Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025.
Promoting civic engagement on college campuses is a priority for higher education institutions, particularly before an election, as is helping students to get involved in political discourse and use their voices.
But in the wake of the 2024 presidential election, most students believe their vote didn’t make much of a difference. Despite this, student organizers and campus leaders plan to continue their efforts to engage students in the democratic process, demonstrating that voting is not the end goal but rather one piece of the puzzle.
Experts are growing more concerned about community "college deserts," which deprive students of easily accessible options for higher education. The deserts, locations where high schools are more than 30 miles away from all community colleges, disproportionately affect rural Americans and those of color, threatening to exacerbate existing education gaps.
A recent study shows such deserts in Texas are a major factor for students who decline to pursue an education after high school in the sprawling state.
The 2023-24 school year saw more than 1.1 million international students in the United States—setting a new record largely driven by graduate students and recent graduates in internship-type programs.
The new figures mark a full rebound from the start of the pandemic, when international enrollment dropped by 15 percent. But experts say those increases could once again be threatened under the incoming Trump administration, which upended the lives of many international students and workers in its first term.
Every year, billions of dollars and countless hours of workforce training are poured into separate silos: public community colleges and the federal workforce system administered via the $2.9 billion Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act through the U.S. Department of Labor. Both aim to prepare Americans for jobs.
Despite similar missions, as well as similar “customers”—students, employers, and job seekers—these two public systems are not as integrated or synergistic as they could be. And without this coordination, students, employers, and taxpayers lose out.
The University of Michigan, one of higher education’s staunchest proponents of diversity, equity, and inclusion plans, is weighing changes to its own program as colleges across the country brace for the second presidency of Donald J. Trump and a Republican assault on such initiatives in government and academia.
Regents overseeing the university are scheduled to meet today, but the changes under consideration would make Michigan one of the first selective public universities to rethink DEI from the inside, rather than under legislative pressure.
For decades, Virginia’s public colleges and universities expanded campuses to accommodate growing student populations—often at the expense of Black communities.
State and local elected leaders are just now probing what price these communities paid. That cost is difficult to determine, officials say, and community members are impatient for a reckoning.
