The University of Illinois, facing a $400-million budget shortfall, will require administrators to take 10-day furloughs and other staff members to take four unpaid days off in the first half of 2010, in a move that will affect 11,000 employees, the university's interim president announced today. The university has also instituted a freeze on hiring and salary increases, effective immediately. The state's budget crisis, which has caused the university's shortfall, is compounding an already difficult academic year for the university, which is still recovering from an admissions scandal last year that led to the departure of its president.

As part of a settlement of a sweeping class-action lawsuit against the United States, American Indian students will receive about $60-million in federal scholarships to attend colleges, universities, and vocational schools, the U.S. attorney general's office announced today. The lawsuit, known as Cobell v. Salazar, was filed in 1996 and contended that the Department of the Interior had mismanaged hundreds of thousands of individual Indian land trust accounts for more than a century. Payments totaling $1.4-billion will be divided among the more than 300,000 Indians involved in the suit.

High schools must do better at tracking their students' success in college and no longer view a high-school diploma as an end in itself, says the Center for American Progress. In a report, "A Promise of Proficiency," released today, the Washington think tank recommends that the federal government should help high schools track how their graduates fare in their first year of college, and reward schools for success in that regard. Such steps are necessary to meet the Obama administration's goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020, panelists said at a discussion accompanying the report's release.

Although a majority of 18- to 29-year-olds approve of President Obama's job performance, slight majorities disagree with his management of the economy and health care, and 55 percent disagree with his handling of Afghanistan, according to a poll released today by the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. Two-thirds of 18- to 29-year-olds oppose the recently announced plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Although young adults voted for Mr. Obama, 66 percent to 34 percent, his current 58-percent approval among that age group is closer to his 54-percent approval rating generally.

Education issues made up only 1.4 percent of national news coverage in the first nine months of 2009, more than the 0.7 percent they received during the same period last year, but still comparatively little, according to a report issued today by the Brookings Institution, "Invisible: 1.4 Percent Coverage for Education Is Not Enough." Community colleges received the least coverage, says the report. "They barely exist in today's media landscape," the report concludes, while broader coverage is "virtually invisible." The report, which singles out The Chronicle and Education Week as exceptions to the pattern of meager national coverage, says that local news coverage tends to be more detailed and substantive than national news outlets. The report is not yet available online.

A racial-discrimination lawsuit against Rutgers University at New Brunswick has been settled out of court, with the university agreeing to pay four groundskeepers $71,875 apiece in lost wages and their lawyers more than $300,000 in fees, according to The Star-Ledger, in Newark, N.J. The groundskeepers, three of whom are black and one Hispanic, filed suit in 2006, accusing the university of denying them promotions and ignoring a noose found hanging on the campus. A spokesman for the university said it was "pleased" with the resolution.

Trustees and administrators of the South Orange County Community College District, in California, are facing a federal lawsuit filed by students, professors, and recent graduates that accuses them of frequently leading prayers at ceremonial events on two campuses in the district, in violation of the First Amendment and court rulings against school prayer, according to the Orange County Register. The suit alleges that one campus, Saddleback College, routinely opened events with prayers and showed a faculty-training video, called God Bless the U.S.A., that included religious imagery and compared American soldiers to Jesus Christ. A professor at Irvine Valley College, another campus in the district, is also a plaintiff. A lawyer for the district said that offering an opening prayer at a public event "goes back to the founding of the country."

The Education Department has made efforts to create risk-based ways to monitor grants for fraud and abuse, but more work needs to be done, says a report from the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found that the department's staff members need more financial expertise and training in order to accomplish their work, and that information on grant recipients should be shared systematically throughout the department for monitoring to improve.

About 22 percent of economic-stimulus funds have been paid out by the federal government, the Government Accountability Office reported today, but the job-creation data posted on the Web site Recovery.gov to highlight the effect of the $787-billion legislation, officially the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, has "significant reporting and quality issues that need to be addressed." As suggested in a Chronicle article two weeks ago, state education departments have had difficulty reporting their data correctly, in part, the GAO said, because there was not a clear definition of "full-time equivalent" jobs, the measure states were supposed to use to measure job creation.

The U.S. Education Department has fined Tarleton State University, part of the Texas A&M University system, $137,500 for not accurately reporting crime statistics, as required by the Clery Act, according to the Associated Press. The J-TAC, the university's student newspaper, reports that Tarleton State "underreported the number of forcible sex offenses, drug-law violations, and burglaries between 2003 and 2005." It did not report any of the 10 sex offenses on the campus, the paper said, and reported only 29 of more than 60 burglaries. The newspaper obtained the statistics through public-records requests.