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.”

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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)

The London School of Economics has denied reports that the university is considering “going private” in response to the coalition government’s announced plans to cut its contribution to university teaching budgets by as much as 40 percent.

Briefly: L.S.E. Denies It Is Privatizing After U.K. Budget Cuts

Nonprofits have long used the honor roll, a list of benefactors prominently displayed, to inspire others to make gifts.

In the last school year, seniors at Dartmouth College and Cornell University turned that tactic on its head, creating a sort of dishonor roll of peers who failed to donate to the class gift.

At Dartmouth, the lone student in the graduating class who held out, Laura A. DeLorenzo, was excoriated in the student newspaper and on The Little Green Blog, a student Web site, which also ran her picture.

Raising the stakes for the student fund-raisers was the potential of $100,000 more that the Class of 1960 had promised if every senior participated. In a statement on the blog, Ms. DeLorenzo said she resented the pressure that gift apparently had created.

“My decision not to donate to Dartmouth reflects my personal conclusion that the negative aspects of Dartmouth outweigh the positive, and nothing more,” Ms. DeLorenzo wrote. “Where other people choose to donate their money is their decision and I fully respect their right to make it.” She could not be reached for comment.

Carolyn A. Pelzel, senior vice president for advancement at Dartmouth, said the university trained student volunteers who managed the fund-raising effort, adding that the publication of Ms. DeLorenzo’s name was “highly inappropriate.”

At Cornell, pressure to contribute to the senior gift was applied through the sorority system, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, which reported on the issue in its latest edition.

Erica Weitzner, a Cornell graduate who is now in medical school, said she received two or three phone calls and a few e-mails from sorority sisters saying they knew she had not donated. “I understand the theory behind the Cornell campaign is they want their seniors to donate, but pushing this hard makes it seem like it’s no longer really a donation but more like part of tuition,” she said.

Robert F. Sharpe Jr., a fund-raising consultant who happens to be an alumnus of the Cornell Law School, said he was uncomfortable with the tactic. Publishing a list of donors serves the same purpose — “people will know who didn’t give because their name isn’t on the list,” he said, adding: “I have always said that when asking becomes demanding, then giving can approach taking.”

Students Feel Peer Pressure to Donate

Incidents like this, and the suicide last month of the Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, could grow rarer, say legal experts and student advocates, following the U.S. Department of Education‘s release Tuesday of anti-discrimination guidelines.

The “guidance letter,” reportedly in the works for months, tells schools, colleges and universities that bullying should be treated as more than just a breach of campus codes; it also must been seen as a possible violation of federal law.

“I am writing to remind you,” wrote Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights, “that some student misconduct that falls under a school’s anti-bullying policy also may trigger responsibilities under one or more of the federal antidiscrimination laws enforced by the Department’s Office for Civil Rights.”

Though Ali’s letter did not stake out any new policy ground, it did signal the Obama administration’s tighter embrace of its duty to police civil rights infractions.

It also more conclusively fleshed out how existing laws will be applied. Most pointedly, it made clear that campus officials must take immediate and appropriate action to impartially investigate harassment allegations and respond in a way that is “reasonably calculated to end the harassment, eliminate any hostile environment and its effects, and prevent the harassment from recurring.” If not, the full powers of the Department’s Office of Civil Rights will be called upon, Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned. “Are we putting people on notice? The answer is yes,” he said. “If we have to, we’re more than prepared to step in.”

In the Emory case, the university already has affirmed its commitment to providing a “safe, inclusive and welcoming environment” for everyone, as well as its intolerance for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, according to a statement attributed to John L. Ford, senior vice president for campus life.

The student, unnamed by the campus newspaper, wants to use the incident as a learning opportunity for Emory students, according to Michael D. Shutt, director of Emory’s office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender life. Such campus-wide efforts are welcome, according to the Department of Education’s letter. It recommends not just separating the victim and perpetrator, but also rewriting policy, if necessary, and educating the wider community.

“If there’s a culture toward being discriminatory or whatever ‘-ism’ you want to insert there, if there’s a culture there, the institution as a whole has a responsibility to shift that culture or at least educate people,” said W. Scott Lewis, president of the Association for Student Conduct Administrators and a partner in the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management. “In the world of student conduct, everything is about accountability and education.” He viewed the letter’s release as properly framing bullying and harassment in the context of civil rights.

Advocates for gay and lesbian students and for Jewish students enthusiastically greeted the release of the letter as bolstering protection of victimized groups. “This is a bold step,” said Shane Windmeyer, executive director of Campus Pride, a Charlotte, group advocating for safer college environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. Windmeyer was especially pleased that the department signaled its willingness to use Title IX, the 1972 law barring sex discrimination, to guard against abuses based on sexual orientation.

