increasing access and success

Northeastern University has suspended its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, barring it from meeting on campus and stripping it of university funding. Northeastern says the group repeatedly disregarded university policies.

As policy makers work to reign in student debt, there’s been a lot of attention on for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University.

Thirty-two states, including Massachusetts, have endorsed new regulations that would require all of these schools to provide more accurate information. Now, the Obama administration is taking steps to further regulate for-profits.

It's been planned, it's been written, it's ready to go. But what's the final step in preparing for the implementation of a new test? To test it. Sounds like process, but it's a critical step.

The new federal Common Core standards, designed to layout what each student should know at the end of each grade, are ready for their close up. Over the next several weeks school children across the country will be taking the new tests, but it's not their grades that will matter.

#itooamharvard.

If you search the hashtag on the web you'll get a whole slew of responses -- from articles in the Washington Post and Boston Globe, to a Buzzfeed link with over a million views.

The social media campaign, born from an independent study project on minorities' experiences as part of the Harvard community, has gone viral and reflects frustrations with stereotypes by students of all races.

It’s that time of year when college-bound students are making tough choices about where they want to study and whether they can really afford it. It's no secret that the cost of college continues to increase, so understanding payment options is increasingly important.

Higher Education is no longer the United States' great equalizer. That's the premise of Suzanne Mettler's new book, “Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream.”

The sticker price at Pennsylvania State University runs about $30,000 a year for in-state students. At Swarthmore College, it’s nearly twice that. Yet Swarthmore ends up being cheaper for most students. That’s because this private liberal-arts college near Philadelphia offers many families a hefty discount, bringing down the average cost to even less than taxpayer-subsidized Penn State’s.

This kind of information used to be hard or impossible to find, because colleges don’t always want people knowing what they really cost—or that some families may be paying a lot less than others. But now the U.S. Department of Education collects this information, and we’re making it available in even more detail through our Tuition Tracker database.

Nonprofit education leaders in Boston say changes to the SAT should help make the college entrance exams more accessible for low-income students.

Updated November 4, 2015

The SAT redesign announced in 2014 had us here at On Campus wondering about the "test optional" and "test flexible" trend  emerging in higher education. More schools are dropping tests like the SAT and ACT as an application requirement, relying instead on GPA. Just how widespread is this trend? According to Fairtest.org, a standardized testing watchdog, more than 800 universities or colleges no longer require either test. 

 In the midst of a passionate discussion about the future of higher education here on Tuesday, one young man stood up and wanted to know if the goal of higher education is to make people productive – or to make them happy.

It was an unexpected query for a panel entitled: “Can the liberal arts survive in an age of innovation,’’and just one of the many dozens of discussions that have been taking place this week at SXSW.edu, a packed and often frantic festival of ideas, technology, workshops and networking.