Starting next year, for-profit schools, including some of the nation’s biggest online colleges–like the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, and Strayer University–will have to provide graduation rate and job placement figures to new students and applicants, the Department of Education has ordered. That’s a sample of more than a dozen reforms the government will impose on for-profit schools beginning July 1, 2011. Students will now be able to make more informed decisions, the Department says. “These new rules will help ensure that students are getting from schools what they pay for: solid preparation for a good job,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an Oct. 28 press release.

[Online programs have respect to gain among employers.]

The regulations were announced amid scrutiny of for-profit schools from the Senate Health, Labor and Pensions Committee, a damning report from the Government Accountability Office, and investigations into abuse of taxpayer funded loan money by state attorneys general. In October, for instance, Oregon’s treasurer and attorney general sued Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, claiming that the school was eager to boost profits with little regard for its students. A motion filed in federal court claims that the school “concocted a scheme to fraudulently inflate revenues and boost profitability by exploiting well-intentioned and often lower-income students, including veterans of the U.S. armed forces, who were hoping to improve their qualifications and employment prospects,” adding that “students often withdrew early or failed to complete degree programs.”

The firm dismisses the claims and plans to fight the suit. “Apollo Group takes its disclosure obligations very seriously and intends to defend this lawsuit vigorously,” company spokesman Manny Rivera said in a written statement. “Apollo Group is a leader in enhancing the student experience, expanding student protections and working to help students succeed in completing their degree programs.”

[Learn more about online education.]

Last week, the office of Florida’s attorney general also announced that it launched an investigation into the for-profit sector. These suits come on the heels of recent legal action against for-profit schools in Texas, Ohio, and Wisconsin. “Federal scrutiny has unearthed a whole set of questionable practices that conscientious AGs across the country start wondering ‘what’s happening in my state?’” says Christine Lindstrom, higher education program director at the nonprofit Public Interest Research Group. “It makes absolute sense that they’re looking into these programs.”

Deanne Loonin, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, works regularly with students–including several that enrolled online–at for-profit schools who have amassed seemingly insurmountable debt and has heard first hand of the dubious practices alleged by federal and state regulators. While she can’t mention specifics due to confidentiality agreements, she says it’s common for poorer people with limited or no Internet access at home to be persuaded to sign up for an online programs, hoping to rely on libraries to complete their coursework. Once they realize they can’t fulfill the time requirements because of their limited access or that the material is simply too advanced for them, they complain to the school or try to pull out altogether. She claims they’re typically met with limited feedback–almost all of which is intended to keep them enrolled in online programs as they amass more loan debt. “They’re told, ‘don’t worry about it. We’ll figure things out,’” she says. “It’s hard to beat all of these problems, even for people who recognize there’s a problem.”

[Learn more before you enroll in an online program.]

Though the new Department of Education regulations have been put in place to help prevent just what Loonin describes, a more significant battle looms on the horizon. Regulations, which will be based on data, will judge an institution’s ability to prepare students for jobs comparable to the cost of their education, have yet to be finalized. They will target so-called “workforce programs” which include for-profit schools, community colleges, and some state universities. If schools’ students are unable to meet adequate loan debt, loan repayment, and career earnings thresholds, the institutions could be denied federal funding, which supplies a vast majority of revenue at most for-profit online programs. The rules are intended to weed out schools that don’t prepare students for their working lives, which, in theory, would benefit students and perhaps shut the doors of several institutions not up to par. Given the severity of the regulatory threat, the industry is expected to put up a fight, experts say.

Rivera, of Apollo, refuses to speak for the sector regarding the potential for a lawsuit, but Lindstrom at PIRG believes litigation will be inevitable–possibly on the grounds that the new rules unfairly discriminate against the already much-maligned sector. “We absolutely anticipate that as soon as the final rules come out the Department of Education will be met with a lawsuit,” Lindstrom says. “The sector will sue.”

Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.

Online Universities: Government Cracks Down on For-Profit Schools (U.S. News & World Report)

Online Universities: Government Cracks Down on For-Profit Schools (U.S. News & World Report)

JERICHO, N.Y. — Fifteen eighth graders at Jericho Middle School were considering a fictional case of stereotyping by hair color the other day, or how a boy came to be prejudiced against people with green hair, or “greenies.” From there, they extrapolated to the stereotypes in their own lives: dumb football players, Asian math whizzes, boring bankers.

