Free Republic

The College Board reduced the Reading and Writing portion of the SAT exam by up to 500 words, arguing the length was nonessential in assessing students' aptitude.. One expert projects the ACT will soon cut its standards as well. In 2024, the College Board introduced sweeping changes to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), made largely without the awareness of lawmakers. According to a June 18 op-ed by Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classical Learning Test (CLT), one major change was the format switch from paper to computerized testing. This allows the exam to be adaptable, which means that...

Around 6 million student borrowers are 90 days or more past due on their student loan payments, and around a third of them, or 2 million, could start having a portion of their wages garnished by the federal government starting in July to pay back their loans. According to the Wall Street Journal, the number of borrowers at risk of wage garnishments is higher than the 1.2 million that was estimated by TransUnion. Wage garnishments—a legal procedure allowing a portion of wages to be withheld by the government to pay down a debt—could spell lower pay for the student borrowers...

200 California bar exam takers have had their failing scores adjusted to “pass.” ... In 2025, American students from kindergarten through law school are dumber than they’ve ever been, and we needn’t look beyond the nation’s abysmal math and English literacy NAEP scores to prove it. In 2025, American students from kindergarten through law school are dumber than they’ve ever been, and we needn’t look beyond the nation’s abysmal math and English literacy NAEP scores to prove it. Now, more than 200 California bar exam takers have had their failing scores adjusted to “pass,” indicating that the newest crop of...

A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to stop Harvard University from hosting foreign nationals on student visas. US District Judge Allison Burroughs’s preliminary injunction extends a temporary block she issued last month, which prevented the Trump administration from revoking the Ivy League school’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification. The certification allows Harvard to host roughly 7,000 international students – about 27% of the school’s total enrollment. The injunction will remain in effect until the underlying case is decided, the Obama-appointed judge ruled. The ruling marks another legal victory for the Cambridge, Massachusetts school as...

The U.S. State Department said Wednesday that it is restarting the process for foreigners to apply for student visas but says all applicants must have their social media accounts set to ‘public’ to allow review by officials. Consular officers will be looking for activity, posts and messages showing “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States,” the department said. The announcement is the latest step in the Trump administration’s crackdown on international students, and the U.S. said applicants who refuse may have their applications rejected.

An Oregon middle school encouraged students to dress up as "drag queens" and their favorite "queer hero" this week in celebration of Pride Month, but one parent said families weren't notified ahead of time. At the Arts & Technology Academy in the Eugene School District 4J, students celebrated "Pride Spirit Week" with a different theme each day intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community, according to a memo obtained by Fox News Digital. On Monday, students were encouraged to "wear as many colors as they could" for "Rainbow-Out" day. On Tuesday, they were told to wear all black "in remembrance of...

BOSTON – A federal judge in Boston on Thursday temporarily blocked US President Donald Trump from barring US entry of foreign nationals seeking to study or participate in exchange programs at Harvard University. Under a two-page temporary restraining order granted to Harvard, US District Judge Allison Burroughs enjoined Trump’s proclamation from taking effect pending further litigation of the matter amid an escalating dispute between the Ivy League school and Republican president. The judge ruled that Trump’s directive prohibiting foreign nationals from entering the United States to study at Harvard for the next six months would cause “immediate and irreparable injury”...

WASHINGTON — The State Department is broadening its review of visa holders at Harvard University beyond the foreign student population, a senior official told The Post on Thursday. The comprehensive investigation will consider F-1 visas for foreign students, B-1 visas for business-related visitors and B-2 visas for tourism, the State Department official confirmed. The probe will also focus on possible threats to security or abuses of the visa system. The wider review was first reported by Fox News after Secretary of State Marco Rubio had announced visa revocations for foreign officials or persons censoring Americans and some Chinese students. Foreign...

Universities and colleges across the country can thank Harvard for this latest development. If federal courts won't allow the Department of Homeland Security to deal directly with Harvard on compliance for the Student Education Visa Program (SEVP), the administration can simply make it more difficult for everyone instead. That seems to be the case today, although this may have accelerated a project that would have started soon anyway. After a federal court issued a stay that allows Harvard to continue enrolling foreign students, the Trump administration paused the entire program. Embassies and consulates have been ordered to stop conducting necessary...

President Donald Trump on Sunday blasted Harvard’s secrecy when it comes to the university’s large number of students from foreign countries. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said: “Why isn’t Harvard saying that almost 31% of their students are from FOREIGN LANDS, and yet those countries, some not at all friendly to the United States, pay NOTHING toward their student’s education, nor do they ever intend to. Nobody told us that! “We want to know who those foreign students are, a reasonable request since we give Harvard BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, but Harvard isn’t exactly forthcoming. We want those names...