Though federal law does not explicitly protect students on the basis of sexual orientation, the letter spells out a more expansive view, one that says sex discrimination can be punished if students are harassed “for exhibiting what is perceived as a stereotypical characteristic for their sex, or for failing to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity.” To Windmeyer, such language is “a great step forward.”

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., hailed the letter for applying Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to incidents of anti-Semitism. Though Title VI does not apply to religion, the letter, here too, stakes out an expansive view. It cites as actionable discrimination against students on the basis of “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.”

“The policy is now clear,” Sherman said in a statement. “Colleges and universities will no longer be permitted to turn a blind eye when Jewish students face severe and persistent anti-Semitic hostility on their campuses. The schools will now be compelled to respond.”

Colleges’ responses are mandatory, even if a student does not formally file a complaint, according to the letter. In fact, college and university administrators are on the hook for addressing harassment incidents about which they know or “reasonably should have known,” wrote Ali. Such an expectation is troubling to Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, especially because the letter applies both to K-12 schools and to colleges and universities.

“Certainly, in a K-12 environment, there are teachers who come and go in hallways. It’s different from a higher ed situation,” said Meloy. “It’s very difficult for institutions to meet a ‘should have known’ standard — especially when it’s often applied in hindsight.”

The emphasis on K-12 creates other problems for higher education institutions looking for guidance on how to respond. Sorting through what qualifies as harassment and what doesn’t depends largely on the specific facts, department officials emphasized. When campus officials receive guidance letters such as the one released Tuesday, they rely on the examples, culled from actual events, that are cited in these guidelines.

Tuesday’s letter, however, cited four examples — and none dealt with higher education. “The new guidance reinforces the complexity for colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, in addressing peer-to-peer harassing behavior,” said Ann H. Franke, a lawyer who consults nationally with colleges and universities on academic freedom, workplace issues, and student affairs. “The more fact patterns they put in front of us the more detail we get.”

Others saw in the letter an even more unwelcome blending of assumptions of the roles played by K-12 and higher education institutions. The letter urges a paternalistic stance that is inappropriate for colleges and universities and would impinge on the First Amendment right of free speech, wrote Will Creeley, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, in Philadelphia.

“At an institution of higher education, students may range in age from 17 to 67 and beyond, and must be treated like the adults they are,” Creeley wrote in an e-mail. “Our nation’s colleges and universities have a legal duty to respond to instances of true harassment. They must also respect the expressive rights of their students. These dual obligations to protect free speech and prosecute actual harassment need not be in tension.”

Experts, advocates weigh in on Ed. Dept. anti-bias letter

Experts, advocates weigh in on Ed. Dept. anti-bias letter

The still unresolved case of Marc Hauser, the researcher accused by Harvard of scientific misconduct, points to the painful slowness of the government-university procedure for resolving such charges. It also underscores the difficulty of defining error in a field like animal cognition where inconsistent results are common.

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Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher

On Oct. 2, a raid by New Haven, Conn., police to break up a party by Yale University students led to claims of police brutality and excessive force.

One week later, a party by Penn State University students turned violent when a fight between two women spilled out onto the streets of State College, leaving two students with stab wounds.

Last week, Pace University football player Danroy “DJ” Henry was shot and killed by police outside a popular eatery frequented by students from the nearby Pace campus.

What they have in common is alcohol — a common component in encounters between police and college students that can fuel tensions.

“Obviously you’re going to have some standard issues,” said Eugene O’Donnell, professor of law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “You’re going to have issues about later-night activity. You’re going to have alcohol-related issues.”

The violence outside Finnegan’s Grill in Thornwood, N.Y., came after a celebration of the school’s homecoming game, attended by about 150 people including students and members of the football team. The crowd spilled into the parking lot after 1 a.m. after a fight inside the bar. On Friday, a law enforcement source told The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News that Henry had a blood-alcohol level of 0.13%, exceeding the legal limit of 0.08%.

It was hardly the first run-in between police and Pace students. In November 2000, several students were among eight men who trashed a campus townhouse in retaliation for an earlier fight at a local bar.

And on April 25, 2008, a 21-year-old student was charged with assaulting his ex-girlfriend in her dorm room during a drunken rampage.

“Pace is like a little city unto itself, and they do require police resources,” said Mount Pleasant (N.Y.) Police Chief Louis Alagno. “We’re called there mostly for things such as motor vehicle accidents and aided cases, but we also respond for criminal incidents. There are burglaries, larcenies and the occasional sex crime or assault. It does require police resources.”

You don’t have to tell police in New Rochelle, N.Y., a city with three colleges — College of New Rochelle, Iona College and Monroe College.

“We’ll have pockets of disturbances,” said New Rochelle police Capt. Robert Gazzola, head of the department’s police services division. “I don’t think there’s any lasting animosity between the police department, the Iona College students, the Monroe College students. A lot of it is isolated incidents that perk up and we have to respond.”

The city, plagued for years by rowdy behavior in local bars tackled the problem years ago by passing a stricter “cabaret law” that allowed police to go after and target troublesome bars.

