US Federal Student Debt Forgiven for Disabled Borrowers

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Student loan borrowers in the United States with total and permanent disability will have their debt discharged, the U.S. Department of Education (DoED) has announced.”Borrowers with total and permanent disabilities should focus on their well-being, not put their health on the line to submit earnings information during the COVID-19 emergency,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a press release.”Waiving these requirements will ensure no borrower who is totally and permanently disabled risks having to repay their loans simply because they could not submit paperwork.” US Students With Disabilities Afforded Equality Reasonable accommodations have been available to students in the US sincemore

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Thai Teen Faces Jail for Allegedly Defaming King

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A 16-year-old Thai is potentially facing jail for allegedly defaming the country’s King Maha Vajiralongkorn by wearing a crop top, as Thailand’s youth-driven pro-democracy protests are gradually being quashed by a royalist establishment armed with draconian laws.The country’s lèse-majesté law, known better as “112,” after its section in the Thai criminal code, carries three to 15 years in jail for each charge of “defaming, insulting or threatening” key players in the palace, effectively shielding the powerful monarchy from criticism.Lèse-majesté allegations have been filed against at least 71 protesters, with seven key leaders denied bail so far as they await trial.Themore

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Universities Serve as Mass Vaccination Centers

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Mass vaccination centers are emerging around the U.S. as more doses are rolled out more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. Colleges and universities around the U.S. have turned into these centers, serving thousands of patients a day. VOA’s Kathleen Struck reports. Producer and camera: Mike Burke.  …

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Visa Delays Hinder Foreign Student Job Prospects

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Emma is a 27-year-old Chinese national who is pregnant and living with her husband in New York. Emanuel, 23, lives in Virginia and is from Morocco. Peter, 31, moved from China in 2014. He resides in Houston, Texas.Emma, Emanuel and Peter do not know each other, but they have one thing in common: Their international student immigration status is in jeopardy due to processing time delays in facilities overseen by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).At their request, VOA is only using pseudonyms.These delays are affecting their ability to accept job offers because some employers are asking tomore

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Prominent Hong Kong Student Activist Charged with Subversion

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Authorities in Hong Kong have reportedly charged pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong with subversion under the new national security law.  News of the new charge was posted on Wong’s Facebook account Thursday.  The 24-year-old activist is currently serving a 13-and-a-half month prison sentence for organizing an unauthorized protest in 2019.  It comes one day after at least 53 pro-democracy activists were arrested in Hong Kong in the biggest crackdown on opposition members in the semi-autonomous city since the law was approved by Beijing last July.  Among those arrested in the pre-dawn raids included several members of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party who took partmore

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Foreign Students Get Green Light to Continue Study Online  

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Federal guidance for international students enrolled in U.S. universities is likely to remain the same for Spring semester 2021 regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, an ICE spokesperson announced. TheFILE – Masked students walk through the campus of Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., Sept. 10, 2020. …If the international student guidance officially continues into the Spring 2021 semester, here’s what it may mean to current and prospective international students at U.S. higher education institutions. What this means for existing students  Continuing international students who held valid nonimmigrant student visas on March 9, 2020 may continue to take their course load online whether insidemore

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How Georgia Youth Vote Could Impact Runoff Election

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Young voters – specifically young Black voters – participating in the Georgia runoff election for two Senate seats are expected to provide significant support for the Democratic candidates.In the Senate race between incumbent Republican Senator David Perdue and Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff, 88% of Black youth favored Ossoff, compared with 31% of white youth, in the November election, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.In the Senate special election between incumbent Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler and challenger Raphael Warnock, 83% of Black youth preferred Warnock, compared tomore

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Indiana to Host All Men’s March Madness Games

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The Midwestern state of Indiana this year will be host to the entire men’s college basketball tournament, also known as March Madness, the NCAA announced Monday.The college athletic group is attempting to create a “bubble,” or an isolation zone, in an attempt to protect the college athletes from contracting COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.“If we’re going to be able to do it, it’s got to be done safely,” Creighton coach Greg McDermott said. “The more you can limit travel the better. To do it in the middle of the country makes it easier for everybody. … You wantmore

