Weeks after SUNY Buffalo’s upper-level administration gave the Shale Resources and Society Institute (SRSI) the boot due to its gas industry public relations effort masked as a “study,” University of Texas-Austin’s (UT-Austin) administration has somewhat followed suit for its own “frackademia” study.

The decision comes in the aftermath of an independent review of a controversial study completed under UT-Austin’s auspices.

Student debt was a prime motivator for the Occupy movement. Some real oversight in higher education costs would go a long way toward driving that problem back down. But the easy accessibility to lending should raise concerns as well.

Today, SUNY Buffalo closed the doors of its Shale Resources and Society Institute (SRSI), what we at DeSmog have described as an epicenter for “frackademia” and a public relations front for the oil and gas industry to promote hydraulic fracturing (“fracking“) under the guise of scientific legitimacy that a university offers.

In one of their last acts before going home to campaign, House Republicans will pass a bill today that would increase the level of high-skill immigrants allowed to stay in the country. It would expand by 55,000 the visas granted to foreign graduates of US colleges and universities in what are known as the STEM disciplines: science, technology, engineering and math. This fits with a key part of Mitt Romney’s immigration agenda, which he expressed in a roundtable on Univision last night. He said that any diploma to a foreign student for a high-skill field like this “should come with a green card.”

However, the Republican bill, authored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, would not create one new net immigration visa.

Some people think they know some things about us job creators. The guy whose job it is supposed to be to represent me in the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), who has of course been featured before on these pages, thinks he knows some things about us job creators. He sent me an email the other day, like he likes to do sometimes, to make sure I didn’t miss his latest op-ed, which ran August 30 in his favorite small-town, low-circulation weekly, which apparently lets him publish whatever disingenuous propaganda he thinks his corporate overlords might want to read. The title of his latest is “Survey Highlights Top Concerns of U.S. Job Creators,” and you can read it in its entirety here.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions has delivered a fairly scathing report on for-profit colleges, arguing that they have provided far more benefits for shareholders than the students that matriculate at their institutions.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has delivered a report to the Senate Banking Committee on the rise of the private student loan industry. This industry took a hit after 2010, when the Affordable Care Act included a provision that ended the practice of private banks administering student loans guaranteed by the government, and just had the government issue the loans themselves. Private student debt origination grew from $5 billion in 2001 to $20 billion in 2008, but after the 2010 law, the market contracted to under $6 billion. The recession and tightening credit standards also had something to do with that.

But those loans from 2001 to 2008 are still out there, for the most part, particularly from the 2005-2007 period. And just like in the housing bubble, this period was characterized by reduced underwriting standards and a kind of “subprime” market.

As we await the Supreme Court ruling on health care, two of the other major stories of the week have reached a conclusion. Congress has reached agreement on a compromise package that will avert three separate deadlines and deliver some of the more robust lawmaking of the entire year to date.

I’ve been tracking the two deadlines for Congress coming up in just over a week. If no action is taken, new federal student loans will see an interest rate of 6.8%, double the current 3.4%. And there will be no surface transportation bill, meaning that highway projects with federal participation will grind to a halt and the 18-cent-per-gallon federal gas tax would go uncollected (heck, at this point, that might be the only stimulus we see this year).

Some details emerged about the state budget framework unveiled midweek by Governor Tom Corbett and legislative leaders, but questions still remain.