Although for-profit schools enroll about 10 percent of the nation's college population, 45 percent of students who defaulted on their loans attended such institutions.

Some of the most striking statistics in Thursday's report dealt with the amount of money institutions spent on teaching students. On average, for-profit schools spent $2,659 per student on instructional costs during the 2008-09 school year, compared with $9,418 per student at public universities and $15,289 per student at private non-profit colleges.

A high-level public row has broken out between two cabinet ministers over the quality of India's premier institutions, the Indian Institutes of Technology, and particularly their research capability, which is seen as lagging behind other countries.

The spat was sparked when Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh (pictured), a mechanical engineering graduate from IIT-Mumbai, said last week that hardly any worthwhile research was done at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). He blamed academics for the poor quality of research.

"There is hardly any worthwhile research from our IITs. The faculty in IITs is not world-class. It is the students in IITs who are world-class. So the IITs and IIMs are excellent because of the quality of students not because of quality of research or faculty," Ramesh said.

India has 14 IITs, seven of them established in the last three years. Competition for seats is cutthroat, with 470,000 students taking the IIT joint entrance examination in 2010 and only 13,104 qualifying. That year some 241,000 students applied for roughly 2,400 IIM seats.

Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal flamed the fires of the controversy by saying that the country's most prestigious institutions were lagging in world-class standards. "Is even one of our institutions world class? If it is world-class it must be in the top 100 to 150 institutions in the world, [but] that is not evident."

Later in the week, Sibal backtracked.

The IITs had "not gained critical mass to change global scientific discourse" but the problem did not relate to their faculty, he said, adding that India spent less than a third of the money the United States did on research and this was "not the fault of faculty".

Marco Boer VP of IT Strategies warns that digital printing statistics can often be misleading and that the digital tipping point may not be here quite yet.

If you're like the vast majority of HDTV users and have a fairly simple setup that isn't spread across a large area, there is absolutely no reason to spend more than $10 on an HDMI cable, never mind more than $100 on one. Any possible benefit that could come from an over-engineered, overpriced HDMI cable simply won't show up in your home theater. If you're running a 4K projector, or have a 25-foot hallway between your Blu-ray player and HDTV, or want to show off how big your home theater budget is, that's one thing. If you just want to hook up your Blu-ray player, cable box, or video game system to your HDTV, bypass the big stores and big brands and reach into the Web bargain bin. Then use the money you saveto buy more electronics that need to be connected to one another.

When it comes to buzzy new computer technologies, schools have long had a tendency to buy first and ask questions later. That seems to be the case once again with e-readers and other tablet-style computers, which many educators, all the way down to the kindergarten level, are lusting after, not least because the gadgets promise to speed the replacement of old-style printed textbooks with newfangled digital ones. In theory, the benefits of e-textbooks seem clear and compelling. They can be updated quickly with new information. They promise cost savings, at least over the long haul. They reduce paper and photocopier use. They can incorporate all manner of digital tools. And they're lightweight, freeing students from the torso-straining load of book-filled backpacks.

But schools may want to pause before jumping on the e-textbook bandwagon. This morning, at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, a team of researchers from the University of Washington, led by doctoral student Alex Thayer, is presenting the results of a year-long study of student reading, and the findings suggest that e-readers may be deeply flawed as replacements for traditional textbooks. Students find the devices cumbersome to use, ill-suited to their study routines, and generally underwhelming. Paper textbooks, it seems, may not be quite as obsolete as they appear.

Leon Rothberg, Ph.D., a 58-year-old professor of English Literature at Ohio State University, was shocked and saddened Monday after receiving a sub-par mid-semester evaluation from freshman student Chad Berner. The circles labeled 4 and 5 on the Scan-Tron form were predominantly filled in, placing Rothberg’s teaching skill in the “below average” to “poor” range.