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.
This week, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon tried to defend major spending cuts to indignant Democrats and skeptical Republicans at a Senate budget hearing.
Democrats weren’t the only lawmakers with tough questions for McMahon. While she was largely praised by Republicans in the House last month, her compatriots in the Senate were more skeptical of the unprecedented spending cuts and bureaucratic overhaul she is overseeing at the department. The opposition could signal that Congress won’t include some of the more unpopular proposed cuts in the fiscal year 2026 budget.
For two decades, Texas offered undocumented students in-state tuition, with bipartisan backing. This week, a federal judge stopped it after the U.S. Department of Justice sued and Texas agreed.
Texas was the first state in the nation to extend in-state tuition benefits to undocumented students, according to the National Immigration Forum. The savings can be substantial. At the University of Texas’ flagship campus in Austin, in-state students pay a minimum of about $10,800 for tuition a year, while the minimum cost for out-of-state students is approximately $40,500.
Joanne Scott had been without full-time work for about two decades and was struggling to reenter the workforce. That changed when she learned this year about a short-term pharmacy technician program at Mt. San Antonio College in eastern Los Angeles County.
The effort is one of 48 short-term vocational programs that Mt. San Antonio has added in the past five years. Those additions reflect a growing trend among the state’s community colleges to create more programs aimed at adult students who, due to work or family responsibilities, have less time for school compared to traditional-aged students. College officials say that enrolling these adults is one way to reverse steep pandemic declines across all populations.
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, says international scholars are among the reasons that "American higher education is a crown jewel of the nation."
And when these students graduate, they do one of two things, according to Mitchell: They land work in the United States, where they have an outsized impact on entrepreneurship as well as on scientific and biomedical innovation. Or they go back home and spread American democratic values. Soon, however, many fear that will no longer be the case.
Southern Illinois University-Carbondale campus police stopped Michael Burton so many times that he now dreads driving anywhere near the college. Burton, who grew up on the West Side and graduated from Christ the King Jesuit College Prep, is among thousands of Black students from the Chicago area attending a four-year public university in Illinois. Burton says he knew the perils of driving as a Black driver. But when he enrolled at SIU-Carbondale, he never expected campus police to be so harsh.
It’s a phenomenon seen at public universities across the state, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis of the Illinois Department of Transportation’s traffic-stop data.
Newly minted M.D.s are among the thousands of students, trainees, teachers, and exchange visitors put in limbo after the U.S. Department of State hit pause on new visa appointments last week as it develops a plan to vet visa candidates’ social media.
For foreign-born and educated doctors who haven’t snagged an appointment yet, the timing couldn’t be worse.
