Chronicle of Higher Ed - Multiyear Study of Community-College Practices Asks: What Helps Students Graduate? (February 2, 2012) - Community colleges are brimming with programs and policies designed to help students complete their studies. Practices like requiring orientation and establishing early-academic-warning systems have sprouted since 2009, when President Obama announced that he wanted to make the United States the best-educated country in the world by 2020...

Inside Higher Ed - Make It Mandatory? (February 2, 2012) - The success of the "completion agenda" may hinge on whether community colleges set more mandatory requirements for students, and drop their reliance on making academic support offerings optional...

Inside Higher Ed - No Money Down! (February 2, 2012) - With public university administrators continually arguing for tuition increases to counter state appropriations cuts, it seems far-fetched that their budget problems could be solved by eliminating student tuition and fees altogether...

Community College Times - Job pathways need to be regional (January 30, 2012) - Job markets have become regional, and that means community colleges need to build partnerships across a broad area...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Summit on Adjuncts Yields Tentative Framework for Campaign to Improve Their Conditions (January 29, 2012) - A national summit on adjunct faculty members held here Saturday produced both heated denunciations of the forces blamed for adjuncts' exploitation and loose consensus on a proposed campaign to improve their working conditions...

CT Mirror - State's colleges put on notice to stop raising tuition (January 27, 2012) - If President Obama has his way, the money that colleges receive from Washington will soon go to schools that can lower their tuition or at least hold it steady...

Hartford Business Journal - CT international student flavor grows (January 30, 2012) - The increase in international students attending Connecticut institutes of higher education doubled the national average - reaching record levels - handing the state's industry and workforce a distinct advantage in the world economy...

New England Journal of Higher Ed - Alignment Job: Community Colleges and Workforce Development (January 27, 2012) - In Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's recent 2012 State of the Commonwealth address, he reported that 240,000 people were still looking for work in Massachusetts - and there were nearly 120,000 job openings...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Aid Experts and Officials Question President's College-Affordability Plans (January 30, 2012) - So far, the outlines of the college-affordability proposals first mentioned in President Obama's State of the Union address last week have raised as many questions as they have answered...

New England Board of Higher Ed - Trends & Indicators: Financing Higher Education (January 29, 2012) - New England's public and private two-year and four-year colleges continue to be more expensive than the U.S. averages...

CNN Money - Federal student loan rate set to double (January 25, 2012) - Attention college students: The interest rate on federal student loans is scheduled to double this summer unless Congress acts soon. Loans taken out for the current school year carried an interest rate of 3.4%, thanks to a 2007 law that phased in rate reductions for subsidized Stafford loans to undergraduate students...

Middletown Patch - Middletown's Finest Welcome Three New Officers (January 30, 2012) - Andrew Wasilewski, James Remotti and Eric Sanford have begun five months of training at the Connecticut Police Academy...James Remotti, 29, is employed at O&M Inc. in Windsor, where he works as an environmental technician. Remotti has completed his associates degree at Manchester Community College, majoring in criminal justice...

Rocky Hill Life - Veterans Hall of Fame inductee has never stopped serving his country (January 27, 2012) - Ronald Catania, a U.S. Air Force veteran who served in Vietnam, was inducted into the Connecticut Veterans Hall of Fame... He earned an associate's degree in business from Manchester Community College...

Hebron & Marlborough Life - Facade program worked for restaurant (January 27, 2012) -Anyone who questions whether government stimulus programs work might try talking to Gina and Troy Kelsey of Gina Marie's Restaurant..Gina and Troy met...when she was a student at Saint Joseph College, studying to be a teacher, and he was at Manchester Community College studying culinary arts. They married at 22 and bought the restaurant at 24....

CT Mirror - Streamlining teacher certification and linking it to teacher evaluations (February 1, 2012) - The peace between the teachers unions and the Malloy Administration ended Tuesday, one week before legislators convene at the State Capitol to get to work on a major education overhaul...

CT Mirror - Do education grants work? State rarely checks (January 26, 2012) - Business leaders offered a simple, if politically sensitive suggestion Thursday on how to pay for many of the things needed to improve education in the state: link the laundry list of grants that the state dishes out each year to performance...

Hartford Business Journal - State Budget: Running on empty (January 30, 2012) - With Connecticut's projected budget surpluses for the 2011-12 and 2012-13 fiscal years slowly eroding, state lawmakers and Governor Malloy will be forced to make revisions to the two-year spending plan they passed last year that included a record setting $1.5 billion in new taxes...

CT Mirror - What not to major in at college (February 1, 2012) - Even with the downsizing of newsrooms across the country, it turns out that college journalism majors don't face the harshest job market. Architecture majors do...

Inside Higher Ed - College in High Schools (February 1, 2012) - This one is really looking for advice from those among my wise and worldly readers who've found reasonably elegant ways to handle a particular situation. Like many community colleges, mine offers some credit-bearing courses onsite in some local high schools that are just far enough way that it would be difficult for the students to commute...

Inside Higher Ed - "Value" (January 30, 2012) - President Obama used the term "value" in outlining the criteria he'd use, if he had his druthers, in allocating Federal funding to higher ed. First, the obligatory disclaimer: he doesn't get his druthers very often. He doesn't quite seem to get that the Republicans have no intention of letting him succeed at pretty much anything. That said, though, the idea of looking at "value" is suggestive...

Chronicle of Higher Ed - Community Colleges and the State of the Union (January 25, 2012) - In this year's State of the Union address, President Obama called the inability of many hard-working Americans to enjoy the American Dream "the defining issue of our time." We shouldn't "settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by...