The Education Department's Office of Inspector General has released a report that evaluates the department's capacity for handling increased volume in the federal direct-loan program. The inspector general found that the department appeared to have access to sufficient resources to assist colleges in making a transition to direct lending from the federal bank-based loan program, which President Obama and Congressional Democrats propose to eliminate. The report says that the department will have to put in place effective systems for monitoring contractors, on which it is expected to rely heavily to ensure effective operations of the direct-loan program if participation in that system increases.

The investment bank of Goldman Sachs has announced a $500-million effort to help thousands of small businesses recover from the recession, and the initiative will include $200-million to expand access to business-education programs at community colleges, universities, and other institutions. The money will be given to institutions to provide scholarships to small-business owners and to increase the programs' capacity. LaGuardia Community College, part of the City University of New York, will be the first recipient, according to The New York Times.

Educators can make better use of available data to track community-college students' progress toward a degree, determine where and why progress stalls, and improve outcomes, says a study released today by the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at California State University at Sacramento. The report, "Steps to Success: Analyzing Milestone Achievement to Improve Community-College Student Outcomes," suggests a framework for monitoring intermediate educational achievements and using indicators to predict success.

Sallie Mae has given an average of close to $3,000 more over the past 20 years to members of the House of Representatives who voted last week against ending the bank-based guaranteed-loan program than it gave to those who voted for the bill, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

President Obama went to Hudson Valley Community College today to talk about his administration's strategy to spark innovation and job growth, delivering a speech that reiterated his plans to spend more money on basic science (with a goal of putting 3 percent of the nation's gross domestic product into research and development) and to focus on spurring advances in key fields such as health-related technologies and alternative energies. The president lavished praise on community colleges, saying they have the power to prepare America for a "21st-century global economy," and said it was important to meet his goals of graduating more students from two-year institutions because the number of jobs requiring at least an associate degree are expected to grow twice as fast as the number of jobs without college requirements.

President Obama, vacationing this week at Martha's Vineyard, has taken along five books: a Washington-based crime novel by George Pelecanos, Manhattan-based fiction by Richard Price, a Colorado prairie drama by Kent Haruf, David McCullough's biography of John Adams, and Thomas Friedman's book on the environment. Here's Slate's take on how to interpret (or overinterpret) the list.

The State Higher Education Executive Officers has released a detailed report about state aid for higher education and college-enrollment trends, including documentation that the one-year growth in state and local spending on public and private colleges was 5.7 percent in the fiscal year that for most states ended in June 2008, before the financial cataclysm on Wall Street worsened state and national budgets. After adjusting for enrollment growth and inflation, the increase from the 2007 fiscal year to the 2008 fiscal year in per-student state and local aid for higher education was 0.6 percent.

Proposals to cut funds for the state's merit-based Promise Scholarship are still on the table as Michigan lawmakers work to close a deficit for the budget year that begins October 1. College officials told The Detroit News that they will credit eligible students' accounts with the scholarship money for now and will decide later whether to ask students to come up with the difference if the state eliminates the aid.