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Listen to the article 3 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief:  College operating costs increased 3.6% in fiscal 2025, according to the latest Higher Education Price Index, which tracks the sector’s inflation. “HEPI inflation rates are again elevated above what many consider the norm, set by expectations from prior decades,” according to a report from Commonfund Institute, which is responsible for the index. For the past five years, the HEPI rate has been above the prior decade’s annual average of 2.2%.  HEPI’s latest inflation rate continues a period of elevated cost…

Rep. Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House committee, said the legislation was an answer to waning public trust in postsecondary education. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images A House education panel voted Thursday to advance two bills aimed at ensuring that students know more about the price of college and their options to pay for it. One of the bills, the Student Financial Clarity Act, would require the Education Department to create a universal net price calculator that would give students an estimate of what they might have to pay for a particular program or institution. That legislation, which passed…

Taariq Ahmed, TDN Northwestern has started to receive the first wave of released federal research funding after signing a Nov. 28 deal with the Trump administration to restore hundreds of…

by Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report December 14, 2025 The 10-year-old was dragged down a school hallway by two school staffers. A camera captured him being forced into a small, empty room with a single paper-covered window.  The staffers shut the door in his face. Alone, the boy curled into a ball on the floor. When school employees returned more than 10 minutes later, blood from his face smeared the floor. Maryland state lawmakers were shown this video in 2017 by Leslie Seid Margolis, a lawyer with the advocacy group Disability Rights Maryland. She’d spent 15 years advocating for a…

Listen to the article 5 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: The New College of Florida could take control of the University of South Florida’s Sarasota-Manatee campus under a new proposal from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.  Under DeSantis’ 2026-27 state budget,  New College would assume control of USF Sarasota-Manatee’s 32-acre property and related liabilities by July. In exchange, the college would pay USF roughly $166,600 per month for debt tied to the property.  Current USF Sarasota-Manatee students would have a “reasonable opportunity” to finish their degrees at the campus before New…

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter This has been an especially challenging year for Rosalba Ortega’s family.  It’s been a cold, soggy winter in Bakersfield, and Ortega said her two granddaughters, ages 4 and 7, don’t have warm coats for their walk to school. Rent and food prices have been climbing, and as a farmworker, she’s struggled to find work in the fields. Last month’s delays to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — known in California as CalFresh — hit her grandkids at a time when her family is already…

ESU’s outgoing president, Ken Hush, faced backlash in 2022 after laying off tenured faculty. Ethan James Scherrer/Wikimedia Commons Ken Hush, outgoing president of Emporia State University in Kansas, is donating roughly $1.4 million—equivalent to the last four years of his salary—to the university. Since taking the helm in 2021, Hush oversaw a controversial workforce-management policy that included firing 23 tenured faculty members. The American Association of University Professors publicly censured ESU for that decision, and some of the laid-off faculty sued. Emporia officials, including Hush, defended the job cuts, saying they were needed to address a budget deficit and falling enrollment.…

Even as the U.S. Department of Education dismantles large swaths of the Institute of Education Sciences, a bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to create a new research center modeled on the Pentagon’s moonshot research-and-development program. The proposed legislation, introduced this week by Reps. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., would create a fifth IES center, the National Center for Advanced Development in Education or NCADE to fund “informed-risk, high-reward education research” to improve teaching and learning.“We must pursue innovation with both ambition and accountability,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement. The proposal ” builds a smarter bridge between research and…

Dive Brief:  A federal judge on Thursday denied the U.S. Department of Education’s request for an 18-month extension to decide borrower defense claim decisions due by the end of January, according to lawyers representing the borrowers.  The affected borrowers belong to the last of three groups covered under a landmark 2022 settlement with the Education Department to resolve a class-action lawsuit that accused the agency of stonewalling borrower defense applications. Under that agreement, the borrowers were set to receive automatic relief if the agency didn’t decide their cases by Jan. 28.  U.S. District Judge William Alsup declined to provide any…

Listen to the article 4 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: While the number of children receiving after-school snacks and suppers through the federal Afterschool Nutrition Programs increased slightly from October 2023 to October 2024, participation still remained below pre-pandemic levels, according to a report released Wednesday by the Food Research & Action Center. The Afterschool Supper Programs, for instance, served 1.26 million students on an average weekday in October 2024 — a 2.8% rise from October 2023, FRAC found. Despite those gains, the report said, roughly 173,400 fewer children received…