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It's been a busy few weeks on the 2016 campaign trail, and the number of candidates vying for the White House is thinning out. Since the Iowa caucuses last week, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Democrat, and five Republican candidates (New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania) have dropped out of the race. Keep track of who's still in the running, and what they've said about higher education with NASFAA's Presidential Cheat Sheet.

Congratulations to the sixth round of winners for NASFAA's 50th Anniversary Trivia Contest. Check out our list of winners on our conference website. Want a chance to win great prizes? Play NASFAA's 50th Anniversary Trivia Contest, now featuring a new round of questions. Stay tuned to Today's News to see if you're a winner.

Test your financial aid knowledge. Here's the definition for this week's term of the week: "a course not offered over the traditional length of time, such as a semester or quarter. In the case of the Return of Title IV Funds, making calculations and determining withdrawals can be complicated with students enrolled in [these]." Think you know what the term is? Head to the Student Aid Index to see if you got it right.

The Higher Education Amendments (HEA) requires that if an institution anticipates not using all of its allocated funds for the Perkins, Federal Work Study (FWS), and Federal Supplemental Education Opportunity Grant (FSEOG) programs by the end of an award year, it must specify the anticipated remaining unused amount to the Secretary.

"In his final budget proposal, issued on Tuesday, President Obama hit familiar notes, calling for an expansion of the Pell Grant program and a shot in the arm for community colleges," The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

"Student debt haunts women for years longer than it stays with men, research suggests," Bloomberg Business reports.

"For Cecily McMillan, getting mail while incarcerated was a complex project. Any letter that was sent to her went through a metal detector and was opened by correctional officers before landing in the mailroom, where she had a two-hour window to collect it on a good day, she said," according to Bloomberg Business.

"With the primary season upon us everyone in the education world is talking about the presidential candidates. But the presidential candidates are not really talking about education," Andrew Rotherham, cofounder and partner at Bellwether Education Partners, writes in an opinion piece for U.S. News & World Report.

"Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proved in Iowa that his campaign is for real. But on the student loan issue, his agenda comes nowhere even close to his rhetoric," Alan Collinge, founder of StudentLoanJustice.Org, writes in an opinion piece for The Hill.

"In his remarks to Congress in September, Pope Francis said, 'We need to avoid a common temptation nowadays: to discard whatever proves troublesome.' He was referring to the refugee crisis, but he may as well have been speaking about the president and trustees of Mount St. Mary’s University of Maryland," Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, writes in an opinion piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

"Last week the U.S. Department of Education took the rare step of cutting off federal student aid to two for-profit college chains, each accused of deceiving the Department and their own students," David Halperin writes in The Huffington Post's The Blog.

"Why shouldn’t higher education be free for everyone? Higher education is not a commodity. It is a social good. It’s increasingly necessary to get a good, middle-class job. A more highly educated workforce can be more adaptable and make the country more competitive. So why shouldn’t it be free for everyone?" AFL-CIO asks in a blog post.

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