State Senator Steve Cassano - Cassano Welcomes State Funds for Manchester Community College Improvements (March 13, 2013) - State Senator Steve Cassano (D-Manchester), who taught sociology for nearly three decades at Manchester Community College, today welcomed a significant state investment of funds to renovate interior and exterior portions of the campus...

New England Journal of Higher Ed - Improving Math Success in Higher Education Institutions (March 20, 2013) - Many students begin higher education unprepared for college-level work in mathematics and must take non-credit developmental courses. Furthermore, many are math-phobic and avoid courses, majors and careers that involve quantitative work...

Inside Higher Ed - Jobs, Value and Affirmative Action: A Survey of Parents About College (March 20, 2013) - Study hard, and you'll get into the college of your dreams. It's debatable whether that advice -- given to generations of American children -- was ever really true...

PBS New Hour - Colleges and Universities See Graying Workforce Holding On to Coveted Positions (March 18, 2013) - In academia, many professors remain working and teaching long past traditional retirement age, leaving younger potential professors shut out from highly coveted full-time, tenured positions. As part of a series on older workers, economics correspondent Paul Solman reports on how institutions are negotiating with aging faculty...

Inside Higher Ed - Whither Work Force Training Bill? (March 18, 2013) - The House of Representatives approved legislation Friday that would consolidate the number of federal job training programs and make other changes in the government's system of work force training. But the measure, which would renew the law governing work force training for the first time in 15 years, is a highly partisan piece of legislation that has virtually no chance of being enacted in its current form...

Community College Times - Interest Growing in Food Sustainability (March 18, 2013) - With growing numbers of consumers and restaurants seeking out locally produced specialty food items, community colleges are creating programs around the concept of sustainability in agriculture and the culinary arts...

Reminder News - Skull Find Remains a Mystery (March 19, 2-03) -Adam Viens made an unusual discovery when he went looking for pieces of scrap metal to use for an art project. While searching a former dump in the woods near his home on West Street in Vernon, he happened upon a human skull. Viens, 23, an art student at Manchester Community College, said he didn't think it was a real skull at first, and had picked it up and taken it into his family home. He later noticed that some of the teeth had fillings, and then it became obvious that it was a real skull...

Inside Higher Ed - Competencies! (March 19, 2013) - I can tell I'm getting older by what gets me excited. There was a time when a story had to feature Winona Ryder and/or Paul Westerberg to get my attention. Now I read about the Department of Education issuing a guidance letter on competency-based education and financial aid eligibility and get all worked up...

Inside Higher Ed - "Not a School for People Like Them"  (March 18, 2013) - Rising star of the Twitterverse Tressie McMillan Cottom has a must-read post about her observations as a sociologist and former admissions staffer at a for-profit college. It's about the interaction between the prestige hierarchy of higher education, economic class, and self-image...