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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.

The Education Department announced Monday that students will not be able to make corrections or adjustments to their student aid until “the first half of April”—potentially weeks later than had been predicted at the beginning of the month.  The department also said it would only start reprocessing the 200,000 forms affected by last week’s calculation error after the forms had been opened for student corrections, meaning most colleges won’t be able to send out complete and accurate financial aid offers until May. 
 

Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, protests and disruptions have proliferated on college campuses. Institutional statements have flopped. Speakers have come under fire. Events have been canceled. Leaders of elite institutions have resigned from their posts. As colleges have struggled to appease their students and faculty at home and donors and politicians from afar, a key question emerged: Can colleges fulfill one of their fundamental missions by fostering spaces for civil discourse?

New York is poised to make it easier for its private nonprofit colleges to merge with institutions in other states.
Some higher ed experts describe the proposal as a no-brainer at a time when demographic changes are taking their toll on small, nonwealthy colleges nationally. But others say the changes could bring new competition into an already cutthroat market.

There’s a lot you can learn about Susan Fournier, dean of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, from her April 2022 and March 2023 cover stories in CIO Views magazine. You can learn that Fournier is “an award-winning researcher with an in-depth knowledge of what it takes to produce ‘research that matters.’” You’ll discover she’s “using strategic foresight to make Questrom the business school of the future.” What’s more, she has “advanced the value of interdisciplinary interfaces,” although it’s a little unclear what that means. Ditto the description of the business school’s goal “to be distinctive in digital business while interfacing with the parallel world.”