When prospective students use Internet search engines such as Google or Bing to plot their education path, they are often led to the for-profit providers that pay the most for online positioning.

Now, community college distance education programs and the American Association of Community Colleges are stepping up their fight to end the domination of for-profits when it comes to Internet searches. On March 22, a new website aimed at making community colleges more visible on the Internet went live.

Onlinecommunitycolleges.org (OCC) is a single portal where prospective students can search and compare online degree programs at public community colleges around the country. The website, which has been under development for more than a year, promotes and markets the online programs of participating colleges through online and traditional marketing tools.

Nine colleges have signed up: Anne Arundel Community College, Broward College Online, Dallas TeleCollege Online, Darton College, Foothill College, Illinois Central College Virtual Campus, Ivy Tech Community College, Northern Virginia Community College and Rio Salado Community College.

. . . Richard Moss showed off his group’s project: a demo of a submarine video game called “Treasures of Atlantis.”

. . . As Moss piloted his digital submarine around the treasure-filled depths, he was eventually killed. Except, it wasn’t quite clear if the game was over.

“Yeah, I’m dead, but we don’t have a ‘Game Over’ screen,” Moss said as the class laughed.

Garry Gaber, who is head of the institute, encouraged Moss and suggested adding more aquatic wildlife, such as seahorses and jellyfish.

Gaber, who worked for LucasArts Entertainment, now runs his own Austin studio.

“It’s the teamwork; it’s the completion of milestones; it’s knowing when to cut bait on things,” Gaber said. “That’s what the studios want. … They know they’re going to have to train them on everything. They want (new employees) to drop in Day One and know how to work on a team, not be obnoxious, know what it’s like to be in an office environment, work with artists — that’s what they got out of this that’s so important.”

Adam Stockton, a former Navy gunner’s mate, moved from California to Austin enroll in the program. His team of nine students spent 16 weeks building a game, “Steam Punk’d,” that requires the player to defend against attacking bugs.

Wilfredo Melendez said he had never needed charity before. But last summer, after leaving the Army and enrolling in Bunker Hill Community College, things started to unravel. He couldn’t find a part-time job to make ends meet. He got divorced. His wife moved out of state, leaving him to care for their 6-year-old son.

Last week, the 30-year-old was facing “streaky’’ finances, he said. Finals were looming. His little boy needed to eat.

So when a team of volunteers from the Greater Boston Food Bank showed up at Bunker Hill on May 2 bearing produce and frozen meats, Melendez took “pretty much one of everything they had,’’ went home, and made himself and his son a dinner of sweet potatoes and pork chops. It might as well have been Thanksgiving, he said: “I was so grateful.’’

So were 281 other Bunker Hill students who walked away from campus with 10,400 pounds of food, enough to make 7,000 meals.

Many community college students are out-of-work adults trying to train for new jobs while supporting their families.  In Massachusetts, North Shore Community College is raising money to fund emergency $7 cafeteria vouchers.” Greenfield Community College opened a food bank last year after noticing that free snacks at a campus event disappeared at a frighteningly rapid clip,” reports the Globe.

Owens Community College in Ohio started two food banks in February to help students who aren’t eligible for food stamps.

State Sen. Roderick D. Wright has introduced legislation that would let community college boards charge more for high-cost technical education or job training classes, making those classes self-supporting.

“This bill would allow community college districts to charge students for the actual costs of the courses,” according to the legislation, including the cost of instruction, equipment and supplies, student services and instructional support.

Wright hopes to expand community colleges’ capacity so they can compete for students with for-profit colleges,  said Stan DiOrio, Wright’s legislative director.  A Democrat, Wright represents a low-income and working-class area in south Los Angeles  where for-profit colleges are recruiting minority students, often for certificate programs to train security guards, chefs and bookkeepers.

California has rejecting pricing differentials before, but this time the pressure is much greater, notes Inside Higher Ed.

The state’s 112 community colleges have been walloped by deep budget cuts, which have forced them to turn away hundreds of thousands of students — an estimated 200,000 this year alone. And an additional $300 million cut looms if the state’s voters don’t pass a tax hike this fall.

Tuition levels at the colleges, which serve 2.6 million students, will rise to $46 from $36 this summer. But even after the increase, California’s community colleges will charge less than half the national average in tuition and fees.

