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.
For the second year in a row, a Black student group at the University of Missouri is facing pushback from administrators over their attempt to hold a back-to-school event with the word “Black” in the name.
Student success experts and advocates for racial minority groups say the tension at Mizzou is just one example of an ongoing change in campus cultures nationwide. As various pieces of anti-DEI legislation take effect in red states and the Trump administration attempts to crack down on practices of so-called liberal indoctrination across the country, many students of color could lose access to vital hubs of cultural recognition.
Administrators at the state university’s campus in Colorado Springs thought they stood a solid chance of dodging the Trump administration’s offensive on higher education. However, their optimism proved to be misguided.
An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of emails from University of Colorado-Colorado Springs officials, as well as interviews with students and professors, reveals that school leaders, teachers, and students soon found themselves in the Trump administration’s crosshairs, forcing them to navigate what they describe as an unprecedented and haphazard degree of change.
You might think that colleges would be ferociously competing to recruit Hispanic students, the one segment of the higher education market that’s growing, and that major education publications would be closely tracking their progress.
But there are few such measures of excellence out there, and the rankings of Hispanic-serving schools that do exist rely on generalized data, rather than numbers that tell you specifically how Hispanic students are doing. That's why this year Washington Monthly, in collaboration with Excelencia in Education, is releasing a comparison of how schools serve this all-important population.
For Zoey Griffith, college seemed like a distant and unlikely idea. Her mother became a parent as a teenager; Griffith’s father works as a mechanic, and he frowns upon the idea of higher education, she says.
But Griffith got lucky. She discovered a group of federal programs, known as TRIO, aimed at helping low-income and first-generation students earn a college degree, often becoming the first in their families to do so. Today, however, TRIO faces an uncertain future, causing many in this part of the Appalachian region of Kentucky, and across the country, to worry about students who won’t get the same assistance if President Donald Trump ends federal spending on the program.
In a year where American universities face mounting financial pressures, several major institutions are touting record enrollments for the Fall 2025 semester.
Those gains come at a crucial time for the nation’s colleges and universities as they try to manage the difficult combination of uncertain or decreasing state financial support, a tumultuous federal policy and funding environment, and the upcoming demographic cliff, which will see the number of high school graduates decline steadily over the next decade.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an increasingly prominent free-speech organization, has long been known as a fierce opponent of campus political correctness. Since its founding in 1999, it has been celebrated for defending conservatives and other dissidents from the prevailing liberal culture at America’s universities.
Now, however, the organization is taking on new and surprising targets.