“We can feel stronger going back to our hallways,” the teacher, Elisa Weidenbaum Waters, said, “going back to our homes, going back to our society, and saying: ‘You know what? What you said is a stereotype, and that’s not cool.’?”

This year, Jericho, a high-performing district, is offering an unusual elective for its middle-school students that channels the soul-searching and team-building activities of a diversity workshop into a yearlong class for credit. The course, which focuses on diversity, “will have you actively thinking about everything from food through language in a way you may never have before as we learn about what unites and divides all of us, and why,” a description said.

“What I’m looking to do,” said Ms. Waters, 40, who has long been active in social causes, “is build acceptance, awareness and appreciation that people may be different than you.”

There are no quizzes or tests in the class, and homework is assigned only occasionally. Instead, there are free-flowing discussions about privilege, discrimination and oppression, and readings, like the recent one about people with green hair from “Prejudiced — How Do People Get That Way?” — a book published by the Anti-Defamation League.

Jericho’s new class comes amid a renewed focus on diversity and antibullying programs in schools, heightened by the suicide of Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University freshman whose intimate encounter with a man was said to have been streamed over the Internet by his roommate and another student.

“It’s a concern that students are not prepared for what they’re going to face when they leave the school district, particularly in more homogenous communities,” said Timothy G. Kremer, the executive director of the New York State School Boards Association, who supports the elective.

With about a third of its current student population Asian, nearly double the proportion in 2004, Jericho’s school district is changing. Nevertheless, it is still largely wealthy, and it is 63 percent white.

Henry L. Grishman, the Jericho superintendent, said special assemblies and programs might not be enough. “While there is a place for one-shot deals, whether it’s for kids’ awareness or teacher training, an ongoing class has so much more meaningful impact,” Mr. Grishman said.

But Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group in Washington, questioned whether a class in diversity was necessary, saying it could too easily become “amorphous mush” with little intellectual value.

Mr. Hess, who is a former high school social studies teacher, added that in a public school, problems could also arise if class discussions about complex societal situations became politicized to favor more popular, progressive views.

“It’s very easy to appeal to a teenager’s imagination and get him riled up about the plight of a homeless youth in New York City,” Mr. Hess said.

But he said it was less intuitive for teenagers to consider the issues faced by a doctor who was facing staggering student loans and was asked to pay high taxes to finance programs for homeless youth.

“It’s not intuitive, and it’s easy to overlook, but it’s the other half of the equation,” Mr. Hess said.

Thirty students have enrolled in the new class, which is divided into seventh- and eighth-grade sections and meets for 45 minutes every other day. Called “Seedlings” — at least one parent mistook it for a gardening class — it grew out of teacher training workshops taught by Ms. Waters, and is named after a national program, SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), that she attended in 2005.

Ms. Waters, who also teaches Spanish, said students would be graded not on their personal views, but rather on how they participated in discussions and challenged themselves, and on what they wrote in self-evaluations.

“How do you truly grade kids learning to be better humans?” she said.

But while there is less academic pressure, the class is unlike other electives. Discussion topics, like Mr. Clementi’s suicide, have weighed heavily on some of the students.

“It was really emotional for me,” Brady Berman, 12, a seventh grader, said. “To be treated like that for being homosexual, it was almost like I felt the pain for his family.”

Ms. Waters said she was careful to keep the class materials age-appropriate. For instance, while she shows the movie “Crash” in her workshops for teachers, she will not play it in her middle-school classes.

As a group, the students have become unusually close.

“I know thousands of things about every single person in this class,” said Sam Newman, 13, an eighth grader. “We’re learning how to make the world a more connected place.”

Emma Distler, 13, an eighth grader who was adopted from China by a Jewish family, said she had become more aware of challenging stereotypes, even ones that do not seem harmful on their face. A classmate recently joked to her: “Oh, you’re Asian, you’re smart; tell me the answer.”

“I like it, kind of,” she said, about people thinking she is smart. “But sometimes when people come up to me and I don’t know the answer, I feel pressured.”

Emma said she had come into class with preconceived notions about athletes in the school: She was surprised to find herself sitting across from them in class.

