Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025.
Brenda Olazava, 39, didn’t know if she’d be able to stay enrolled at Los Angeles City College this semester. She found out she was no longer going to receive a cash benefit from the county for low-income families, which helped pay her rent while she studied for her associate degree in psychology and sociology and worked part-time at the front desk of the college’s counseling department.
Then she got an email from the Los Angeles Community College District inviting her to apply for a new form of aid, a guaranteed basic income program called Building Outstanding Opportunities for Students to Thrive, or BOOST.
Students, families, financial aid counselors, and others are optimistic: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid is now accessible to all users and operating efficiently.
Last week's announcement by officials at the U.S. Department of Education marks a pivotal moment in the continuing FAFSA saga. Throughout the 2024-25 cycle, technical errors and processing delays stymied students, parents, and college officials, injecting months of chaos into the enrollment process. Now, everyone with a stake in the federal-aid system is hoping to avoid a sequel.
President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of a close ally and the co-chair of his transition team indicates that education could be a major priority of his administration, even though it did not feature prominently in the 2024 presidential campaign.
Linda McMahon, the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, is a leading financial backer Trump has been close to for decades. She's also chair of the board of the little-known America First Policy Institute. The institute has issued a detailed education policy agenda that is likely to serve as a guide for McMahon, and the Trump administration in general, should she be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
The U.S. Department of Education has been under heightened scrutiny over the past few years, with the rocky rollout of the simplified version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the legal battle for student loan forgiveness under the Biden administration.
It’s once again on the chopping block as former President Donald Trump has proposed dissolving the agency when he enters the White House for a second term. Here’s what eliminating the Education Department might mean for K-12 and higher education.
The term “youth apprenticeship” seems relatively straightforward, but trying to understand exactly what it means can often feel like a dizzying exercise in semantics. Does it refer to youth in Registered Apprenticeship? Pre-apprenticeship? Non-registered apprenticeships designed for high school students?
The answer, in some ways, is all of the above. That’s because, in the United States, there is no federal legal definition of “youth apprenticeship.” In the absence of that definition, states are stepping in to create their own, and, without federal standards to shape them, these definitions often look quite different from one another.
U.S. colleges and universities have faced a number of challenges in recent years, including the new issue-ridden Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the 2023 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to ban affirmative action on campuses.
And then there's freshman enrollment, which declined at colleges for the first time since 2020, with a five percent drop in first-year students. But the number of applicants and first-year students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities offers a different picture. Many HBCUs, in fact, have reason to revel, with some seeing record increases. What’s behind their success?
