There will be middle-class jobs for high school graduates — especially as baby boomers retire — but there won’t be enough to go around, concludes the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce’s new Career Clusters report. In 1973, 72 percent of jobs were open to workers with a high school diploma or less. That [...]

Compromises tend to please nobody:  Critics of for-profit higher education say the Education Department’s “gainful employment” rule, announced yesterday,  is too weak, while the industry complains it unfairly cuts off access to student loans. Under the new regulation (pdf), career training programs will have to show that  at least 35 percent of former students are [...]

Who Wins? Who Pays? The Economic Returns and Costs of a Bachelor’s Degree finds clear winners:  Bachelor’s degree holders get a good return on their investment.  But taxpayers can be losers, the report concludes.  Including public subsidies, tax breaks and government aid to students, taxpayers spend more than they get back for bachelor’s degrees earned at public [...]

When financial aid checks arrive, students vanish, writes Julie White, a community college instructor, on The 2-Year Track. The college gets the aid money, deducts tuition and sends students the rest in a “refund” check to cover living expenses. Of the 27 students who originally enrolled in my course, I have 16 in class today. [...]

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Omid Khorasani wants to be a pharmacist — without taking on huge student loans. So the 35-year-old is paying about $1,700 for a nine-month course at nearby Foothill College that leads to a pharmacy technician certificate and a chance to earn a solid middle-class wage of up to $60,000 a year as [...]

Fast-growing for-profit colleges, under fire for saddling students with unmanageable debt, are rolling out new policies aimed at raising graduation rates while also hoping a Republican-controlled House will block unfavorable legislation. “We have a great opportunity to educate (the newly elected representatives) on the value our sector plays in the higher education system and the [...]

Already hit by rising enrollments and funding cuts, community colleges will face even more demand as high-cost for-profits lose students due to new Education Department loan rules. Proposed rules linking loan eligibility to default rates and debt ratios will affect only eight percent of for-profit students in five percent of programs, Education Secretary Arne Duncan [...]

Remember the three Rs – reading, writing and ’rithmetic? Get ready to add a fourth: rigor. It’s the buzzword in education. From presidents to principals, billionaires to school board members, governors to teachers, everybody seems to be promising rigor, demanding rigor, or deploring the lack of rigor in American schools.