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.
What is the role of higher education in a democracy? To what extent should American colleges and universities respond to the demands of those in power? Are college leaders meeting this moment? As a former federal and state prosecutor, governor, university president, and the nation’s longest-serving secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano is uniquely positioned to address these questions.
Today, Napolitano is a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. In this interview, she shares insight about the current relationship between higher education and the federal government and how today's institutions can stay true to their missions.
In rural Washington, access to higher education is often shaped by challenges that extend beyond tuition and coursework. For student parents, the availability of affordable, reliable child care can determine whether college is feasible at all.
Lisa J. Smith of the Grays Harbor College Foundation weighs in on the role of child care in rural student success, how her organization is responding to local needs, and what these efforts mean for the region’s workforce and communities.
When California lawmakers voted in 2017 to all but eliminate remedial math across the state’s community colleges, Nicholas Lujan was the kind of student they hoped to save. Given Lujan's struggles with math and his years-long absence from the classroom, enrolling in a local community college might have landed him in a sequence of noncredit remedial math courses before he could even start earning college credit.
Despite the fact it was meant to help him, Lujan considers himself an unintended casualty of a policy that skipped him past the catch-up coursework he says he needed. Without being able to brush up on algebra first, it took him three attempts to pass calculus. It was a demoralizing process, he says, that complicated, rather than streamlined, the path to where he is now as an honor student seeking to transfer to a four-year university.
Scholars, sitting presidents, practitioners, and higher education leaders recently gathered virtually to focus on what organizers called the "health and well-being" of Historically Black Colleges and Universities at a pivotal and politically turbulent moment for the sector.
The daylong convening drew participants from across the country to examine funding, disparities, presidential leadership, student mental health, institutional sustainability, and the broader economic role HBCUs play in their communities.
Several prominent universities, including Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania, made headlines in 2025 in a dizzying back-and-forth with the federal government as the Trump administration cut large amounts of research funding. Some schools pushed back, while others hatched settlements to get their money restored.
Fast forward to today: How have these confrontations between higher education and the White House played out over the past year? Brendan Cantwell, a professor at Michigan State University, offers his thoughts on how the Trump administration is adopting a more subtle tactic to influence higher education.
Six Massachusetts community colleges are partnering with employers across the state to launch new apprenticeship degree programs that combine paid, on-the-job training with academic coursework—connecting students to high-growth careers while helping employers close critical talent gaps.
The apprenticeship degree model is new in Massachusetts but gaining momentum nationwide. Apprenticeship degrees take a long-proven workforce development approach, common in careers such as plumbing and electrical trades, and apply it to new occupations where there is significant and long-standing need for talent with postsecondary credentials.
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