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.
When students at Farrington High School attend the annual kuleana fair, an event whose name is the Hawaiian word for “responsibility,” they play a game that simulates the financial challenges they’re bound to face in life. They draw cards that may give them a child, a car loan, or student debt.
For Rianna Milne, a senior at Farrington who helped organize the school’s kuleana fair in spring 2026, it’s the last of those three that she’s trying to avoid. A scholarship program called Hawaii Promise is helping on that end. Meanwhile, Direct2UH, the state’s version of direct admission, is also making life a little easier for Milne and for other Hawaii high school seniors facing decisions about college.
Colleges and universities are seizing the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence as an opportunity to facilitate community reflection about the complexities of the nation’s history—and what it means for the future of democracy.
That reflection has taken on many forms, including essay contests, art installations, lectures, quilting bees, civic dialogue events, and film screenings. And much of the semiquincentennial programming happening on college campuses this year shares a similar goal: foster respectful conversation about the people, policies, and events that have shaped American history—warts and all.
After the U.S. Department of Education pulled out of some of its sessions at an annual conference for financial aid administrators, Nicholas Kent, the undersecretary who serves as the Trump administration’s top higher-education official, emphasized his commitment to working with colleges on sweeping policy changes that take effect this week.
But financial aid professionals say they still need more guidance detailing how to practically put hundreds of pages of new regulations—which limit how much students can borrow for graduate school and impose conditions for programs to be eligible for loans, among other things—into action.
They arrive before dawn to beat the parking fees, teach back-to-back sections for wages that barely cover gas, then go home to grade papers for hours that no one pays for. They are the adjunct faculty, the backbone of the American community college system and, increasingly, the subject of a legal and moral crisis that California courts are now forcing the nation to confront.
Nationally, community college students comprise 39 percent of all U.S. undergraduates, with nearly half of Hispanic college students, 53 percent of Native American undergrads, and 39 percent of Black undergrads attending public two-year institutions. The populations most reliant on community colleges as a pathway to economic mobility are, in other words, the very students most likely to be taught by instructors working under the most precarious conditions in American higher education.
For decades, the United States was considered a nation that prized its universities and scientific researchers. That changed when President Donald Trump began his second term, says Megan Peters, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine.
Peters believes it became apparent that the new administration did not value higher education nor the scientific research done at universities. So when she went on the job market, she started looking around overseas. As it turns out, many other U.S.-based research scientists are following suit.
This fall, colleges nationwide are using common reader programs to spark campus-wide dialogue on diverse, pressing issues. These initiatives, a rite of passage at many institutions, assign a shared book to engage students and faculty in critical conversations, though some selections can prove controversial. This year's choices span a wide array of contemporary themes: Northwestern University picked George Saunders' "Vigil" for its environmental commentary, while Princeton University's "Reader, Come Home" addresses digital reading in the AI era.
Other universities are tackling public health and the Black college experience, highlighting literature's power to foster critical thinking and connection.
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