On my desk I have the White House Proposal for Educational Reform and our latest report, "Campus Commons? What Faculty, Financial Officers and Others Think About Controlling College Costs," and the two present some interesting contrasts and questions.

A couple of weeks ago Education Week covered a report from two University of Pennsylvania researchers who claim we've got plenty of math and science teachers in our country. In fact, the amount of new math and science teachers that we produce is twice as many as the number of retiring math and science teachers. So why are we scrambling for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) instructors? Because we can't hold on to the ones that we have.

In a speech today, President Obama will lay out his plans on education reform, and in the process take on one of our country's most powerful labor groups: teachers' unions.

The Pittsburgh public school administrators have made it mandatory for teachers to give their students, regardless of how poorly they perform, a minimum grade of 50 on homework, tests and grading periods. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, some students have said that they'd rather take the 50 than do any work.

The picture was grim this week as the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education released a report predicting that a college education could soon become unaffordable for most Americans. In the past 25 years, the cost of college has increased by 439 percent. [The New York Times notes that this figure is not adjusted for inflation.]

Is a diploma by any other name a diploma? I suppose it depends on who you ask. Graduation rates in the country are just under 70 percent, meaning that fewer than seven in ten freshmen who enter the system graduate from high school four years later.

If you've taken a night class recently or have kids in college, you've probably felt the sticker shock induced by college textbook costs. Sometimes the course materials alone can cost as much as a single credit hour. But, resourceful as ever, college students are finding ways around these costs and some professors are helping them.

Enrollment is up this year, so up in fact that colleges are struggling to keep up. USA Today reports that many state schools are seeing far more freshmen than they anticipated. Now they have to scramble to find enough dorm rooms and classrooms to house and educate them all.

According to two articles today, SAT scores remained flat this year. A graph in the Wall Street Journal’s coverage illustrates that this news comes after two years of decline from a peak reached in 2005. While WSJ’s headline “Class of ’08 Fails…” sets a dour scene, the people who run the test are actually encouraged by the results.

A couple of interesting items have come up in the past few days on the cost of college as well as the pay off that college provides to its graduates. The Associated Press revealed the results of a report by the Sallie Mae foundation, which showed that when looking for a college, 40 percent of families don’t limit their school searches based on cost.