“I always thought they were the jocks, and why would they want to be here when they could be hanging out with their friends,” she said. “That shows what stereotyping can do to you.”

Jericho Journal: At a Long Island Middle School, a Course in What Unites and Divides

The tribute to 18-year-old freshman Tyler Clementi will be held Sunday night on the steps of Brower Commons, on the school’s College Avenue campus in New Brunswick.

Prosecutors say Clementi’s roommate and another student used a webcam to broadcast on the Internet live images of Clementi having an intimate encounter with another man.

Clementi, a promising violinist, jumped off the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River three days later. His body was identified Thursday.

Rutgers President Richard McCormick says the vigil will be an opportunity for students and staff to come together and “reaffirm our commitment to the values of civility, dignity, compassion, and respect.”

The vigil is the latest in a series of remembrances for Clementi at the university that included the establishment of a Facebook group, In Honor of Tyler Clementi.

On Friday, students wore black and were encouraged to leave flowers or mementoes at a makeshift memorial for Clementi. The Rutgers Glee Club also marched down to the memorial and performed a rendition of Rutgers Prayer, which is traditionally sung when an important member of the Rutgers community dies or a tragedy happens at the university.

On Saturday, the school had a moment of silence for Clementi before the start of Rutgers’ homecoming game against Tulane.

Clementi’s death was one of a string of suicides last month involving teens believed to have been victims of anti-gay bullying. On Friday, more than 500 people attended a memorial service for Seth Walsh, a 13-year-old central California boy who hanged himself after enduring taunts from classmates about being gay.

Rutgers holding silent vigil to honor Clementi

Rutgers holding silent vigil to honor Clementi

A former administrator at St. John’s University accused of embezzling about $1 million from the college in Queens has now been charged with far more lurid crimes: forcing students to clean, cook and act as her personal servants to keep their scholarships.

Ex-Dean Accused of Using Students as Servants

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Republican Gov. Chris Christie has fired New Jersey’s education chief after the U.S. Department of Education released video that caught the administration in a lie, The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports.

The state missed out on $400 million in federal education funds for submitting budgetary information for the wrong years, a move that Garden State Democrats have decried as a “stunning 400 million mistake.”

Christie claimed in a several-minute long rant in a press conference Wednesday that his education commissioner Bret Schundler provided the Race to the Top reviewing board with the missing information two weeks before a decision was made. Today, the Department of Education released video that shows no one from New Jersey’s contingent could provide the missing information when panel members repeatedly requested it. You can watch the video after the jump:

Christie called the Obama administration’s education team “mindless drones” and said they should have looked up the missing budget information up by themselves on the internet in his rant Wednesday, insisting that he would not fire anyone over the mistake. “We’re the victim,” he said.

“This is the stuff that drives people crazy about government, and crazy about Washington…Does anybody in Washington DC have a lick of common sense?” he asked.

Christie fired Schundler today over the incident.

“I was extremely disappointed to learn that the videotape of the Race to the Top presentation was not consistent with the information provided to me,” Christie said in a press release. “As a result, I ordered an end to Bret Schundler’s service as New Jersey’s Education Commissioner and as a member of my administration.”

Watch the video of Christie’s rant below:

(Photo: Chris Christie. AP)

Gov. Christie fires education commissioner over video flap (The Upshot)

Gov. Christie fires education commissioner over video flap (The Upshot)

JACKSON, Miss. – A policy designed to achieve racial equality at a north Mississippi school has long meant that only white kids can run for some class offices one year, black kids the next. But Brandy Springer, a mother of four mixed race children, was stunned when she moved to the area from Florida and learned her 12-year-old daughter couldn’t run for class reporter because she wasn’t the right race.

The rules sparked an outcry on Internet blogs and other websites after Springer contacted an advocacy group for mixed-race families. The NAACP called for a Justice Department investigation — not surprising in a state with a history of racial tension dating to the Jim Crow era.

The district scrapped the policy by Friday afternoon.

Superintendent Russell Taylor posted a statement on the school’s website, saying the policy had been in place for 30 years, dating back to a time when school districts across Mississippi came under close scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department over desegregation.