That’s a source of pride in a state with a deep commitment to cheap, open-access public higher education.

But it means that students pay in time wasted when they can’t get into critical classes to complete a degree or transfer.  And many decide it’s cheaper to earn a for-profit certificate or degree quickly, even though the cost is much higher.

Still, differential tuition is very, very controversial in the state. Very.

In the Boston Globe Magazine, Jon Marcus asks whether higher education’s purpose should be knowledge or vocation.”

(Bob) Britt had watched as friends and relatives went to college only because it was expected. “They were 18, and so they went,” he says. “And when they got out, there wasn’t anything for them.” So when Britt enrolled at North Shore Community College, it was for a new kind of program that is being closely watched by industry executives and policy makers alike. It’s a program connected to the real world of work that all but guarantees its students something universities and colleges are being pressed to provide in exchange for their spiraling costs, and at a time when employers complain they can’t find workers for high-tech jobs in a fast-changing economy: useful skills.

Britt’s two-year associate’s degree program in manufacturing technology is a collaboration between the college – which furnishes faculty for classroom work – and General Electric. GE needs highly trained machinists to replace the large number of employees nearing retirement at its River Works aircraft engine plant in Lynn, which has been chugging along while recovering from the 1980s recession. GE pays the students while they learn and covers the costs of their academic courses in advanced manufacturing. That’s a high-growth field, one in which Britt is virtually assured a job after graduation that pays an average of $62,400, with ample opportunity for advancement.

“It’s not a dead end,” Britt says.

Employers want workers with an academic foundation andworkplace skills, writes Goldberg. It’s not either or.  ”Everyone will need some opportunity to gain practical experience through internships, apprenticeships, or perhaps working their way through college” whether they pursue a technical or liberal arts degree. The question is:  How do we enable young people to learn academic and workplace skills?

Here’s a sobering statistic: “For the first time in history, the number of jobless workers age 25 and up who have attended some college now exceeds the ranks of those who settled for a high school diploma or less,” reports Investors Business Daily.

Achievement is measured in points, using six metrics: improvement in performance on assessment of basic skills; advancement across levels of developmental education; accumulation of 15 college credits; accumulation of 30 college credits; completion of quantitative reasoning courses; and completion of a degree, certificate, or apprenticeship.

From baseline to 2011, the average college increased its total points by 31 percent. The study found “modest evidence” of progress improvements, known as momentum, “primarily among students in college-level courses who were accumulating credits and making progress toward completion.” However, half of students didn’t earn any progress points.  Basic skills students also had little momentum.

“Moving forward, colleges may be more likely to improve student momentum if they focus on the gains that can be made among students when they first enter the institution,” Belfield advises.

“Too many people do too many favors for too many. Rules and regulations in many instances are ignored. … Accommodations must stop.”

Peter Helff, the union president, used his influence to get his granddaughter enrolled at BCC at age 16, even though she hadn’t completed high school or earned a GED, the report found. When she was failing three classes in the spring of 2010, he “allegedly intervened to improperly change three of her failing grades” to withdrawals, reports the Bergen County Record.

A math instructor, Helff has worked at BCC for 42 years. He makes more than $133,000.  Trustees suspended Helff without pay and ordered charges that could lead to his firing.

 . . . women need to see—in posters, videos and career events with women actually working in STEM disciplines—what a typical day looks like for women employed as technicians in STEM workplaces.

Young women “need to understand what kind of jobs they can get,” Milgram says.

Feminizing STEM role models can be a turn-off, at least for middle-school girls, concludes a University of Michigan study  published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. From Ed Week‘s Inside School Research:

In the first experiment, 144 6th and 7th grade girls read articles about three successful female university students. In some cases these were overtly “girly,” wearing pink clothes and make-up and saying they like to read fashion magazines, while in other cases the students wore dark clothes and glasses and simply said they liked to read. The role models also either were specifically described as successful in a STEM field, math, engineering or biochemistry, or were reported as generally successful—for example called a “freshman star.”

The researchers found girls who read about the overtly female role models actually reduced the students’ reported interest, perceived ability and future expectations in math, and they showed less interest in taking math classes in high school and college than girls who read about role models in more neutral clothing or with non-STEM-specific achievements.

“Submitting STEM role models to Pygmalion-style feminine makeovers may do more harm than good,” the researchers concluded.