Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025.
Like many four-year colleges, Moravian University, a small liberal arts college in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, began its dual-enrollment program as an equity initiative to give local high schoolers access to higher-level courses. That’s still a key part of the mission, officials say, only now they’re banking on an enrollment windfall, too.
But that hasn’t happened yet. Only five of Moravian’s 530-student incoming class came via the dual-enrollment program, a re-enrollment rate of about 1 percent.
In 2020, Owen Girard was all in for Bernie Sanders. The high school junior couldn’t vote just yet, but he liked the pro-worker, anti-establishment policies championed by the progressive Vermont senator during the presidential campaign. Four years later, Girard found himself in a starkly different place—voting for Donald J. Trump and leading his campus’s chapter of Turning Point USA, a conservative student group.
The rightward turn comes at a moment when higher education is wrestling with two parallel trends: the declining number of men enrolling in college and the growing skepticism of higher ed, particularly on the right.
Office hours for Patrick Cafferty’s biology classes are anything but traditional. Sometimes, students will go on runs with Cafferty, who is a teaching professor at Emory University. Other times, they’ll meet for coloring sessions or use chalk to draw anatomical diagrams on the sidewalk outside the medical school on campus.
Cafferty is among a growing number of instructors who view office hours as more than simply homework help. Instead, they're using the time as a way to connect with students and build relationships to help them perform better in class.
Milwaukee Area Technical College is on the brink of joining the nation’s growing list of Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a coveted designation that opens the door to new federal funding. Colleges achieve the federally designated HSI status when at least 25 percent of their full-time undergraduate students are Hispanic and at least half of their undergraduates qualify for need-based aid from the U.S. Department of Education.
However, for many institutions—particularly ones in regions with smaller Hispanic populations—reaching HSI status can be a long and arduous process.
After bouncing around in several job paths, including retail sales, office receptionist, and warehouse worker, Cindy Crisanto is beginning a potentially lucrative career as a welder and ironworker—a field with very few women.
Crisanto, a single mother of two elementary school-aged boys, made that switch with the aid of a new state apprenticeship program that provides child care funds during her on-the-job training, helping her to overcome an obstacle many women face in trying to enter the construction trades while also raising a family.
Nomar Leonardo Melo Cabral was weeks into his first semester in college when an unexpected bill from Stony Brook University arrived in his inbox. Cabral, 19, is the first in his family to attend college in the United States, and he was tempted to panic.
Instead, he called upon a resource many young people in his position don’t have: an advocate from OneGoal New York, a mentorship program that has been working with him since high school.
.jpeg?upscale=true&width=500&upscale=true&name=images%20(44).jpeg)