“It is the belief of the current administration that these procedures were implemented to help ensure minority representation and involvement in the student body,” the statement said. “It is our hope and desire that these practices and procedures are no longer needed.”

Springer, who moved to Lee County from Florida in April, said her daughter was told the office of sixth-grade class reporter at Nettleton Middle School was available only to black students this year.

Her anger grew when she saw school election guidelines that allowed only whites to run for class president this year. In alternating years, the positions would be reversed so blacks could run for president and whites could hold other positions, district officials said.

Even if the policy is an attempt to ensure black and white participation, Springer said diversity is no longer a black and white issue, with a growing number of mixed-race children, Hispanics and other ethnicities attending school together.

The school agreed, saying it the statement that it “acknowledges and embraces the fact that we are growing in ethnic diversity and that the classifications of Caucasian and African-American no longer reflect our entire student body.”

Springer is white. Her two older children, including the sixth grader, are half Native American. Her two younger children have a black father.

“How are they supposed to be classified?” she asked.

“My main concern is that the object of school is to prepare people for life. An employer could never do this: Advertise a position for a white man only or a black man only,” she said. “This is not a lesson we want to teach.”

The changes in school policy may have come too late for Springer. Springer said she moved to another school district last week and pulled her kids from Nettleton Middle School.

School administrators did not immediately respond to messages seeking further comment left Friday by The Associated Press.

Nettleton is a town of about 2,000 people with a population that is about 66 percent white and 32 percent black.

Springer’s plight demonstrates the complexities faced not only by interracial families, but by school officials trying to achieve racial equality in a state known for tensions between blacks and whites. The school district also manipulated prom and homecoming elections so that the outcome is an equal division of blacks and whites.

Springer and others worried that could leave out Hispanics, Asians or any other student from another race or ethnicity, Springer said.

Springer’s story spread rapidly on the Internet after she contacted a website for mixed families — mixedandhappy.com.

Suzy Richardson, the website’s founder and the mother of four mixed-race children, said she and her husband have “raised our children to tell them they are black and white. They’re half of me and half of dad.”

“It really made me upset (to hear Springer’s story). The message that were sending to kids is that they have to choose one side of who they are,” she said. “The message that we’re sending our children is that we do things based on race.”

Before the school announced it was getting rid of the policy, Charles Hampton, a vice president of the Mississippi NAACP, said he would ask the U.S. Justice Department to investigate.

“That’s something that shouldn’t be happening anywhere in America, but we still have pockets of it happening at certain schools,” Hampton said. “The local community needs to get involved and demand they change the policy.”

School’s race rule prompts mom to pull kids out (AP)

School’s race rule prompts mom to pull kids out (AP)

Five Rules For How To Make Things Go Viral (TCTV): Making things go viral on the Internet is an…

It was part of the math major’s routine last quarter at the University of California, Los Angeles: Stand in line at the reserve desk in the library’s closing hours with the goal of borrowing a copy for the weekend.

The alternative was to buy a $120 book and sell it back for far less. If she could sell it back at all.

“It’s like this terrible game of catch your books when you can,” said Wolfe, a new graduate who estimates she saved $800 a year using books on reserve and who now shares textbook tips as a counselor to incoming UCLA students. “It’s frustrating when you’re already stressed about school. Being stressed about textbooks doesn’t seem right.”

Maybe, just maybe, relief is on the way.

A new federal law requires publishers to provide textbook price information to professors and calls on colleges to identify course textbooks during registration, giving students more time to shop around. Experts call it a step in the right direction, but not a game-changer.

At the same time, a robust online marketplace of used books and recent inroads by textbook rental programs give students more options than ever. The prospect of digital books and slow-but-steady growth in free online “open” content loom as developments that could upend the textbook landscape and alleviate the perennial problem of rising prices.

“Change is coming, but it’s not going to happen immediately,” said David Lewis, dean of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis University Library and assistant vice president for digital scholarly communications at Indiana University. “If you’re in junior high school, you can be sure it’ll be better. If you’re in high school, there’s a shot. If you’re starting college as a freshman, you might see it as a senior. It’s on more and more people’s agenda.”

According to a 2005 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, college textbook prices increased at twice the rate of inflation over the previous two decades, though not as dramatically as tuition.

