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.
For a decade, we’ve heard that the college degree is fading. Employers are dropping requirements. Skills matter more than credentials. The four-year diploma is an outdated filter in a world of artificial intelligence and rapid disruption.
However, employers have a different perspective. A new Lumina Foundation–Gallup survey of 2,000 U.S. employers shows the degree is still very much alive. Employers say the degree still matters. Students believe in it, and graduates benefit from it. But its meaning is under pressure, and aligning expectations requires collective action.
“These programs are not luxury degrees,” says Dana Merk, a clinical assistant professor in the School of Nursing at DePaul University, in Chicago. “They are workforce pipelines.”
In just a few words, that comment captures the deep unease permeating across higher education as it braces for the end of a program that, for 20 years, has allowed graduate students to take out federal loans up to the full cost of their attendance. And it hints at how the sector is framing the stakes.
Although Karla Vásquez Perez stepped onto the University of California, Los Angeles, campus with no support, she built a network of friends and professors to help her navigate a foreign system. She spent most of her time at UCLA doing what many first-generation students quietly puzzle together: applying for scholarships, writing citizenship appeals, supporting their families, and learning—often too late—how to access resources most students inherit through generational guidance. But her success is not the story of most immigrants. Many fall through the cracks without graduating.
With federal cuts and heightened fear on college campuses, first-generation students like Vásquez Perez are asking their institutions to defend and expand their right to education.
Apprenticeships are diversifying, as are apprentices themselves. Once synonymous with hard hats and tool belts, apprenticeships are branching into health care, artificial intelligence, business services, advanced manufacturing, and more.
Community colleges and four-year institutions are serving a growing role in this shifting landscape, acting as connective tissue across apprenticeship fields. They not only provide instruction but also navigate complex credentialing and funding landscapes and broker agreements between parties that don’t naturally talk to each other.
Colleges play a critical role in helping students vote in what is often their first chance to cast a ballot. But the Trump administration is barring colleges from using a federal program that employs low-income students to register voters and threatening to investigate schools if they use data from a nonpartisan student voting study to help boost turnout.
The U.S. Department of Education has also warned colleges not to violate election laws and told school leaders to limit who they share voter registration information with, even though there is no evidence of widespread fraud on campuses.
Brandeis University has a plan to reinvent its academic programming by embedding microcredentials into its curriculum and creating a competency-based, employer-valued secondary transcript. Brandeis isn’t alone in transforming itself. Higher education leaders across the country are looking at ways to innovate, from expanding campuses globally to exploring multi-generational learning and launching new colleges.
The push for change comes at a time when colleges are up against a series of challenges, including the value of a college degree coming under increasing scrutiny, a declining number of college-aged students in the United States, and the climbing sticker price.
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