increasing access and success

On this Martin Luther King Day, Americans are remembering the civil rights leader's fight for the poor, commemorating his service and sacrifice.

In October 1962, Reverend King addressed students on campus at the Harvard Law School forum. He talked about the future of - and struggle for - integration.

“We’ve been able to say to our bitterest and most violent opponents, ‘We will match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering,’” King said.

Listen to Dr. King’s full remarks here, courtesy of Harvard Voices:

Two years later, in 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to racial and economic prejudice. At 35, as the youngest recipient of the award, he then donated his winnings to the civil rights movement.

A White House push to increase the college-going rates of of low-income students flies in the face of real-world trends that are heading in exactly the opposite direction—including institutional and federal financial-aid and tax policy that has been shifting in favor of high-income and not low-income families.

At the White House on Thursday, college presidents pledged to increase access for low-income minority students and to help them graduate without crushing debt. And initiatives adopted by some New England schools are gaining attention.

On Thursday at the White House, more than one hundred college presidents will meet with President Obama to discuss ways they can enroll more low-income minority students.  The plan is to help those students graduate on time, without massive debt loads. 

Being named one of the 25 best colleges by U.S. News & World Report gets an institution 6 to 10 percent more applications than it would otherwise receive, the research, published in the journal of the American Educational Research Association, shows. Making the top 20 for academic quality in the Princeton Review pushes up the number of applications by 2.3 percent.

Massachusetts is joining a growing number of states that want to better regulate for-profit colleges. The Attorney General’s office is taking testimony this week on new rules that would strengthen oversight of colleges that don’t have tax-exempt status and rely on tuition and stock market investors.

The Obama administration wants technical expertise as the U.S. Department of Education develops a system that would rank colleges and universities and tie university funding to certain criteria like graduation rates.

Researchers from the National Student Clearinghouse find of the 2.4 million students who enrolled in the fall of 2007, 56 percent of them finished a degree or certificate within six years. That includes 43 percent of students who finished at the school where they started, and another 13 percent who transferred.

Recently, more than 25 newly-elected mayors met at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics to discuss the challenges they'll face, everything from responding to a disaster to dealing with the media. Among the issues is college access and affordability. 

New figures show more than 70 percent of college students carry student debt. Up from 68 percent four years earlier. That's according to the Institute for College and Success.

We caught up with two of the new mayors: Seattle's Ed Murray and Pittsburgh's Bill Peduto. 

WGBH's Kirk Carapezza asked them about the role higher education plays in economic growth.

On Friday’s Basic Black, Craig Wilder, Professor of History at MIT and author of the new book Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery and the Troubled History of America's Universities, explored the connection of slavery to the beginnings of America's Ivy League schools.