense federal and state scrutiny, the for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges says it will shut down its more than two dozen remaining campuses. Massachusetts and other states have accused the career college of recruiting students with inaccurate job placement rates.

The U.S. Education Department has fined the for-profit giant Corinthian Colleges $30 million for recruiting students with inaccurate job placement rates.

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After a long reign as the fastest-growing and most problematic sector in higher education, for-profit colleges are on the ropes.

This week the U.S. Department of Education announced that it will review how federal student aid is administered at one of the country's largest for-profit colleges, the University of Phoenix. Owned by the publicly traded Apollo Group, the University of Phoenix enrolls over 200,000 students, rivaling the size of the nation's largest public university system.

When you factor in the size of a school’s endowment and its ability to offer financial aid, it turns out, incoming full-time freshmen at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are paying more than their counterparts at Harvard. That’s according to the latest federal figures released by the Department of Education.

The country’s top education official is in Massachusetts for a two-day tour of schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan is visiting schools in Boston, Worcester and Reading, where he’ll meet with community college officials and business leaders. Duncan is drumming up support for the Obama administration's education budget.