Linkpile for Wednesday, October 26, 2011.

• An October 26, 2011 New York Times article brings word of "A One-Page Form to Compare College Aid Offers." "In its latest effort to simplify consumer finance, the new federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has teamed up with the Department of Education to create a one-page financial aid 'shopping sheet.'"
• An October 25, 2011 Bloomberg Business week article reports that Officials target college financial aid letters." "On Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education announced a plan to simplify the aid letters so that families can assess a school's true cost and make comparisons more easily."
• College Students Get Schooled on Managing Debt," reports an October 25 WOI TV story. "Drake University is going to offer a free computer program to students to help them learn how to handle their money. It's called Buttonwood."
• The future's so bright, Jeb Bush has gotta wear shades. "Hitting Re-Set: Higher Education and Disruptive Technology." "Bush's optimism is certainly infectious. He depicts a market-driven higher-education culture that wrings the best out of student and instructors and returns a fair bit of coin to investors and significant stakeholders. Of course, "the market solution" can often prove quite caustic, dissolving the best and worst elements of those practices and institutions that once stood outside commercial exchange relations. The fact that Bush and Hunt want to march into the market state institutions, many of which are land-grant and tax-exempt, should give most people of good will pause, because the end result would be a de facto, if indeed not de jure, privatization of public institutions. All the techno-utopian razzmatazz of Bush's rhetoric ultimately serves only to conceal his true object, i.e., the privatization of public resources, or, to use the hoary old activist jargon, a little bit of old-fashioned primitive accumulation."
• Keeping tuition rates has become "A Shifting Burden," reports an October 26, 2011 Insider Higher Ed article. "While tuition and fees continue to rise at a fast pace, particularly at public colleges and universities struggling with declining state appropriations, federal financial aid policies have kept down the price students pay for a college degree, according to two annual reports released today by the College Board on tuition and financial aid."
• "College: Is it easier to cheat in online classes? ", asks an October 25, 2011 Metro.us article. "Frank M. LoSchiavo and Mark A. Shatz, both psychology professors at Ohio University's Zanesville campus, took an in-depth look at whether students are more likely to cheat in online courses. In the first part of the study, about 40 students who completed 14 online quizzes during the course of the class were surveyed. At the end of the course, 72.5% of students reported cheating at some point by consulting their textbook, notes, friends, family or the Internet."
• "Student loans add to angst at Occupy Wall Street," reports an October 25, 2011 Los Angeles Times article. "With the nation's student loan debt approaching $1 trillion, the issue has also generated debate in Washington. The Obama administration announced plans Tuesday to expand a government program to help 1.2 million borrowers reduce their payments and consolidate their student debt."