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.
Campus diversity, equity, and inclusion officers and researchers who study inequities in higher education say they’re watching decades of their work disappear as colleges respond to federal and state bans on DEI policies and programs by scrubbing evidence of their efforts, research, and milestones from campus websites.
But two former diversity professionals and an anthropology professor are making it their mission to preserve what they can of their colleagues’ DEI work with the creation of a journal called Dear Higher Ed: Letters From the Social Justice Mountain.
A new pilot program in Massachusetts aims to help residents with some college credits complete their certificate or degree. The reengagement effort offers direct student outreach and coaching to the more than 760,000 people who fall into the “Some College, No Credential” category.
José Luis Santos, senior deputy commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education, says the goal of the effort is to tackle the financial or personal barriers that often deter students from completing their education. So far, some 1,300 former students have expressed interest in the initiative.
A narrator speaks over images of busy cityscapes, children playing in a field, and ominous scenes of natural disasters and civil unrest. “There’s no sugarcoating it,” the deep voice warns. “America’s future is under attack.” Its salvation: higher education, personified by young people shown listening attentively in classrooms and busy at work in high-tech labs.
This 60-second public service spot is part of a small but growing response by the higher education industry to more than a decade of plummeting public confidence and falling enrollment followed by a year of political attacks against which insiders and advocates concede it has until now been mostly silent.
The U.S. Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions as we knew it two and a half years ago. But colleges throughout the nation are still grappling with the fallout from the court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a decision that left highly selective institutions without a long-used tool for increasing racial diversity. So began an anxious chapter in which colleges must confront a slew of difficult questions about what they value, how they operate, and whether they have the institutional will to create a more equitable admissions system.
Julie J. Park tackles these questions in her new book, Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era. In this interview, she discusses race and equity and why she believes colleges must continue to innovate in admissions.
The recent announcement by California College of the Arts that it would close by the end of the next academic year stunned many in the Bay Area arts community. Nashville-based Vanderbilt University plans to open a satellite location in CCA’s San Francisco campus and also bought a shuttered site in Oakland.
Higher education expert and author Jeff Selingo recently shared his thoughts on the deal and what the demise of the 120-year-old CCA and expansion of a new university mean for the Bay Area, the arts in the region, and higher education overall.
Thirty-five years ago, Michigan workers were paid much more than their counterparts in North Carolina and Texas and about the same amount as wage earners in Massachusetts.
Today, workers in all those states are bringing home paychecks that are far fatter than those of Michigan workers. That’s because those states made the transition to a knowledge economy that largely bypassed Michigan, according to this study by a University of Michigan economist.
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