More recent data from the National Association of College Stores show textbooks costs climbed 14% from the 2006-2007 academic year to 2008-2009. A 2010 survey by the group found students spent an average of $667 per year on required course materials including textbooks, although other studies have put the figure at about $900.

In 2008, Congress responded by including textbook-affordability provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act.

Along with the price-disclosure clause meant to push professors toward cheaper options, it requires publishers to offer textbooks separately from extra items like workbooks and CDs. The practice of “bundling” products leads to markups of 10 to 50% and makes books harder to sell, according to the Student Public Interest Research Groups, which pressed for the reforms.

“We have more lower cost options than ever before, and professors are going to have more information than ever before,” said Nicole Allen, textbook advocate for the student PIRGs.

Like the music and media businesses, the textbook industry has been revolutionized by the Internet. Although used books have long been an option for students, the Web opened up a world of bargain-hunting beyond the campus bookstore.

These days, sites such as BIGWORDS and BestBookBuys let students search several online stores at once. The 13th edition of the seminal textbook “Marketing Management,” which lists for $190 new, can be had for as little as $19.99 used.

More recently, textbook rental sites such as Chegg, BookRenter and CollegeBookRenter have arrived, offering rentals at roughly half the cost of buying. Their business model —Netflix goes to college — has prompted college bookstores and publishers to play catch up and offer rentals themselves.

Textbook publisher Cengage Learning began renting directly to students last spring and has expanded its online rental inventory to 3,000 titles. Campus bookstore operator Follett will introduce rentals at more than 800 bookstores this fall, and Barnes & Noble will do the same on more than 300 campuses.

Earlier this summer, BookRenter, which has contracts with Amazon.com and other online booksellers to fill orders, announced that more than 75 campus bookstores would use its platform to rent textbooks.

Chegg keeps its own inventory of nearly 5 million books at a warehouse outside Louisville The start-up aspires to forge direct relationships with students, shipping products in their own packaging, offering a liberal return policy and promising to plant a tree for every order, said CEO Dan Rosensweig, a former Yahoo executive.

Behind the scenes, publishers get a share of the rental revenue — something they can’t say about used book sales.

Open access textbooks pose a bolder challenge to the status quo. The start-up Flat World Knowledge contracts with authors to write new textbooks and publishes them for free under an open content license, allowing professors to edit the raw material and add their own contributions while giving students access to a Web-based HTML book.

Last fall, about 480 professors adopted one of the company’s initial 10 business and economics titles, said co-founder Eric Frank. About 1,200 professors are expected to use 22 titles to teach 95,000 students this fall.

The company is betting students will pay a reasonable price for greater convenience. Flat World’s revenue comes from selling everything from $30 black-and-white copies of its books to $3 audio chapters, as well as study aids like digital flash cards. About 55% of students are buying something at this point, Frank said.

So far, the main drawback to open access is the dearth of titles, said Albert Greco, a professor at Fordham University‘s Graduate School of Business Administration and an authority on the textbook publishing industry.

Greco and others forecast a major shift in the next five years to digital textbooks, which already cost about half as much as new print editions on CourseMart.com, a kind of textbook iTunes launched in 2007 by the major textbook publishers.

That would doom the used book and print rental marketplace, Greco said. As for immediate relief from the new price disclosure law, Greco said it won’t do any good for students unlucky enough to have four courses with brand-new books.

“Whether it will help students comes down to, ‘It depends,’” he said.

Sophie Stanish, a junior at Fordham University in New York, fumes about paying $200 for a new math textbook she couldn’t sell back and a $10 short-story collection that fetched 75 cents at trade-in.

She likes the concept of Fordham’s “E-RES” program — short for “electronic reserve” — in which professors scan sections of textbooks to the extent allowed by copyright law and then put the material online for free.

But, she said, “I can’t read off a screen and retain the knowledge as well. It’s a personal thing. I like to highlight.”

Other colleges seeking to provide relief have adopted textbook loan programs. At City College of San Francisco, Kathy Gill said she misses class to line up early for a popular loan program for students on financial aid.

The limit is two loaned books, so the business major still shops online for used and rental options each semester.

“You do get a little bit of a break,” Gill said. “Every little thing helps.”

New law, e-books and rentals may make college textbooks less costly

New law, e-books and rentals may make college textbooks less costly