Federal policy

Put a bunch of college officials in a room the week after the release of the federal budget proposal, and it's not hard to tell what it contained. Lots of money, lots of smiles (O.K., that doesn't happen a lot).

With a budget like last week's -- full of hundreds of millions of dollars in proposed cuts to programs that colleges hold dear -- the mood is one of uncertainty and frustration. And that was evident Monday at the National Legislative Summit put on annually by the Association of Community College Trustees and American Association of Community Colleges.

The Marines are back at Middlebury College -- recruiting this week for the first time in at least a decade. But before they could recruit, they had to agree to explain the military's policies that discriminate against gay people, and to answer questions about those policies at an open campus forum.

President wants to eliminate many education programs -- and community colleges are particularly hard hit.

For much of the last year, community colleges and the Bush administration have, symbolically, been dancing cheek to cheek. Given what's in the Bush administration's 2006 budget proposal, they may spend the next few months fighting toe to toe.

Regulating diploma mills is a little like herding cats.

The institutions, which offer fraudulent degrees in exchange for cash and little or no academic work, crop up overnight and disappear nearly as fast, when consumer complaints rise or law enforcement officials catch the scent. State and federal lawmakers yearn to crack down on these "colleges," but because they're hard to define and hard to nail down, there's often little they can do.

2 studies from the NSF offer a detailed portrait of graduate enrollments in the sciences and how colleges fared in federal spending on science and engineering.

Congress offered a first glimpse Wednesday at the new federal job training program for community colleges that President Bush unveiled more than a year ago. It came as members of a House of Representatives subcommittee approved a bill to renew the Workforce Investment Act of 1998.

Officials of two-year colleges generally liked what they saw.

The university agrees to pay $500,000 and 3 scientists accept severe restrictions on their work.

The Bush budget plan would provide small increases for the NIH and NSF, while cutting spending on other programs.

House Republicans unveiled their proposals for renewing the law that governs federal financial aid programs, which mirror the bill introduced last year.