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.
At a moment of rapid technological change, heightened political uncertainty, and urgent environmental foreboding, professors and pundits are spending a lot of time talking about young people. In many instances, the discourse is relentless and grim—that 18-to-22-year-olds are hyper-transactional, super-anxious, and coddled when it comes to their schoolwork.
Ian Bogost, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, believes there are larger forces at work for the way today's students approach higher education. He explains more in this interview.
The country’s only nonprofit accredited university dedicated to apprenticeship degrees is opening a health care college. Reach University, which launched in 2020, has thus far been focused on education, helping incumbent workers in K-12 schools earn degrees to become teachers while they continue to work full time, typically as paraeducators.
Just as Reach’s debt-free teacher apprenticeship model is designed to address a critical shortage of educators, the Apprenticeship College of Health is set to address a critical shortage of health care workers—starting with those in behavioral health. Could this program be a model for the field?
Despite both graduating from Ivy League institutions, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have been harsh critics of traditional higher education and represented themselves as strong advocates for workforce education and alternative pathways into the middle class.
Their budget, however, says something else. Overall, it slashes more than $800 million in funding for community colleges, the primary providers of career and workforce education, along with other critical programs to support people looking for a good job.
New restrictions on how much parents can borrow for their children’s higher education are putting pressure on colleges and universities to help families cover more of the cost. Some schools are fundraising or cutting expenses to provide more scholarships. Others are considering creating their own loan programs or turning to state-based lenders for support.
But the need may be far greater than most colleges can handle.
Hundreds of scholars spent years prying open social-science research, asking versions of the same question: How much can we trust what’s under the hood?
Results of this mammoth effort—published as a collection in Nature last week—are complex. Among the findings that have some scholars concerned: When researchers tried to use fresh data to replicate statistically significant claims across six disciplines, they succeeded only about half the time—a coin flip. For some, the results are worrying and underscore the ongoing need for data transparency reforms. Others think things are less dire than they might appear and caution against rushed conclusions.
Bucking a national trend, North Carolina and other Southern states are expected to see an increase in high school graduates in the coming years. State university leaders hope that means the demand for college education will remain strong.
But it won’t come without challenges. Colleges and universities are increasingly being called upon to address return-on-investment concerns to prospective students. And funding threats at the state and federal levels have stretched university resources at the same time they are trying to attract more students.
.png?upscale=true&width=500&upscale=true&name=download%20(2).png)
