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In the early 2000s, as the uprising known as the second intifada instilled fear in Israelis through a series of suicide bombings, Kenneth Marcus, then an official in the U.S. Department of Education, watched with unease as pro-Palestinian protests shook college campuses. Ever since, Mr. Marcus, perhaps more than anyone, has tried to douse what he sees as a dangerous rise of campus antisemitism, often embedded in pro-Palestinian activism. He has done it as a government insider in the Bush and Trump administrations, helping to clarify protections for Jewish students under the 1964 Civil Rights Act and broadening the definition of what can be considered antisemitic.

As the American public has lost confidence in higher education over the past few years, policymakers have begun talking more about return on investment. In the simplest terms, they say that graduates who invest time and money pursuing a college education should see an earnings bump from their degrees.  In a recent report from the Strada Institute for the Future of Work and the Burning Glass Institute, researchers have attempted to push the conversation beyond earnings by looking at the kinds of jobs graduates are getting.  They issued a big finding: 52% of graduates with only a bachelor’s degree end up underemployed a year after getting their diploma — that is, they work in jobs that don’t typically require a college degree. Ten years on, that number only drops to 45%. 

Legacy preferences have weathered an enormous wave of public disapproval and political attacks since last summer’s Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action. Opponents of admissions advantages for descendants of alumni have won a few recent victories; a handful of prominent private institutions eliminated the practice, and recently Virginia outlawed it at public colleges. Now, a critical battle for legacy’s future is playing out in Connecticut’s state legislature, which is currently considering a bill to ban preferences for legacy applicants, as well as relatives of donors, at both public and private colleges.

The notoriously rocky rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FASFA)keeps getting rockier.
On Friday, the Education Department acknowledged that a calculation error by the office of Federal Student Aid led to inaccurate aid estimates on hundreds of thousands of Institutional Student Information Records, or ISIRs, processed in the past few months.
 

Students across the country this spring are confronting one of the most momentous decisions of their lives without an answer to a fundamental question: How much will college cost? The federal government’s lifeline of aid to low- and middle-income students has been mired in bureaucratic delays that leave aspirational students without the information they desperately need. Amid a national debate over college admissions in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court ruling rejecting race-based affirmative action, the issue of affordability is a crucible. And the government isn’t helping.