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.
If you are about to walk across a commencement stage or just did, the news coverage on the brutal job market is not what you need right now. It’s also an inaccurate picture of what’s happening.
Here is what the doom narrative leaves out: 77 percent of graduates from the class of 2025 found a job within three months of getting their degree. Yes, the path from college to career is changing, and it needs to work better than it does today. That’s on institutions and employers to correct. In the meantime, keep the larger context in mind. The degree you’ve earned is something that still opens doors, even if the first one takes longer to push open, writes Lumina Foundation's Courtney Brown in this op-ed.
Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly embedded in higher education and the workforce, with students adopting AI tools at growing rates and employers placing greater value on AI-related skills.
As the higher education sector races to keep up, colleges and universities are developing new AI policies and literacy programs aimed at preparing students for an evolving job market. For example, the State University of New York recently adopted a new systemwide AI policy aimed at expanding the use of AI tools while setting guardrails around how they shape student learning, support services, and academic outcomes.
The crisis of trust in higher education is long in the making. This situation is the result of decades of political choices, including federal and state disinvestment that has shifted costs onto students and families, as well as culture war attacks and policies that have reshaped higher education away from its public mission. Over time, this crisis has produced a system that leaves students struggling, workers insecure, and communities underserved.
In this perspective piece, the heads of the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers lay out their vision for overhauling the sector.
High schools have been working hard to expand and diversify future prospects for today's students. Walk through any building and you’ll see a plethora of enriching experiences: students earning college credits, mastering technical skills, and exploring careers.
But these programs typically provide limited opportunities to integrate pivotal skills—too often, they track the students enrolled in them into two categories: “college” or “career.” In reality, academic knowledge and technical skills aren’t opposing forces; they should be complementary building blocks, says this education insider.
In most cases, choosing a major—computer science, business, nursing, or English—matters less than the critical question of how to remain indispensable in fields already reshaped by artificial intelligence.
That distinction is what the best available evidence suggests will determine who thrives in the job market now taking form. And it is a distinction that higher education—a sector that prepares young people for working life and whose degrees remain the primary currency of the labor market—is just beginning to grapple with.
Nursing programs throughout the country are under pressure to meet the growing nursing shortage. In response, nursing education increasingly uses immersive technologies to accelerate training and expand clinical placement capacity. More than 68 percent of nursing schools had begun integrating generative AI and virtual reality tools into their curricula as of last year.
In North Carolina, which has one of the largest projected nursing shortfalls in the country, North Carolina Central University introduced students to virtual reality clinics two years ago. In this interview, leaders at the Historically Black College and University discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the technology.
