Inside Higher Ed

The Trump administration is trying to strip the American Bar Association’s accreditation council of federal recognition—a move that could threaten law students’ eligibility for federal student aid and disrupt legal education more broadly. The ABA currently stands as the nation’s leading law school accreditor and the only one that is federally recognized; it oversees nearly 200 colleges across the country.

Whoever wrote the rule for F-1 visa students saying that they need at least nine credits per semester to be entirely in-person has never had to manage a community college course schedule. As local funding has lagged what it takes to run a full schedule, we’ve had to consolidate sections. In practice, that often means sacrificing on-site classes to their online alternatives, since the latter tend to fill faster.

Allegations that the Trump administration’s antisemitism probes into Ivy League universities were legally baseless aren’t new. What is new this week is who’s making them. Three former Justice Department attorneys, through their own lawyers, filed whistleblower allegations against their former employer: the federal government.

By this point in the higher ed calendar, faculty are revising syllabi, deans are scheduling retreats and our inboxes are overflowing, having somehow multiplied while we were away for the summer. Naturally, this feels like the perfect time to also attempt to become entirely different people from the ones we were last academic year.

The university has suspended Cofnas from his post as a postdoctoral researcher in its Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences. Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Belgium’s Ghent University has suspended Nathan Cofnas, the controversial scholar whose blog accusing Jason Arday of plagiarism led to widespread public scrutiny of the late University of Cambridge professor’s academic record and personal achievements.

I was very encouraged to read a recent New York Times article by Dana Goldstein that asks what students “lose when they stop writing.” Truth be told, I was a little bummed not to have been interviewed for the piece, given that I was one of the earliest out of the gate championing the need for us to actually double down on teaching writing in a world with AI, but I’m not going to let the dent to my ego get in the way of noticing that the concerns I’ve been voicing for years are making their...

PayPal and Venmo want to make it easier for students to pay tuition. Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | neirfy/iStock/Getty Images Students at some U.S. universities are now able to pay their tuition through Venmo or its parent company, PayPal, the financial technology giant announced Wednesday.

Students can now use Workforce Pell Grants to pay for an eight-week medical assistant program at Ivy Tech Community College. SrdjanPav/E+/Getty Images Students at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana can now use federal Pell Grant dollars on an eight-week clinical medical assistant training program, the Department of Education announced this week.

As a new academic year begins, teacher shortages remain a challenge for K–12 districts nationwide. Addressing those workforce needs will require long-term strategies, including building new pathways into the profession, researchers say. A new report from New America’s Center on Education & Labor examines one such pathway: teacher degree apprenticeships. These programs allow aspiring educators to earn a paycheck while completing their degree and teaching certification.

Going forward, the task force urges Berkeley officials to be candid about why they make specific judgment calls about political speech on campus. russaquarius/Getty Images Signature A faculty task force at the University of California, Berkeley, determined that—in addition to policies protecting free speech and academic freedom—a campus climate “characterized by trust and good faith” is essential to achieving the university’s core mission, according to a report released Thursday.