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It was when the shuttle bus stopped coming that Luka Fernandes began to worry. Fernandes was a student at Newbury College near Boston, whose enrollment had declined in the previous two decades from more than 5,300 to about 600.The private, nonprofit school had been placed on probation by its accreditors because of its shaky finances.After students went home for their winter holiday, an email came: Newbury would shut down at the end of the next semester.
 

It’s been three months since Sami Saeed filled out a federal financial aid application. And for three months, the senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Md., has waited to fix an error in his form. Somehow, when Saeed’s parents submitted their portion of the application, it was automatically submitted without his signature. So as acceptance letters rolled in for him from the University of Maryland in College Park and George Washington University, neither college could tell Saeed how much aid he might receive without a completed financial aid form. It was mid-April before Saeed was finally able to correct and finish his application.
Now, he has trading one waiting period for another — biding his time until financial aid offers arrive.

High school seniors are more likely to attend college if they complete the federal financial aid form known as the FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid. But the state that was the first to require students to fill out the form to graduate, Louisiana, has reversed course and dropped the mandate, after state officials decided it was too intrusive. For now, Louisiana appears to be an outlier.

May 1 is traditionally known as "National College Decision Day" – when colleges and universities ask accepted students to commit to the school they plan to attend in the fall by making a deposit toward their first semester tuition. Not this year. With the federal financial aid process in disorder following a revamp late last year, schools are already way behind in formulating financial aid off ers to students, and many students have yet to even apply for the federal aid. Because of a series of glitches with the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid form, the federal Department of Education and the state SUNY system had already asked schools to push their deadlines back to at least May 15, with some opting for June 1 in hopes of gaining wiggle room.

Net neutrality, a set of policies designed to prevent internet-service providers from playing favorites among the websites they carry, is coming back. In a vote Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission is poised to classify internet service as a public utility. The definition is part of a new framework the FCC will use to regulate broadband networks.