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.
In 2013, the family of Herschell Lee Hamilton established an annual scholarship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to support high-achieving, financially needy Black students who had been accepted to the university’s medical school. On April 11, the university terminated the scholarship after the Trump administration deemed race-conscious scholarships as discriminatory and illegal.
In this interview, the son of Hamilton, Herschell Lanier Hamilton, talks about his father’s legacy, why he thinks the scholarship is still needed, and how the university’s return of the contribution stung.
Erik Jacobsen, an associate professor of mathematics education at Indiana University, was nearing the end of a years-long project designed to address teacher biases with the goal of helping more students excel in math and pursue STEM careers. But that stopped several weeks ago, when the National Science Foundation notified him that it had terminated the grant because it was “not in alignment with current agency priorities.”
The NSF says major budget cuts, restructuring, and priority changes are designed to build a more robust STEM workforce. But experts say the opposite effect will happen.
Yurong “Luanna” Jiang did not mention President Donald Trump last week at Harvard University’s commencement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but her speech before thousands of other graduates was a full-throated rebuttal to his administration’s ban on the school’s ability to enroll international students like her.
The commencement ceremony served as a bright spot amid one of the most tumultuous times in Harvard’s 389-year history. The nation’s oldest, most prestigious university has been engaged in an ongoing battle with the Trump administration as it slashes federal funding and threatens visas.
The Trump administration’s reductions in the federal workforce have been devastating for scores of midcareer government employees, who have seen their research and work projects canceled or discarded and their livelihoods thrown into disarray and uncertainty.
But the radical changes in Washington are also creating a complicated regional problem—in the local economy, in workforce development, and for new graduates seeking employment opportunities amid what’s already shaping up to be a very tough job market.
American universities are where people go to learn and teach. They're also where research and development take place. Over the past eight decades, universities have received billions in federal dollars to help that happen. Those dollars have contributed to innovations like drone technology. Inhalable COVID vaccines. Google search code.
But when did the government start funding research at universities? And will massive cuts by the Trump administration mean the end of universities as we know them? Two experts weigh in.
The 2026 budget request for the U.S. Department of Education has been released, and it follows through on President Donald Trump’s promise of deep cuts for a department marked for elimination.
The budget summary begins by quoting a portion of Trump’s speech from his signing of the executive order calling for the elimination of the department. “But we’re going to be returning education very simply back to the states where it belongs,” he promised. The proposed budget seems to indicate that not only will states get more responsibility for education, but additional costs as well.
