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.
College leaders return to campus this term appearing steady and resolved. After a year of tumult, they remain vigilant about more attacks from Washington but are ready to refocus on the other crises knocking at their doors—million-dollar deficits, declining enrollments, and the disruption from artificial intelligence. And now that higher ed has gone through nearly 12 months of Trump 2.0, it’s learned a few things.
The year didn’t just teach colleges what to expect—it also showed them how to respond. And we’ve seen that fighting back works. Leaders have also woken up to the fact that visibility matters.
A new national rating identifies the top 200 university‑based scholars who exerted the greatest public influence on U.S. education policy and practice over the past year, highlighting a group that includes several prominent Black educators whose work has shaped debates on equity, higher education, and school reform.
Unlike traditional academic rankings focused on research output alone, the RHSU Edu‑Scholar Public Influence Rankings aim to capture how frequently scholars’ ideas appear in public discourse and policymaking.
Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M University, was thunderstruck when he was told this week that he needed to excise some teachings of Plato from his syllabus. It was one way, his department head wrote in an email, that Peterson’s philosophy class could comply with new policies limiting discussion of race and gender.
Universities across the country routinely say that classes cannot be used for political purposes. But the push by A&M regents reflects a noisy debate in Texas, the nation’s most populous conservative state, over its public universities.
Collecting and analyzing student data and then acting on any findings to support student success is a struggle for many institutions. Often, the data is either in the wrong format, inaccessible to the appropriate teams, or so overwhelming that colleges don’t know where to start. Many administrators also lack the data literacy needed to make accurate, data-informed decisions.
In this interview, three higher ed experts—Lumina Foundation's Courtney Brown, Elliot Felix, higher education advisory practice lead at Buro Happold, and Mark Milliron, president of National University—offer insight into the question of how institutions can be more data-driven and student-centered.
College leaders face no shortage of challenges in the year ahead. They’re up against an uncertain federal policy landscape, challenges to international enrollment, and, for some institutions, operating models that may no longer be working.
This week, top leaders attending the Council of Independent Colleges’ Presidents Institute—an annual gathering of hundreds of leaders of private nonprofit institutions—shared those woes and more.
Co-op programs are trending these days, with many colleges looking to offer students on-the-job experiences while taking classes. One of those schools is Kettering University. Students engage in a unique 50/50 blend of rigorous academics and mandatory hands-on co-op experiences, spending one term mastering theories and skills in classrooms and labs and the next term applying those skills in their paid co-op roles.
Robert McMahan, president of Kettering, argues that more colleges could incorporate and scale the co-op approach. But there are obstacles, both cultural and logistical.
