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.
After a debilitating reduction in staff and months of silence on higher education research, the Institute of Education Sciences announced two new college-oriented surveys on the same day. One focuses on shaping the future of loan repayment, and another will examine the status of today’s TRIO programs, a collection of grant-based initiatives designed to improve college access for historically underrepresented students.
Higher ed researchers and policy experts are pleased to see the agency get back to work after losing 80 percent of its staff. But one college access group has concerns about how the Trump administration may use the data it collects.
Barbara Gellman-Danley, president of the nation’s largest institutional accrediting agency, took a defiant stand recently, telling her members that the group would not respond rashly to threats from the U.S. Department of Education.
The comments are the latest punch in an intensifying tussle between the Trump administration and the college-accreditation system as the government looks to reshape the way academic quality is measured and who gets to do the measuring. The department has begun leveraging the federal recognition process to try to force accreditors to meet its demands.
At 16, Khloe Watson-Barrett already knows she wants to be a lawyer. She also knows she’ll soon have to run the gauntlet of the high-stakes college admissions process now that she’s past the halfway point of her junior year in high school.
Now Watson-Barrett’s school and many others are just at the start of testing a whole new generation of technology that promises to free up time for college counselors while providing students crucial information, even outside school hours: artificial intelligence built specifically to provide advice about life after high school.
Employers across industries continue to value degrees and credentials, and most expect them to remain important in hiring. At the same time, many report gaps between what graduates bring to the workplace and what employers need to stay competitive. This finding is one of the key takeaways from a new Lumina Foundation/Gallup report, Aligning Education and Work: What Employers Say Higher Education Must Deliver.
In this interview, Lumina's Courtney Brown shares additional insight from the report—and why its findings provide an opportunity for policymakers, educators, and workforce leaders to reimagine education-to-employment pathways.
The National Institutes of Health’s abrupt termination of nearly 2,300 federal research grants last year disproportionately affected women researchers and those early in their careers, a new peer-reviewed paper found. Women grantees lost access to a higher percentage of their funding, while early-career researchers faced lost advancement opportunities that could have long-term career effects, according to the analysis.
That insight comes as legal battles over NIH’s canceled grants wind their way through the courts.
Waves of opposition and concerns about land, water, and electricity usage routinely follow data center proposals, while supporters echo that the centers will create jobs and help the economy. This sentiment is happening in real time in Wisconsin as data center developers stake out land in local communities.
But what jobs? How many of them? And will they last? Three professors weigh in on the types of work data centers bring to communities and what their economic trickle-down effects may be.
