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The U.S. Education Department last week proposed new rules that would loosen a ban on incentive compensation for college recruiters and get rid of a financial-aid regulation. The proposal to eliminate the 12-hour rule follows years of debate. Distance-education providers have pushed the department and Congress to throw out the regulation, but others have cited fears that relaxing the rule would lead to fraud.

The Education department must explain why it let a student loan company that an audit had found improper millions of dollars. The loan company received the payments through a subsidy program that guaranteed a 9.5 percent interest rate on student loans. In an accord reached in January, the department allowed it to keep the $278 million it had received but suspended future payments of more than $800 million until a future audit could determine whether the company was eligible for the money.

Zambia's government has decided to scrap its national bursary scheme and replace it with a transparent student loans scheme, following controversies including allegations of corruption that have dogged the bursary initiative for years.

A forensic probe into corrupt practices at the government’s embattled multibillion-rand student funding vehicle is set to be launched, said Higher Education and Training Minister. The scheme gets a significant portion of the department’s budget. Students who did not meet the scheme’s funding thresholds were granted loans, putting countless deserving others at a disadvantage.

Accreditors keep hundreds of schools with low graduation rates or high loan defaults alive. Most colleges can’t keep their doors open without an accreditor’s seal of approval, which is needed to get students access to federal loans and grants. But accreditors hardly ever kick out the worst-performing colleges and lack uniform standards for assessing graduation rates and loan defaults.

Uganda joins the rest of Africa to mark the Africa Public Service Day, an annual event that recognizes value and virtue of service to the community. The objective is to raise the image of public service, thus enhance trust in government, collect, document and share best practices for possible replication within a country as well as across the African Continent.