On Wednesday, President Obama announced a new proposal to ease the burden of student loan debt. The "Know Before You Owe" initiative will allow students with multiple government-backed loans to consolidate them into one loan under the federal Direct Loan program with an interest rate reduction of 0.25% to 0.5%. The administration estimated that about 5.8 million students could be eligible for loan...
On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee voted 15-7 to advance legislation to replace the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal education law, with three Republicans joining Democrats in support of the bill. The legislation would replace NCLB's requirement that all students achieve proficiency in math and reading by 2014 with a mandate that states adopt "c...
The House Education and Workforce Committee's Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training held a hearing Wednesday on the benefit of encouraging foreign graduates of U.S. universities to remain in the U.S. Employment visas are currently restricted to 140,000 annually, with no more than 7% going to any single country. Supporters discussed various possible strategies for preventing the b...
Hilary Pennington, who has led the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success efforts for the past five years, emailed her colleagues that she was leaving the foundation. Before joining Gates, she was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and CEO of Jobs for the Future, which she co-founded. Inside Higher Ed reports that Tom Dawson, a senior policy offi...
J. Bonnie Newman, the former interim president of the University of New Hampshire, was named interim chancellor of the New Hampshire Community College System, succeeding Richard Gustafson, who is retiring as chancellor of the seven-campus system. Newman was executive dean of Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, an assistant to President George H.W. Bush, president of the Business and...
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy will be among speakers at “To Have and Have Not: The Growing Economic and Social Divide and its Implications for Educational Leaders,” a conference scheduled for Monday, Oct. 3, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., at Boston University’s Metcalf Trustee Center.The conference sponsored by Concord, Mass.-based Maguire Associates will also feature Barry Bluestone...
As part of its mission to tie higher education to the economic well-being of New England, NEBHE has partnered with the New England Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (NE HERC) to provide access to recruitment and employment resources to address faculty and staff hiring needs.The mission of the NE HERC, which was founded in 2006, is to advance the efforts of member institutions to recruit ...
The debt-ceiling deal signed by President Obama last week will cut over $900 billion in federal funding over the next 10 years. Yet even in an extremely budget-conscious atmosphere, members of Congress singled out the Pell Grant program for an increase in funding to guarantee college access for low-income students. Under the terms of the new law, the Pell program would receive $10 billion in FY 20...
All six New England states have completed the initial step in their budget processes in this very difficult fiscal year.In mid-June, we reported that Connecticut and Vermont had completed budgets in record time, followed by completions in Maine and New Hampshire. Now, Massachusetts and Rhode Island ...Massachusetts BudgetTo the consternation of labor leaders, Democratic lawmakers in Massachusetts,...
Editor's Note: A reminder that our DC Shuttle column has changed gates. Our news from Washington will now appear in Newslink, rather than the Journal section, of https://www.nebhe.org.On Wednesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan defended the department's budget request for FY 2012, including a 10.7% increase over 2011 funding levels, to the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Labor, ...
On Wednesday, President Obama announced a new proposal to ease the burden of student loan debt. The "Know Before You Owe" initiative will allow students with multiple government-backed loans to consolidate them into one loan under the federal Direct Loan program with an interest rate reduction of 0.25% to 0.5%. The administration estimated that about 5.8 million students could be eligible for loan... 
As part of its mission to tie higher education to the economic well-being of New England, NEBHE has partnered with the New England Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (NE HERC) to provide access to recruitment and employment resources to address faculty and staff hiring needs.The mission of the NE HERC, which was founded in 2006, is to advance the efforts of member institutions to recruit ...