News Archive

More Hispanic students are seeking educational opportunities after high school, with a notable upswing over the past decade in the percentage of Hispanics earning degrees. But the pandemic brought unfortunate setbacks to Hispanic enrollment, and a new study also reveals other alarming hurdles many Hispanic students face on their educational journeys.

No one disputes the need for more—and better—news coverage that helps us make sense of an increasingly complex world. We need local angles on national news, better statehouse reporting, and more explainers and in-depth coverage of local communities.

These are odd days for American higher education. More and more Americans doubt the value of going beyond high school. From 2016 to 2022, the proportion of young Americans choosing to continue their education after graduating from high school dropped significantly—from 70 percent to 62 percent.

There are many reasons why only half of American adults have an education credential beyond high school, and we’re starting to see one of the biggest: Communication. Too often, we simply talk past each other. Take these points, for example: A bachelor’s degree is worth $2.8 million, on average, over a lifetime. Someone with a […]

coalition of 22 donors announced Press Forward, a national initiative to strengthen communities and democracy by supporting local news and information with an infusion of more than a half-billion dollars over the next five years.

INDIANAPOLIS—Bachelor’s programs are losing students at shocking rates. Test-optional policies have become the norm. And more recently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against considering race as a factor in college admissions. To transform how potential students get into college, Lumina Foundation is launching The Great Admissions Redesign, a challenge to find and support the best ideas on how to simplify the admissions process.

State restrictions risk undermining efforts to create a more racially equitable workforce, Kermit Kaleba and Kysha Wright Frazier write.

Our latest national poll on the value of higher education doesn’t beat around the bush. At a time when many Americans wonder if a college degree is worth it, the poll bluntly asks: What is education really for? Overwhelmingly, people responded that their education has helped lead to greater well-being.

U.S. adults with a post-high school education have better health and well-being, are more likely to have jobs that align with their natural talents and interests, and increased civic engagement

We’re always stronger together—and that includes the effort to fix our system of education and job training.

There is a staffing crisis in healthcare - a crisis that is so bad, that some are calling it a national emergency. To meet today’s and tomorrow’s labor demand, leaders need to provide clear and supported career pathways to adults already in the workforce. In this episode, Dr. Jill Buban of EdAssist joins us to talk about their work developing new career pathways, and describes what it takes to make a talent-focused partnership work. Dory Manner of Yale New Haven Health and Gerard Camacho of Atrium Advocate Health discuss the important steps healthcare employers need to take to attract, develop, and retain talent in critical areas.

When Great Falls College Montana State University applied for The Million Dollar Community College Challenge, college officials expressed a strong desire to strengthen brand identity and engage the community.

My whole life I’ve been curious about exoskeletons. As a child, I dreamed about building one for humans. Well, while Sarcos beat me to the punch with its wearable robotics, it hasn’t quashed my fascination with how humans and technology form a symbiotic relationship.

Next up, we're traveling to the U.S. territory of Guam to visit Guam Community College, which is steeped in history and culture, and all in on workforce programming. There’s never been a stronger sense of community in college. Guam Community College might be far from the mainland United States, but its faculty and staff are working tirelessly to improve opportunities close to home.

The bedrock for brand strategy is a well-defined brand positioning statement, which follows a WHO-WHAT-HOW framework. A brand positioning statement is aspirational, authentic, forward-facing, grounded in truth, and easily digestible. It is an internal-facing statement that articulates a community college's core promise to learners and expresses the competitive difference and value it provides. It is the foundation on which all marketing plans should be built.

When we launched The Million Dollar Community College Challenge in February 2022, we were intentional about focusing on individual colleges. Our goal was simple: to provide an opportunity for colleges across the country to energize the field around improving community college brands AND to get resources directly to colleges to do the work. As we went through the process, we heard from state systems and associations that were also interested in working together to advance brand awareness and deepen the outreach and connection with residents of their college communities. So, in July 2023, we provided a $1 million grant to the Louisiana Community and Technical College System (LCTCS) to improve the brand-building efforts of their 12 colleges in support of adult learners – and ultimately help them advance their bold goal of Reaching Equitable Prosperity by 2030. To accomplish this goal, LCTCS is working toward graduating 330,000 individuals who will earn on average 150 percent above the state median income.

A college's strategic plan guides all long-term and day-to-day institutional decisions, ensuring operations and priorities support the institution's mission, vision, and values. Brand strategy defines and sets the expectation for the experience people will have when engaging with the community college brand. And marketing strategy outlines the tactics of how and where the college will engage audiences to increase awareness and influence them to pursue the college.

As my daughter begins her sophomore year of high school, we are starting to think more about college and the complex web of admission requirements. Though I work in higher education, I know very little about what it takes to get into highly selective schools. It’s a black box. But as we figure it out, we have advantages – and that’s the larger problem.

If you want progress, work for justice. That’s a paraphrase of Pope Paul VI from 1972 amid the Vietnam War. Then, the sentiment was about peace. More than 50 years later, we’re still talking about justice—but now in the context of economic mobility and the promise of American progress.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s June 29 decision to end affirmative action in college admissions, a group of foundations quickly issued a joint statement condemning the decision, saying, “The Supreme Court’s decision impedes colleges and universities from selecting their own student bodies and fully addressing systemic racial inequalities that persist.”

What will American colleges and universities look like now that the Supreme Court has upended affirmative action? The evidence is clear: As we’ve seen from states that had already banned race-conscious admissions prior to the court’s recent decision, enrollment for students of color will decline. We can avoid going backward only if institutions embrace new approaches for increasing student diversity and abolish advantages for the privileged, such as legacy preferences.

With the 2024 presidential campaign about to kick into a higher gear after Labor Day, one thing we can be sure of is that immigration will once again be a major campaign theme.

Support services for college students are more than a nice benefit – they’re essential. Resources such as academic advising, financial aid services, and mental health counseling can mean the difference between stopping out and graduating.

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Tom Vander Ark is joined by repeat guest Jamie Merisotis, CEO of Lumina Foundation, a foundation committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. We spoke with Jamie in 2020 right after the publication of Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines.

Built along interstates to increase access, nestled within office buildings for convenience or in a field to connect with nature’s laboratory, it’s all too easy to pass by classrooms for the mechanical and agricultural arts without realizing the opportunities they offer.

Indianapolis – Six community colleges have received $150,000 grants from Lumina Foundation to improve and expand their digital presence and mobile outreach capabilities to better connect with potential students.

Not that long ago, higher education advocates regularly complained about the lack of national attention on colleges and universities. A huge win involved a sentence or two in the president’s State of the Union or a governor’s State of the State.

A new survey confirms what most of us have seen in the last eight years or so: Confidence in higher education is at an all-time low. But there is at least a glimmer of light in the numbers and an opportunity for higher education to show how it is responding to this waning confidence.

Federal law merely suggests that training providers confer a credential, but they are not required to do so, denying some participants an economic edge.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision limiting the use of race in college admissions may not be a total surprise, but it is still a slap of hard truth about the long road ahead for those who respect and understand the benefits of a more diverse and just postsecondary educational system.