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.
Many state legislatures are wrapping up their legislative sessions this month, and swaths of bills will be sent on to governors’ desks in the coming days and weeks. At least four states have moved on comprehensive legislation that, if enacted, will have significant impacts on tenure, academic freedom, and shared governance at public colleges and universities.
Last year, Florida, Ohio, and Texas were in the spotlight for new laws that brought significant changes to higher ed, but this time around Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Tennessee are the states to watch. Sponsors of the legislation say the bills will help keep higher education institutions accountable to taxpayers. None of the legislation, however, has garnered any public faculty support.
More than 100,000 computer-science majors across the United States have reason to wonder if artificial intelligence poses a threat to their career prospects. Recent research shows that these graduates faced a 7-percent unemployment rate in the first month of 2024, compared with the overall graduate unemployment average of 4.4 percent.
Bearing this in mind, some professors are infusing AI into senior-year capstone programs with the goal of turning the perceived enemy into a marketable tool. Nevertheless, the question remains: Will this approach enable recent college graduates to prove their value in the job market?
Accreditors assess colleges and universities by their standards and determine whether those institutions should qualify for aid, which is an $120 billion annual funding stream. But they’re not always portrayed accurately or fairly.
In this interview, the president of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education discusses how accreditors actually work on the ground and how they evaluate their colleges.
Joshua DeAnda’s freshman-year dorm room window overlooked a University of California, Los Angeles dining hall. Every night, he would watch as workers exited the dining hall and discarded countless untouched trays of food into the dumpster. Seeing the waste occur “destroyed” him, he says.
Two years later, DeAnda launched Bruin Dine—a student-run organization that works to bridge the gap between food waste and food insecurity by recovering food from the UCLA dining halls that would have otherwise been thrown away and redistributing it to students and staff in need.
Getting a college degree in Detroit has never been simple. Over half of the children in Detroit live in poverty. Many Detroit public school graduates do not enroll in college within a year of finishing high school. And of those who do enroll, most don’t earn a degree within six years.
It could be getting more difficult. President Donald Trump’s recent budget puts several programs aiding low-income students on the chopping block. Cyekeia Lee of the Detroit College Access Network offers insight on how wraparound services can provide the support needed to help more students make it to and through college.
A decade ago, Marion Technical College did not have the means to pursue meaningful grants. The two-year institution, which shares a campus with Ohio State University, lacked a dedicated grant office as well as a staffer to spearhead large-scale funding proposals.
That unfortunate dynamic changed in 2019, when Columbus State Community College began sharing a grant writer with Marion Tech. Through this collaboration, the rural college has secured millions in funding—from National Science Foundation grants to Title III recognition—that would be impossible to access independently.
