	Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025.

September 6, 2023

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Photo: Camilla Forte

The Newest Benefit at Top Companies: Private College Admissions Counseling

Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report/GBH News/NPR

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More top companies are providing access to admissions counselors as a benefit to their employees. These employers say that offering private coaching for college admissions as a perk—which typically costs around $140 an hour—is a way to recruit and keep workers in a tight labor market with record-low job satisfaction and to prevent the stress of the admissions process from cutting into productivity.

Critics contend it’s just another advantage for wealthier parents over lower-income ones.

Photo: Christopher Tyree

Erasing the 'Black Spot': How a Virginia College Expanded by Uprooting a Black Neighborhood

Brandi Kellam and Louis Hansen, Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism/ProPublica

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Sixty-plus years ago, the white leaders of Newport News, Virginia, wielded their eminent domain power to seize the core of the thriving Black community of Shoe Lane to build a college.

The school has been gobbling up the remaining houses ever since.

Attacks on DEI Jeopardize College-Employer Partnerships

Kermit Kaleba and Kysha Wright Frazier, Inside Higher Ed

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Recent state government actions attacking diversity efforts at public colleges and the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling are hindering partnerships between community colleges and employers and their mission to create more racially equitable opportunities and outcomes for learners and workers of color.

In this essay, Lumina Foundation's Kermit Kaleba and Kysha Wright Frazier of the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce argue that we cannot allow government officials who are unready or unwilling to wrestle with past and current inequities to undermine these essential college-business relationships.

Photo: Rachel Woolf

Many Colorado Students Juggle College and Parenting. Often They Feel Like Outsiders on Campus.

Jason Gonzales, Chalkbeat Colorado

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Deysi Parga Macias faced a dilemma last fall in the first week of classes at the University of Colorado Boulder. She couldn’t find daycare for her son, Ramiro, and her grandparents, who were supposed to watch him, were sick.

Macias, now a 20-year-old junior at CU Boulder, tries her best to separate parenting and coursework on campus. Often, however, she feels that her fellow students can’t relate to her life. Many student-parents express the same sense of isolation.

The Great Admissions Redesign

Lumina Foundation

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To transform how potential students get into college, Lumina Foundation is launching a new funding effort to find and support the best ideas on how to simplify the admissions process.

Applications for The Great Admissions Redesign are due October 6, 2023. You can learn more about eligibility, criteria, and application questions here.

What the Public Really Thinks About Higher Education

Eric Kelderman, The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Here’s a story. Higher education is as valuable as it has ever been. Here’s another story: Confidence and trust in higher ed are fast eroding.

To work in higher education is to worry over the space between those two storylines. What happens to a public good when much of the public stops thinking it’s good? A new survey examines higher ed’s public-perception challenge—and the solutions to it.

HUMAN WORK AND LEARNING

Time ≠ Learning: Tim Knowles on Scrapping the Carnegie Unit

Beth Hawkins, The 74

The Community College Has Become the Nation’s Engine for Job Training

Terry O'Banion, The EvoLLLution

Colleges Classes, Money Now Available for Those Who Want to Work at Intel Plant

Eileen McClory, The Journal-News

The Math Revolution You Haven’t Heard About

Daniel Mollenkamp, EdSurge

'I Didn't Really Learn Anything': COVID Grads Face College

KGAN

Essay: College Students: School Is Not Your Job