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.
While policymakers and employers demand tighter alignment between education and workforce needs, the financial structures of higher education often reward the opposite. It's not about whether higher education has value. The data are clear on that.
It's the fact that our systems of learning, hiring, and workforce signaling must evolve fast enough to connect that value to opportunity in ways students can actually see and trust, writes Lumina Foundation's Courtney Brown in this perspective piece.
On July 1, many of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overhaul federal student financial aid will come to fruition. Student borrowers will begin to see different options for loan repayments and forgiveness, while current students will face new limits on how much they can borrow in the first place. Low-income people will have more funding available to pursue career and technical training.
These moves have cheerleaders, critics, and skeptics. In this interview, experts from around the country reveal what they’re wondering and watching for as it all unfolds.
When Princeton University announced in February that it would pursue “more targeted, and in some cases deeper, reductions over a multiyear period,” the news landed with the force of a paradox. Here was an institution sitting atop a $35.7 billion endowment—the fifth largest in the nation—telling its campus community it needed to cut.
To the average observer—and to many lawmakers—the question was obvious: How can a university worth tens of billions of dollars plead poverty? The answer lies not in the endowment's size but in what portion any institution can actually touch.
The Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdowns have already had a significant impact on America’s higher education institutions, including highly visible confrontations and arrests, fear and uncertainty on campuses, and a drastic drop in new international student enrollment.
College leaders and students in Minnesota weigh in on how immigration enforcement strains higher education and what faculty and administrators are doing as they continue to prepare for an uncertain environment. The conversation also tackles some of the policy debates and changes around financial aid and in-state tuition for undocumented students.
Across the country, public and private investments in quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, energy, and cybersecurity continue to accelerate. These investments are important because they indicate the direction of the nation's economy. But innovation alone is not enough. New technology cannot move from research and development into practical use without a skilled workforce prepared to deploy, operate, maintain, and advance these complex systems at scale.
Community colleges are at the center of making these changes happen.
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” presents one of the most direct and specific challenges to higher education issued by a global figure in recent memory, focusing on artificial intelligence and the human person.
In this op-ed, Eric F. Spina and Brother Tim Driscoll of the University of Dayton urge all college presidents, regardless of institutional type, to consider the encyclical's argument. That argument transcends shared faith, they say, and speaks to our shared stakes: whether today's graduates can still think, judge, and do work that machines are unable or unwilling to do.
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