3 in 4 parents of college-age students also oppose men in women’s spaces A majority of parents with college-age students want universities to stop prioritizing race in hiring and scholarship decisions ... The results showed a majority of parents “are at odds with our country’s higher education institutions on several contentious issues that are consistently in today’s political dialogue,” according to a news release. Defending Education works to rid education of ideological agendas. In the poll, which involved parents of 15- to 21-year-old students, 54 percent said universities should not prioritize a student’s race when awarding scholarships, and 57 percent...

The Trump Administration has delivered a significant blow to Harvard’s wallet with a move that will likely get challenged in court. As The New York Post reported, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem moved to kick out thousands of foreign students enrolled at Harvard University by terminating Harvard’s international student program. She explained this was the administration’s way of holding the Ivy League school accountable for its violent, Anti-Semitic, and pro-China activities. “This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Noem wrote on X. “It is a privilege, not a...

A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump Administration from revoking the legal status of international students nationwide while their legal challenges are going through the court system. According to the AP, California-based US District Judge Jeffrey White, a George W. Bush appointee, said Trump’s immigration actions “wreaked havoc not only on the lives of Plaintiffs here but on similarly situated F-1 nonimmigrants across the United States and continues do so.”

A senior at Northeastern University filed a formal complaint and demanded a tuition refund after discovering her professor was secretly using AI tools to generate notes. The professor later admitted to using several AI platforms and acknowledged the need for transparency. The incident highlights growing student concerns over professors using AI, a reversal of earlier concerns from professors worried that students would use the technology to cheat. Some students are not happy about their professor’s use of AI. One college senior was so shocked to learn her teacher was using AI to help him create notes that she lodged a...

Seven Georgia students — some as young as 5 — were arrested for allegedly attacking their 7-year-old classmate during an early morning bus ride to school, according to police. The alleged attackers, who range in age from 5 to 14, were slapped with battery charges for the vicious beatdown that erupted while their bus was en route to Mattie Lively Elementary School in Statesboro on April 18, the Bulloch County Sheriff’s Office announced Wednesday. Police said they were notified of the heinous assault roughly a week later and identified the troubled students after reviewing the transport’s security footage, which captured...

College students don't work very hard these days, write Rick Hess and Greg Fournier of the Manhattan Institute. Full-time students say they average 20 to 25 hours of class time and studying each week, and some estimates are even lower. Thirty-five hours a week would be a reasonable amount of time, according to traditional measures. They're not more likely to have paying jobs than earlier generations, research shows. In 2024, the average first-year student reported spending 5.3 hours per week in campus activities and clubs, 9.3 hours working for pay and 11.9 hours relaxing and socializing. Yet most think they're...

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York state would ban cellphones in public schools “bell to bell” beginning with the next school year under an agreement announced late Monday by Gov. Kathy Hochul.“We’ve protected our kids before from cigarettes, alcohol, and drunk driving, and now we’re protecting them from addictive technology designed to hijack their attention,” Hochul said in announcing the plan as part of a tentative budget agreement with state lawmakers.Hochul, a Democrat, did not immediately detail plans for the ban. Her office has previously said that schools would have some flexibility over how to implement it, with districts deciding...

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is suing President Trump’s administration in federal court for targeting international students who had their legal status revoked. “The consequences of Defendants’ unilateral and unlawful termination are dire. The termination puts students out of lawful student status. Plaintiffs and the class face immigration detention and deportation. Plaintiffs and the class face severe financial and academic hardship. Further, Plaintiffs and the class are not able to obtain their degrees and work pursuant to the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program after graduation,” ACLU’s lawyers wrote in the class action lawsuit filed in New Hampshire. “Indeed, Defendants’...

For the last few weeks, many foreign students living in the US have watched as a sequence of events has repeated itself on their social media feeds: plain-clothes agents appearing unannounced and hauling students off in unmarked cars to detention centres. The combination of targeted detentions and reports of wide-scale visa revocations have left campuses on edge, from the biggest public universities to elite Ivy League institutions. "I could be next," said one student visa-holder attending Georgetown University, who has written articles about Israel and the war in Gaza. Another student in Texas said he's afraid to leave his apartment,...

America’s non-profit sector is at the root of the post-October 7 tidal wave of domestic terrorism, antisemitism, and destructive anti-Israel protests plaguing the United States. A series of large-scale investigations by Capital Research Center (CRC) revealed that the leadership of the so-called “pro-Palestinian” movement is, at its core, anti-American and anti-Western. It views the US exactly the same way it views Israel: as an illegitimate, genocidal entity that must be destroyed. The cumulative conclusion of these reports serves as a warning about what is to come unless the corrective measures CRC identified are implemented: a burgeoning nationwide insurgency in the...