Police in Mount Pleasant and Pleasantville, where most Pace watering holes are located, have enforced underage drinking laws for years — a common tactic in college towns.

But the bar at the center of a fatal shooting had no recent history of problems involving students, according to state and local law enforcement.

Finnegan’s seemed an unlikely place for a violent encounter between police and celebrating college students last weekend.

Pace students interviewed by The Journal News said they generally had not had negative encounters with local police. Some went so far as to say they were shocked to hear of the violence outside Finnegan’s last weekend.

“I wouldn’t say they’re aggressive, they’re just doing their job,” said student John Tripodi. “I guess what they did (outside Finnegan’s) was a little excessive, but if I was him I don’t know what I would have done.”

But Megan Murphy, a freshman accounting major at the Mount Pleasant college, called the police account of the shooting “ridiculous.”

“It’s all too iffy right now. I’m not sure,” Murphy said. “I wasn’t there so I can’t say what exactly happened. (Henry) probably just panicked.”

Alcohol fuels tensions between college students, police

Alcohol fuels tensions between college students, police

Tuesday night was busy and chilly on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx, even if most eyes and minds were focused a few miles south, where the Yankees were hosting a playoff game. Out of the darkness around 7:30, squeezing through the doors of crowded buses and descending the steps from an elevated train platform, about 40 football players walked one by one across uneven sidewalks lugging shoulder pads, cleats and brightly painted helmets.

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Ray Baxter calls club football a â??carrotâ? to help his players get to college.

Among the Pads and Huddles, a Nudge Toward College

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

It is a question on the minds of so many high school seniors at this time of year: How can you raise your chances of getting into your No. 1 college choice?

Early Action Could Aid in Admission, Report Finds

No science fiction here: “These are real,” say commercials for Planet Green’s new show, Dean of Invention, which premieres Friday at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

Dean Kamen, the show’s host and inventor of various medical technologies as well as the two-wheeled self-balancing personal transporter, the Segway, says he wants the show to get kids excited about STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), although the series is not aimed just at children.

Demolishing stereotypes

Inspiring and engaging kids in STEM has long been one of Kamen’s goals, which he largely pursues through his FIRST robotics competition, a series of hands-on robotics contests culminating in a large international championship, something of a robot Olympics.

“I think the biggest stereotype of all that hurts the world of science and technology is that kids think of scientists as a ‘they.’ Kids think, ‘It’s those scientists who will cure cancer. It’s those weird geniuses. It’s them, those scientists, not me,’ ” says Kamen.

Kamen says that he hopes his show will wipe out the image of the crazy or boring scientist by showing kids fascinating technology and fun, exciting scientists of all races, genders and ages.

In each show, Kamen takes his audience on “field trips” to labs and other research sites to investigate breakthrough inventions, including a trip to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to study robotic prosthetic limbs, a feature on the first episode.

“We want the opportunity to present this information in a way that is broadly interesting and accessible from kids to adults. We want kids to say, ‘I wanna get involved,’ or ‘I wanna build that reality.’ We want to build the army of kids who are going to be the next generation of saviors,” he says.

There are educational TV shows that are effective, such as Cyberchase, a science cartoon on PBS Kids that must prove it is reaching kids because the National Science Foundation funds it, says Joe Blatt, Harvard University Graduate School of Education senior lecturer and director of the Technology, Innovation and Education program.

Blatt adds, however, that educational shows succeed best when geared toward the appropriate age group.

He has not seen Dean of Invention yet, but Blatt says it is not unreasonable to assume that older kids might watch because “teens and tweens” often turn to shows designed for adults as they grow out of kids’ shows.

“A lot of the show, from what I can see, is very technically oriented,” says Tony Murphy of St. Catherine University’s National Center for STEM Elementary Education in St. Paul. Murphy watched preview clips of the show on Planet Green’s website.

“But it is also done in a way that’s interesting and easy to understand, with graphics and great visuals, that help people to gain an understanding of what’s being done in science and technology,” Murphy says. “It’s very, very exciting, and could be great for parents and kids to watch together.”

The show is designed to be accessible to the average adult viewer but stimulating for kids, and informative for professionals in STEM, says Kamen.

Although entire episodes may not appeal to some younger kids, Murphy says teachers from elementary to high school could use clips from the show as part of a lesson to get kids thinking about technology, which is vital because by middle school, some children already have negative feelings about those subjects.

Outside the typical lab

Murphy adds that bringing this show into the classroom could “start kids off with an understanding that we live in a technological world,” and expose kids to scientists and engineers of all cultures and outside of the typical laboratory setting.

Kamen says future episodes will feature a range of innovations such as computer programs that can transfer information from the human brain, and the development of human waste as an energy source to be burned like coal.

Planet Green show aims to inspire kids with science

Planet Green show aims to inspire kids with science