Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025.
North Carolina’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities have a distinguished history of serving adult learners with a clear, caring focus on students’ needs—and now they are leading the way for others to follow.
Their efforts were bolstered in 2021, when Lumina Foundation chose five North Carolina HBCUs for its HBCU Adult Learner Initiative. Over the past two years, these institutions have significantly increased capacity, working to strengthen data infrastructure, improve onboarding processes, increase adult student services, and deepen college leaders’ understanding of adult learners.
Federal relief funds helped higher education institutions meet a host of challenges amid the pandemic, from addressing lost revenue to supporting basic student needs. How did community colleges spend these funds, and what are their priorities now that relief funding has expired?
Student advocates and policy experts from the Community College Research Center and the Public Policy Institute of California weigh in on community college spending and the distinct approaches colleges chose for applying Higher Education Emergency Relief funds on the ground.
Higher education wasn’t a top priority for Donald Trump when he first took office. The four years of his first term as president were fraught, defined by threats to international students, allegations of “radical left indoctrination,” free speech controversies, and far-reaching attacks on fundamental institutional values such as diversity.
But now that he and the GOP see attacking elite institutions and regulating colleges as winning political issues, a second term is likely to bring even more aggressive policies.
In September of last year, the Biden administration released bombshell data suggesting that numerous states have underfunded their land-grant Historically Black Colleges and Universities by more than $12 billion since 1987, violating the Second Morrill Act of 1890.
But a series of setbacks has forced students and alumni to hit reset on their reparation efforts.
Nathan Coulter, a Minnesota House lawmaker, first read about online program managers, or OPMs, in the press, and the problems associated with such companies. OPMs, which have increasingly cropped up over the last decade or so, are in charge of recruiting students into online programs—and often they’re only paid if those students actually enroll.
In May, Minnesota became the first state to ban its public colleges from striking tuition-share contracts with OPMs, effective January 2025. However, the road from bill writing to Governor Tim Walz’s signature on the law wasn’t always smooth.
Many colleges are still adjusting to the lingering impact of COVID-19 shutdowns that kept students out of physical schools at key points in their social development. As a result, some institutions are rethinking their freshman orientation programs, adding new options and doing more to help students forge relationships.
Colleges have another reason to try to get orientation right: It’s the first step to building belonging and, hopefully, convincing students to stay. That’s especially important for first-generation students and those transferring from other schools.
