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.
The Trump administration wants to streamline its existing higher education accountability measures with a new earnings test, holding all postsecondary programs to the same standard—regardless of the certification level or institution type involved.
Officials at the U.S. Department of Education contend they are creating a level playing field. Meanwhile, advocates and committee members say they are leaving students vulnerable.
Louie Delgado is the only one of his seven siblings to have graduated from both high school and college. Continuing to push educational boundaries is what made him want to pursue a graduate degree and become a nurse anesthetist. After an initial rejection from Kaiser Permanente’s School of Anesthesia, a partnership with California State University at Fullerton, he applied again this year. This time, he got in.
Concurrently, the Trump administration was carrying out the biggest overhaul of federal aid in more than a decade. Now, tighter limits on borrowing for master’s and professional degrees are leaving many students like Delgado fearful of the future.
As 2025 drew to a close, the nation lost two leaders whose careers spanned very different worlds—but whose legacies converged around a shared conviction. Jim Hunt, who served two stints as governor of North Carolina, was one of the most influential education governors of the modern era. Lou Gerstner, the former chairman and CEO of IBM, is widely credited with orchestrating one of the most significant corporate turnarounds of the 1990s.
Hunt and Gerstner believed that education is the linchpin of economic opportunity for individuals and of long-term competitiveness for the nation as a whole. Their passing is a moment not only for reflection but also for reckoning—because the conditions that brought them together nearly three decades ago are strikingly similar to those facing higher education leaders and policymakers today.
A new emergency fund at Rider University has attracted more than $2 million in pledged donations to help students facing unexpected financial hardships—even as the New Jersey institution implements drastic cost-cutting measures to address its own fiscal crisis.
The Presidential Hope Fund comes as the private university prepares to lay off up to 35 full-time faculty members and has already reduced salaries for most employees by 14 percent. The cuts follow Rider's placement on probation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education due to financial instability.
Shreya Hessler’s students said they felt trapped in a phone prison. One student picked up her device 190 times a day. Another had downloaded 55 games. A third learned from an app that, at his current pace, he’d spend 32 years of his life staring at the screen in his pocket.
Then they took Hessler’s digital detox psychology class at Loyola University Maryland, and the numbers began to drop. The class—part experimental, part research, and part group play—aims to address the worsening phone dependency that psychologists say is eroding young people’s ability to focus, sleep, and regulate their emotions.
Despite their leading role in access and cost containment, too many students who begin at community colleges still lose time, credits, and money on the path to a bachelor’s degree.
The cause is often misunderstood. The problem is not student motivation, academic ability, or the quality of advising. It is structural, writes a former community college president and higher education leader in this commentary on improving the transfer design of community colleges.
