Gov. Chet Culver of Iowa, a Democrat, today became the latest state official to announce midyear budget cuts to public higher education and other state agencies. State revenue projections were $415-million lower than expected, prompting the governor to order an across-the-board cut of 10 percent, according to the Associated Press.

Gov. David A. Paterson of New York, a Democrat, has ordered all state agencies to cut their budgets by 11 percent to help eliminate a deficit of more than $2-billion, according to an article in The Buffalo News. That order would mean a $90-million cut in state appropriations for the State University of New York and $53-million less state money for the City University of New York.

California's community-college system, with nearly three million students, had planned on receiving $130-million in federal stimulus money to cover state budget cuts this fiscal year and next. But state lawmakers had overestimated the amount of federal aid the state would receive by about $90-million, according to the Contra Costa Times.

In 2005, Congress added private student loans to the list of debts that are not automatically discharged when a person declares bankruptcy -- federally guaranteed student loans were treated that way in a 1976 law. Instead, students who borrow from both public and private lenders must prove to a judge that repaying their debts would be an "undue hardship." On Wednesday, a subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on why the law should be changed.

When the fiscal year began for most states, on July 1, it was already clear that flagging tax revenues would make more budget cuts inevitable and that the $40-billion in federal stimulus funds for education would be inadequate to offset all the reductions. Now Virginia is seeking to spend $91.5-million of its federal stimulus dollars for education in 2010, rather than 2011, in order to lessen the impact of a proposed midyear cut for higher education.

After 130 years, Southeastern University in Washington, D.C., doesn't plan to offer fall classes, reports The Washington Post. The institution lost its accreditation, effective August 31, after years of declining enrollment, faculty size, and financial support. It's still possible that the university will merge with the nearby GS Graduate School, which serves mostly government employees, the Post reports.

Morgan State University, one of Maryland's four historically black colleges, is trying to stop the creation of an online program at the University of Maryland's University Collge, reports The Sun of Baltimore. Morgan State argues that UMUC's proposed doctoral degree in community-college administration duplicates an existing program at Morgan State and could violate civil-rights laws.

In August, Mark Parkinson, Kansas' Democratic governor, said that within 10 years at least one of his state's public universities should be among the top 50 in U.S. News & World Report's college rankings and that a second state university should be in the top 100. Now the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization that studies college accountability, has released a policy brief urging lawmakers not to make changes in higher education based solely on those kinds of rankings.

Illinois legislators passed a vast public-works spending bill this summer that included $40-million for an extension campus of Chicago State University, reports the Chicago Tribune. However, the university hadn't requested the money, which was championed by a state senator from Chicago, and the interim president says he was unaware that he was opening a new campus until he read about it in a newspaper.

The Dallas Morning News reports that Paul Quinn College, a historically black institution in Dallas, has filed a federal lawsuit in Atlanta against the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which removed the college's accreditation in June because of its financial instability. Paul Quinn says the accreditor violated its due-process rights and asks the court for a restraining order to prevent the loss of accreditation.