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Grad Student Finds Fundamental Flaw in Earlier Study

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A graduate student found a fundamental flaw in published research upon which she was building her research, which led to a retraction by the original author.Susanne Stoll, a graduate student at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said she thought she had made a mistake when trying to duplicate the results of an earlier experiment in brain research.“When I first stumbled upon the error, I had no clue what I was dealing with. I thought I had messed up my experiment because I obtained similar results in fairly distinct experimental conditions,” Stoll said in emails with VOAmore

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Students Ask for More Transparency During Pandemic

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College students say clearer communications with their institutions could improve learning during the COVID-19 pandemic that has limited most classes to online.Better communications include transparent decision-making, a 24/7 chatbot, text messaging and better IT support, according to a poll of 2,200 students and staff in Spain, the United States, Britain, Australia, France, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.While all students reported diminished trust with university leadership during the pandemic, students in the U.S., Britain and Spain reported the greatest amount of disconnect from their institutions.Students and staff also asked for testing for COVID-19 and personalmore

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Students Want Universities to Boost Communication During Pandemic

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College students say clearer communications with their institutions could improve learning during the COVID-19 pandemic that has limited most classes to online.Better communications include transparent decision-making, a 24/7 chatbot, text messaging and better IT support, according to a poll of 2,200 students and staff in Spain, the United States, Britain, Australia, France, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.While all students reported diminished trust with university leadership during the pandemic, students in the U.S., Britain and Spain reported the greatest amount of disconnect from their institutions.Students and staff also asked for testing for COVID-19 and personalmore

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COVID-19 Dominates Rough Year for Universities

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Higher education did not escape the reaches of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. U.S. colleges and universities struggled with decisions in the spring to send students home, and then whether to open campuses in the fall, all with an eye to trying to limit the spread of the coronavirus. Students still feel adrift, and the financial impact on the industry has been significant.  The issues:  COVID-19 begins  In December 2019, international students celebrated the end of a semester’s hard work, with many flying home for the winter holidays. A month later, they traveled back to their U.S. schools for themore

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2020 Sees Higher Education Admissions Scandal, Visa Challenges for International Students

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The coronavirus pandemic led to more than 1.7 million deaths and 79 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 — the disease caused by the virus — and international students around the world largely escaped health affects but were disrupted in their studies. Higher education in the United States also was roiled by a huge admissions scandal and immigration restrictions, which punctuated a chaotic and anxiety-ridden year.  The issues: College admissions scandal  Nearly three dozen parents, including “Full House” actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, were sentenced in a high-profile college admissions scandal that revealed wealthy parents buying their children’s way intomore

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US Actress Lori Loughlin Released After Prison Term in College Scam

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“Full House” actor Lori Loughlin was released from prison Monday after spending two months behind bars for paying half a million dollars in bribes to get her two daughters into college.  Loughlin was released from the federal lockup in Dublin, California, where she had been serving her sentence for her role in the college admissions bribery scheme, the federal Bureau of Prisons said. Her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, is serving his five-month sentence at a prison in Lompoc near Santa Barbara, California.  Loughlin and Giannulli were both initially supposed to report to prison on Nov. 19, but prosecutors andmore

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Duty-Free King Quietly Gives Away $8 Billion

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Among the celebrity philanthropists who donate extreme amounts of money to education and lifting others, Chuck Feeney’s name is not as well-known as Bloomberg, Gates or Buffett.Those billionaires — Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — are highly recognizable names of great wealth, and their efforts are well-known.But Feeney, 89, has donated more than $8 billion in the past 38 years more quietly, espousing the slogan “Giving While Living” through his Men look at cosmetic products in a Duty Free store at the Fraport airport in Frankfurt, Germany, Nov. 14, 2012.Numerous educational programs have benefited from Atlantic Philanthropies, butmore

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For South Korea’s Graduating High Schoolers, Entrance Exam Results Bring Relief

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Twelve years of study boiled down into one eight-hour test for graduating high-school seniors — the suneung, South Korea’s college entrance exam, announced results on Wednesday.“I’m pretty satisfied with my results. I think I got what I worked for,” said Gi Tae Kim, a student who studied the liberal arts track at Daedong Taxation High School in Seoul. “Overall, I thought it was a bit easier than past tests.”Like U.S. students, many take annual aptitude and entrance exams more than once to improve their scores.“I thought that the Korean language section was alright. English was easy. The math and sciencemore

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For South Korea’s Graduating High Schoolers, Entrance Exam Results Brings Relief

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Twelve years of study boiled down into one eight-hour test for graduating high-school seniors — the suneung, South Korea’s college entrance exam, announced results on Wednesday.“I’m pretty satisfied with my results. I think I got what I worked for,” said Gi Tae Kim, a student who studied the liberal arts track at Daedong Taxation High School in Seoul. “Overall, I thought it was a bit easier than past tests.”Like U.S. students, many take annual aptitude and entrance exams more than once to improve their scores.“I thought that the Korean language section was alright. English was easy. The math and sciencemore

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Limited Funds or No English? No Problem at Community Colleges

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Community colleges — sometimes seen as a lesser alternative for college students — can get many students started on a more flexible and less costly path toward a degree.These schools offer an associate’s degree in two years that is transferable to many four-year institutions for a bachelor’s degree. Once called junior colleges, they popped up in the U.S. around the turn of the 1900s.The biggest draw of community colleges is their affordability.While the average tuition at public four-year schools for the 2017-2018 academic school year was $26,261, and $46,014 at private institutions, according to the National Center for Education Statistics,more

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More Than 70 West Point Cadets Accused of Cheating on Exam

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More than 70 cadets training at the U.S. Military Academy to be Army officers have been accused of cheating on a math exam taken online when they were studying remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic.  Lt. Col. Christopher Ophardt, spokesman for the academy at West Point, said Monday that 73 cadets were accused of cheating on the calculus exam in May after instructors noticed irregularities in answers. All but one were freshmen, or plebes, in a class of 1,200. The other was a sophomore. “West Point honor code and character development program remains strong despite remote learning and the challenges broughtmore

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US Supreme Court Takes Up NCAA Appeal over Benefit Limits for College Athletes 

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear a bid by the National Collegiate Athletic Association to defend its limits on education-related compensation for college basketball and football players. The justices took up an appeal by the NCAA, the major governing body for U.S. intercollegiate sports, of a May decision by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that deemed the organization’s rules anticompetitive under a federal law called the Sherman Antitrust Act.The justices also agreed to hear a related appeal brought by major college sports conferences including all of the big-money so-called Power Five conferences: the Bigmore

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Mackenzie Scott Gives $4.2 Billion to Help ‘Vulnerable’

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MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, said Tuesday she has given $4.2 billion to groups helping the vulnerable, as the pandemic hits lives like “a wrecking ball.” Scott, who formerly went by the name MacKenzie Bezos, last year signed a “giving pledge” to donate the bulk of her wealth to charity. In a round of donations early this year, Scott gave nearly $1.7 billion to groups devoted to race, gender and economic equality, as well as other social causes. “This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,” Scott said in a post detailing hermore

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Parents Pray for Hundreds of Students Kidnapped in Nigeria’s Katsina 

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Parents converged on a secondary school in Nigeria’s northwestern Katsina state on Sunday, begging authorities to save hundreds of boys abducted by gunmen. The army had exchanged fire with a gang that took the students from the all-boys Government Science school in Kankara, a spokesman for the president said on Saturday night, but parents on Sunday said they had heard little more on the fate of their children.Abubakar Lawal came from Zaria, a city 120 kilometres (75 miles) south of Kanara, after learning that two of his three sons at the school were among the missing. “From yesterday I was here, prayingmore

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Swift Backlash for Brazil Students Targeting Misinformation

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Before dawn on December 1, Leonardo de Carvalho Leal prepared to leave his family behind in the Brazilian city of Ponta Grossa, in Parana state. His mother overwhelmed him with goodbyes and gave him a bracelet she said had brought her luck. He fiddled with it on his wrist the entire ride to the airport, unsure when he might see her again.“Maybe I was blaming myself a bit, for leaving so many people vulnerable,” he said in a video interview with The Associated Press, with tears welling as he recalled his departure. “But what I did was right.”Leal and hismore

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