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.
In the book, Hacking College, authors Scott Carlson and Ned Laff draw on decades of combined experience—Carlson in higher education journalism, Laff in student affairs—to describe how to craft a higher education experience that intentionally links student learning to future work and career success.
In this interview, Carlson and Laff discuss what must happen so that students are empowered to actively design their undergraduate degrees, unearth hidden job markets, and leverage faculty expertise.
This past spring, "Faten" was on the brink of achieving her lifelong dream: graduating from college. She was also exploring her longtime passion for writing as a reporter for University Press, her school’s student-run magazine, where she had been offered an editorial position for the fall semester.
Then, she became ensnared in Florida’s crackdown on illegal immigration. But it was not the threat of deportation that thwarted her graduation plans at Florida Atlantic University. It was the GOP-dominated Florida Legislature’s decision in January to repeal a decade-old state law allowing “Dreamers,” non-citizen students who have lived in the United States since they were very young, the ability to pay in-state tuition rates.
International college students are learning that speech isn’t as free as they thought in the United States. After President Donald Trump began his second term, hundreds of international students lost their student status as part of an executive order cracking down on immigration.
While lawsuits resulted in many of those students having their status reinstated since April, the uncertainty of it happening again has created fear among international students, particularly within the University of California system, where international students made up 13.6 percent of student enrollment as of Fall 2024.
Diego Dulanto Falcon, a graduate student in public health at the University of South Florida at Tampa, doesn’t feel comfortable spending a lot of time on campus anymore. The 26-year-old from Peru, who came to the United States as a child, says he will limit his movement this fall semester after USF’s campus police department signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that will enable the university’s officers to enforce immigration laws.
Dulanto Falcon’s experience is one example of how President Trump’s campaign to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, over 70 percent of whom are Hispanic or Latino, is rippling across college campuses—from an increased ICE presence to new limits on educational access.
President Donald Trump took direct aim at elite universities this spring, prompting an outcry over the choking off of billions of dollars in federal research funding from top-tier institutions.
But far from historic campuses in Cambridge and Manhattan, a White House-instigated financial drama was playing out at institutions like Nebraska Indian Community College. The dollar figures are much smaller, but the stakes for students and faculty members are about as high.
As President Donald Trump attempts to reshape college admissions, he’s promising a new era of fairness, with an emphasis on merit and test scores and a blind eye toward diversity.
Yet the president’s critics—and some allies—are questioning his silence on admissions policies that give applicants a boost because of their wealth or family ties. While he has pressed colleges to eliminate any possible consideration of a student’s race, he has made no mention of legacy admissions, an edge given to the children of alumni, or similar preferences for the relatives of donors.
