Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025. | Jessica Blake, Inside Higher Ed SHARE: Facebook • LinkedIn As Donald Trump returns to the White House, academics have expressed a catalog of concerns about the vulnerability of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; student loan forgiveness policies; and academic freedom. However, policy experts say that certain executive actions could help colleges' finances, despite the president-elect's expected increase in academic scrutiny. | WBUR SHARE: Facebook • LinkedIn More than 4.2 million young people in this country are considered "disconnected" youth—16- to 24-year-olds who are not in school, college, or the workforce. That's more than one Chicago and one Houston. In Detroit—where youth disconnection rates are the second highest in the country—nonprofit leaders are experimenting with new ways to bring young people back into the fold. | Jessica Priest, The Texas Tribune SHARE: Facebook • LinkedIn For some public higher education observers, the departure of Jay Hartzell, president of the University of Texas at Austin, is indicative of how difficult it has become to be a university president amid growing political pressures. In Texas, navigating the state’s ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion offices has been particularly challenging, with Texas GOP leaders criticizing universities for not doing enough to enforce it and students and faculty criticizing university administrators for going too far with its implementation. | Emily Tate Sullivan, EdSurge SHARE: Facebook • LinkedIn A typical career trajectory in early care and education might follow like this: start as an assistant teacher in a classroom, eventually gain the experience to move up to lead teacher, and if you’re ambitious and able, one day become the assistant director, director, or even owner of a program. On paper, it seems reasonable. Each role, over time, equips the educator to step into the next one, right? Not necessarily. | Zach Montague, The New York Times SHARE: Facebook • LinkedIn The U.S. Department of Education announced this week that it had cancelled student loans for more than 150,000 borrowers, bringing the total number of Americans who have had their loans forgiven under President Joe Biden to more than five million. The Biden administration reached the milestone even though many of its more ambitious plans to overhaul the nation’s system for administering student debt faltered over the past two years. | Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report SHARE: Facebook • LinkedIn While much attention has been focused on how enrollment declines are putting private, nonprofit colleges out of business at an accelerating rate—at least 17 of them in 2024—public universities and colleges are facing their own existential crises. State institutions nationwide are being merged and campuses shut down, many of them in places where there is already comparatively little access to higher education. Case in point: Vermont. | Daniel Dolan and France Hoang, The EvoLLLution |
Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed |
Mark Schneider, American Enterprise Institute | Joshua Kim, Learning Innovation | Courtney Tanner, The Salt Lake Tribune |
Taylor Telford, The Washington Post |
Kathryn Palmer, Inside HIgher Ed | Hannah Gross, NJ Spotlight News |
Angel Reyna and Frank Wu, Diverse Issues in Higher Education | Eric Hoover, The Chronicle of Higher Education |
Laura Hancock, Cleveland Plain Dealer | Carolyn Gentle-Genitty and Brooke Barnett, USA Today | Riley Board, Portland Press Herald |
Anthony Izaguirre, The Associated Press | Brian Eason and Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun |
Ben Unglesbee, Higher Ed Dive | American Indian College Fund |
The Chronicle of Higher Education | Student Borrower Protection Center |
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville | |