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.
Colleges are excited about Workforce Pell Grants, but getting the money will be no easy feat. That reality was made clear recently as U.S. Department of Education officials, industry advocates, and experts discussed plans to carry out the major policy change, which will allow low-income students to pay for workforce-training programs with Pell Grants.
While advocates for these training programs see Workforce Pell Grants as a vital tool to help many students gain career skills that don’t require a years-long degree, many colleges lack the data-tracking and staffing capacity necessary to meet these requirements quickly. Some policy experts are concerned that institutions’ rush to qualify could undercut program quality.
Today, colleges and universities, technical schools, private training centers, and online platforms offer more than 1 million short-term workforce credentialing programs. Regrettably, there has been minimal assistance for adult learners in identifying programs that align with industry standards and lead to higher-paying jobs.
But that’s changing. Through the FutureReady States initiative, Lumina Foundation is supporting emerging efforts in 12 states to identify credentials of value and to build systems that help learners find the programs that can serve them best.
Across the country, students have seen their colleges slash positions, services, and programs they celebrated and relied on amid a deluge of federal and state challenges to anything perceived as diversity, equity, and inclusion. President Donald Trump won re-election in part by amassing support from voters frustrated with “wokeness,” who argued they were being sidelined in favor of minority communities’ concerns. Critics bristled at concepts like “white privilege,” “male privilege,” and “implicit bias.”
After a year of repeated blows, diversity professionals and scholars are now debating whether DEI has a future on college campuses, and if so, what its next iteration looks like.
England has embraced degree apprenticeships as a solution to a wide range of challenges, including high youth unemployment, spiraling student debt, and rapid technological change. The programs have been sold here as a way to both retrain existing employees and to get more low-income students through college and into the workforce.
Now, as student advocates in the United States embark on their effort to expand apprenticeship programs, some are pointing to England as a leader to follow.
Tremaine Collins, who is Black, has just begun his first year at Temple University Japan, where about half of its 3,000 students are from the United States and roughly a quarter are from Japan. He is not simply doing a semester abroad program. He’s enrolled as a full-time student in a four-year undergraduate program.
Most Black men attending a U.S. college or university do not take advantage of opportunities to study abroad. In the 2023-2024 school year, there were almost 300,000 Americans studying in other countries. About two-thirds of these students were white, according to the Institute for International Education, and six percent were Black. While men made up one-third of Americans studying abroad, Black men represented only 2 percent of that total.
Schools are still debating how to use artificial intelligence in classrooms. Employers, meanwhile, are moving ahead and reshaping what working with AI looks like.
Over the last decade, demand for AI skills has been steadily rising. Between 2012 and 2024, the share of job postings calling for AI skills increased nearly sevenfold. In 2024, about 1.7 percent of job listings referenced AI skills. By mid-2025, that figure had already climbed to 2.8 percent, with a much higher concentration in high-paying jobs. The bottom line: work is changing faster than education systems are adapting.
