Links for 1/27/10

Paul Fain

Among the common themes that emerged in comments from presidents who described negative interactions were faculty views of trustees through an adversarial, labor-versus-management lens, and trustees who see faculty members as privileged, too powerful, and overpaid.

Frederick Hess

the Obama administration has secretly selected the reviewers for state grant applications to its $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT) fund, but has no intention of publicly revealing who these 60 judges are.

Jennifer Gonzalez

Under the new proposal it offered Monday, a vocational-training program would comply with the gainful-employment rule if a graduate's annual debt payment, based on a 10-year repayment schedule, did not exceed 8 percent of the expected earnings of the occupation the student was preparing for.

However, programs in which student-debt payments exceeded 8 percent could still maintain federal-student-aid eligibility by meeting one of three alternatives: showing that the actual earnings of the institution's graduates (rather than the expected earnings as determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) are high enough to reduce the ratio below 8 percent; showing that 75 percent of students who entered repayment in the previous three years were repaying their loans without deferrals or forbearances; or showing that the program had at least a 70-percent completion and placement rate.

The Ticker

Judge Smith ruled on Friday that the town of Narragansett, R.I., could continue to put bright yellow stickers on houses whose residents are deemed too raucous. The town began labeling residences in 2007 in an effort to crack down on partying college students who rent houses there...