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Education Secretary Miguel Cardona sent a letter to governors Tuesday outlining recommendations to help increase completion of Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms and ease stress on students in the process. The new FAFSA rollout has had a bumpy ride, from getting off to a late start in January to calculation errors in 200,000 forms that were sent to universities recently.  

Many higher ed employees got pay increases this past year that exceeded the inflation rate for the first time since the pandemic, but they still don’t have the same buying power as before the public health crisis/emergency, according to a new report by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR).
 

This year’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournament is being played amid a revolutionary change in college sports: The best players are now openly recruited, retained and rewarded with cash. That change began in 2021, when the N.C.A.A. — under pressure from the Justice Department and state legislatures — allowed players to be paid for the use of their “name, image and likeness.” The idea was to let players endorse shoes or sports drinks.
The new system was overrun by groups called “collectives” — made up of wealthy boosters who donated money, and in some cases raised even more, to pay athletes based on their value to the team. 

As colleges and universities scramble to process student financial aid applications and send out award letters, institutions want more time to comply with reporting requirements in the Education Department's new gainful employment and financial value transparency rule. The rule aims to provide prospective students with more information about whether college programs pay off. 

The U.S. Education Department said it has discovered a calculation error in hundreds of thousands of student financial aid applications sent to colleges this month and will need to reprocess them — a blunder that follows a series of others and threatens further delays to this year’s college applications. A vendor working for the federal government incorrectly calculated a financial aid formula for more than 200,000 students, the department said Friday. The information was sent to colleges to help them prepare financial aid packages but now needs to be recalculated — even as the department works through a backlog of more than 4 million other financial aid applications.