Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025.
Colleges and universities have spent years ramping up student success services, diversifying curricula, training faculty in culturally responsive practices, and employing other strategies to close racial gaps in academic outcomes. Now, some institutions are shedding hard-won diversity centers, initiatives, and personnel, spooked by state-level DEI bans and President Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders.
Indeed, all higher ed institutions seem to be asking the same question these days: What parts of their once-touted progress are they prepared to lose? And what strategies, programs, and practices will they fight to keep?
Spread over 1,000 acres, the University of Utah has more than 80 buildings across its main campus perched on Salt Lake City’s hillside. There’s the Marriott Library, Rice-Eccles Stadium, and Kingsbury Hall. And one building is dedicated entirely to dreaming up even more buildings within its architecture program.
But despite their different designations, the spaces inside each structure are more similar than you might think. Much of it is dedicated to one use—and it’s not classrooms.
A week before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, Syracuse University’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion web page mentioned the word “diversity” 13 times.
Now, the page has been mostly scrubbed of references to diversity. A picture of a pride flag was removed. An entire page about diversity at SU is no longer there. The mission statement has been changed to get rid of that touchy d-word.
When the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions in 2023, most people expected a major drop in the enrollment of Black and Latino students at elite schools. That happened at a few schools, but at others, enrollment of Black and Latino students went up.
Rose Horowitch, a staff writer at The Atlantic, talks about the numbers from the first admissions cycle since that 2023 ruling and why some are surprising.
Facing teacher shortages, many states are embracing the promise of apprenticeship as a training strategy for roles in education. Since January 2022, more than 45 states, plus Washington, DC, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico, have registered apprenticeship programs for educators.
A new resource from Education Trust and the Pathways Alliance provides data from all 50 states and DC on how leaders there designed program standards and supplied funding for these efforts.
Mergers aren’t easy. They demand careful analysis, difficult decisions, and tricky stakeholder management. But they are becoming increasingly necessary as demographic and financial challenges make going it alone less viable for more and more postsecondary institutions.
The presidents of two colleges in Ohio that are in the process of merging discuss the components of forging a successful merger, plus how to find the right partner, navigate federal approval processes, and manage the emotional elements that will undoubtedly take place.
