Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025.
Internships can be a powerful vehicle for work-based learning and professional development for college students, but securing a paid internship is something only a fraction of students accomplish.
A September report from the Business-Higher Education Forum found there are not enough internships available for students who want them nationally, and a new brief from California Competes shows similar gaps among students at California public institutions.
When The Oglethorpe Echo, a now 151-year-old weekly newspaper, found itself on the brink of shutting down, William H. NeSmith, 72, stepped in with a plan to save it. Students from the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication would report the news as part of their coursework, and the paper—along with all of Oglethorpe County—would become their learning laboratory.
Three years after NeSmith staged his intervention, the Echo is still rolling. Even more fundamentally, this partnership offers a template for how colleges can bolster all kinds of important institutions in their communities, not just newspapers—and find new ways to prepare students for the workforce in the process.
For Gen Z, college represents an opportunity to pivot from being defined by the traumatic events that shaped their childhoods—the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic—to creating real change. These individuals are idealists—or as a McKinsey report calls them: socially progressive, “inclusive consumers.”
To create the changes they seek, they’ll need education. And against a rising tide of higher-ed skepticism over cost and economic outcomes, colleges and universities must define themselves with the authenticity and transparency this generation demands, writes Lumina Foundation's Jamie Merisotis in this op-ed.
As citizens vote to choose the nation’s 47th president, many will be exercising that right for the first time.
Some high school seniors and college freshmen—among the eight million newly eligible to vote this year—will be casting ballots at the same time as they’re taking classes about voting rights, elections, and democracy. These young voters could have a monumental impact on the 2024 presidential election, and research shows that what teens learn in class about voting plays a key role in determining if or how they show up to the polls.
The number of Black men enrolled at Historically Black Colleges and Universities is the lowest it's been since 1976. Black men now currently account for only 26 percent of the students at HBCUs—back in 1976, that figure was 38 percent.
In this interview, Calvin Hadley, assistant provost for academic partnerships and student engagement at Howard University, discusses what's lost when Black men don't attend HBCUs and how he is trying to close this gap.
Dual enrollment is exploding. During the 2022-23 school year, nearly 2.5 million high school students took college classes, simultaneously earning high school and college credits. That’s up from 1.5 million students in the fall of 2021 and roughly 300,000 students in the early 2000s. Figures released last week show that dual enrollment grew another seven percent in the fall of 2024 from a year earlier, even as the number of traditional college freshmen fell.
But alongside this meteoric rise of students and resources, it’s not clear that an early taste of higher education encourages more students to go to college who wouldn’t have otherwise. And it’s still hard to tell if the credits are helping students get through college any faster.
