The Week: What You Need to Know About the Past 7 Days

You may have spent last week working on March Madness brackets — or choosing between a bracket completed according to institutions’ net prices (by Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of education at Seton Hall University) and a bracket filled out according to how much controversy each university struggled with in the past year (by The Chronicle’s Andy Thomason). But the parties involved in the Education Department’s current round of negotiated rule making were hashing out how much easier it should be for students defrauded by colleges to get their student loans forgiven.

The negotiations, which were in their final round last week, brought department officials together with advocates for students and representatives of for-profit colleges, among others. That gave Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, a captive audience when she dropped by.

“We all know the story of the Corinthian tragedy,” she said. “It built its business model to scoop up federal financial aid by any means necessary, including fraud. They roped in students by using false and misleading information and then saddled them with debt that would be impossible to repay.”

“Multiple state and federal agencies have concluded, and a federal judge has ruled, that Corinthian lied, cheated, and stole,” she said. “And now, unless the department acts, these students who were victims of Corinthian will be victimized again, stuck with thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in student-loan debt that they were conned into taking on.”

Along with Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, Senator Warren praised the latest draft of the department’s proposed loan-repayment rule, which would prohibit colleges from requiring students to agree in advance to mandatory arbitration of loan claims. It would also drop a four-year statute of limitations on students’ claims that they’ve been defrauded, but would not eliminate limits on when claims can be brought. “A student who has been cheated has been cheated, even if the student managed to pay some or all of the debt that was fraudulently incurred,” Ms. Warren said.

She said the final rule should do more to create a “streamlined pathway” to loan forgiveness that would let students use “a process for automatic, classwide debt relief.” The rules, she said, shouldn’t require students to hire lawyers or prove that they were individually cheated if state or federal agencies had already collected evidence of institutional fraud. The department is currently evaluating claims from thousands of former for-profit-college students, but has resolved only about 1,300 of the cases.

“The government was responsible for monitoring these schools,” she said, and it should be the government’s job to prove that they defrauded their students. “The Corinthian story,” she concluded, “makes me sick.”

As of late last week, it was uncertain whether the negotiations would produce a settlement that representatives of for-profit colleges would agree to. If not, the Education Department will release rules on its own.

Trouble in the States

Public institutions in several states are having a rough spring. The continuing budget impasse between Democrats in the Illinois legislature and Gov. Bruce V. Rauner, a Republican, forced Eastern Illinois University to lay off 177 employees. A similar impasse in Pennsylvania — where Republicans control the legislature, and the governor, Tom Wolf, is a Democrat — has brought Temple University a letter from its accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, asking whether the university can meet financial-health standards while it waits on $147 million in state aid.

In Alaska, the precipitous decline in oil prices has left the state budget in the red by $3.5 billion, and higher education is sure to be in line for big cuts. Faculty members aren’t waiting around to see how bad the damage will be, The New York Times reports, noting that the University of Alaska’s Anchorage and Fairbanks campuses have between them lost 10 out of their 60 biology professors.

In Tennessee, meanwhile, both houses of the legislature are considering bills to cut $100,000 for the University of Tennessee’s Office for Diversity and Inclusion from the state budget. And a proposal in California’s Assembly to cap out-of-state enrollment at 15.5 percent of undergraduates in the University of California system failed by one vote in a committee — good news for the university, which relies on higher out-of-state tuition to balance its books.

The Latest

• John E. Coyne III, who as chairman of the Mount St. Mary’s University Board of Trustees fiercely defended its controversial president, Simon P. Newman, stepped down from his board post two weeks after Mr. Newman resigned. Mr. Coyne, an investment-management executive, will be succeeded by Mary Kane, chief executive of the nonprofit Sister Cities International.
• Melissa A. Click, the University of Missouri assistant professor of communication who was recorded angrily attempting to keep a student journalist away from protesters on a campus quadrangle last year, has lost an appeal of her dismissal by the university’s Board of Curators.
• John B. King Jr. has won Senate confirmation as secretary of education. He has been serving as acting secretary of education since December, when Arne Duncan stepped down.
• Otto F. Warmbier (above), the University of Virginia student arrested in North Korea in January for allegedly stealing a poster from his hotel, has been sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.
• Paul Nungesser, the former Columbia University student accused of rape by a student who carried a mattress around the campus as a performance-art piece, cannot sue the university for discriminating against him, a federal judge in New York ruled last week. He said Mr. Nungesser had not demonstrated that he was the victim of bias.

Sweet Briar’s Head Count

A lot has been written in the past year about how many students Sweet Briar College has. But now that alumnae have raised millions to keep the college open and a new administration is working to boost admissions, Linda S. Fink has turned her attention to another population question: How many spotted salamanders still live on Sweet Briar’s campus? Right now the numbers are not looking good.

Ms. Fink is a professor of ecology whose specialty is insects, but she oversees an every-other-year student census of the campus salamanders. The amphibians (left), which can live up to 30 years, inhabit old rodent burrows in the woods behind the Guion Science Center, “eating tiny things in the leaf litter that you’ve never paid attention to,” Ms. Fink told a reporter recently. Each spring the salamanders emerge on the first warm, rainy nights and head for a small pond below the science center to breed.

“When you stand down at the pond, salamanders are silently appearing at your feet,” she said. But along their route, students set up barriers that guide them into buckets. Then the salamanders are carried up to the science center to be weighed, measured, and counted. After they’re released, males leave capsules of sperm on the pond bottom, and females pick them up through an orifice called a cloaca. Then the females deposit fertilized egg masses in the pond.

Back in the 2008 census, students rounded up 632 individuals, but the counts have been trending downward — 584 in 2012, 355 in 2014, and, as of last week, only 261 this year. Ms. Fink suspects that two invasive species are to blame — the red swamp crawfish and the mosquitofish — because they feast on the egg masses. Sweet Briar’s salamanders are unusual in that they’ve chosen an artificial pond to keep returning to. Spotted salamanders usually breed in vernal pools, which dry up for part of every year and don’t support such predators.

“While it’s not impossible that one more rainstorm will bring in another group, the probability is that most of the migrants have arrived,” Ms. Fink said. “In ecology class we’re about to discuss population dynamics. Unfortunately, my students are seeing firsthand how dynamic natural populations can be.”

The salamander census is also a good reminder of how dynamic even small colleges can be. Last year, Ms. Fink said, “when my students worried what was going to happen here, they were worried about the salamanders.”

Correction (3/29/2016, 2:30 p.m.): This article originally said the University of Alaska at Fairbanks had lost 10 biology professors out of 45. In fact, the 10 were from both the Archorage and Fairbanks campuses of the university, which together had 60 biology professors. The article has been updated with the correct information.