Lumina Foundation is working to increase the share of adults in the U.S. labor force with college degrees or other credentials of value leading to economic prosperity.
During their undergraduate years, Miranda Lacy and Harold Rogers formed a strong friendship. They were thrilled to reunite for graduate school at West Virginia University later on. Little did they know, however, that their journey there would be much harder.
Both students are blind and say learning materials, from course modules to readings for class, have been inaccessible to them at WVU. The problems Lacy and Rogers encountered in their graduate program are precisely the kinds of issues the update to regulations in the Americans With Disabilities Act aims to fix.
Amanda Lynn Tully spent her teenage years as a ward of the State of Colorado and believed a college degree was her ticket to a better life. When she graduated in 2017 with a master’s degree in historic preservation from the University of Oregon, $65,000 in federal student loans, and no job offers in the conservation field, she felt misled.
Less than a year after graduating, Tully made a drastic decision: She moved to Prague, where she had completed an internship, and defaulted on her loans. She hasn’t made a payment in over seven years.
Since 2022, students from Agnes Scott College have helped place 36 heat sensors across their campus and surrounding Decatur, Ga., to assist researchers in analyzing and mitigating the risks of extreme heat waves in the area.
But the project—one of several initiatives of the joint Climate Resilience Plan partnership between Agnes Scott and Decatur—also demonstrates the power of town-gown collaboration in addressing climate change, an area of mounting concern to institutions and their constituents.
Over the last year, sweeping regulatory and legal changes in Texas have upended all facets of life for noncitizens. The state has limited who can get an occupational license, register or buy a car, obtain commercial driver’s permits, and secure in-state tuition at colleges and universities.
The changes are causing significant disruption to the 1.7 million undocumented individuals in Texas, as well as tens of thousands of refugees and individuals with protected legal status, such as those under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Already, more than 6,400 refugees and DACA recipients have lost their commercial driver’s licenses. Many more noncitizens are expected to lose the ability to work in licensed industries from construction and medicine to air conditioning and cosmetology.
When Arnold Mitchem received an offer to head up a special program for “culturally distinct” students at Marquette University in 1969, he viewed it as an attempt to co-opt him into “the establishment.”
Mitchem initially thought he’d serve five semesters. But he ultimately stuck with the program much longer. That fateful decision put Mitchem on the path to becoming the architect of a national movement to protect federal TRIO programs—an array of outreach and student service programs meant to help low-income individuals, first-generation college students, students with disabilities, and veterans succeed in higher education.
In a moment when artificial intelligence companies are racing to build automated tutors and personalized learning engines, what does Ben Gomes, one of the key leaders for Google's education efforts, actually believe is the most important challenge in learning?
His answer is disarmingly simple: motivation. And he doesn't think AI is the solution. He explains more in this interview.
