Lumina Foundation is working to increase the share of adults in the U.S. labor force with college degrees or other credentials of value leading to economic prosperity.
For generations of college students, explosive charges of campus rape have been galvanizing events, uniting disparate groups of young people against a stubborn menace that can shatter individuals and erode faith in institutions. These watersheds are at once eerily familiar and singularly of their moments—both timelessly toxic and tragically new.
In Quincy, Massachusetts, nature is reclaiming what remains of Eastern Nazarene College, which closed last year after its enrollment plummeted and its liabilities ballooned to an unsustainable $18 million. The school is among a growing number of closed colleges sitting empty, some for years stretching into decades, as communities fight over what they should become and trustees struggle to pay off creditors.
All of this activity is happening as the country faces an urgent need for a resource that a mounting number of experts say should be built on abandoned campuses like this one: housing. But putting needed housing on empty campuses uses one problem to solve another—and it is harder than it seems.
California State University is betting that artificial intelligence will transform the workplace—and that its 470,000 students need to learn how to use it before they graduate. Last year, CSU became the nation’s first public university system to pay for students’ access to ChatGPT Edu. It has awarded over $3 million in grants for faculty to experiment with how to use AI in classrooms. Plus, several campuses now train students in how to use the technology responsibly.
Those measures are all pieces of CSU’s strategy to prepare students for a future labor market reshaped by AI. But the investments in AI have come under criticism from several CSU faculty members, and some students remain skeptical about the value of knowing how to use AI.
As the nation’s Hispanic population continues to grow, so too has the relevance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions, colleges where at least a quarter of undergraduates are Hispanic. But Trump administration cuts to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and federal funding for HSIs have diminished some of the luster of achieving the designation, particularly for institutions that once saw the threshold as a pathway to additional resources.
Now, colleges that have reached—or are approaching—the status are navigating a new landscape, deciding whether to pivot while continuing to serve the students whose enrollment helped make them HSIs in the first place.
Frankie Llerandi, 21, has been unable to land a single internship in his three years at Michigan State University. He will graduate in the spring with an economics degree and an interest in data analytics, but true adulthood seems maddeningly far away. Most of his cousins have not been able to buy a house or start a family deep into their 30s.
For many students on today's college campuses, the present looks bleak and the future uncertain at best. Their anxiety is fueling a restlessness with a national political system that they worry is no longer capable of improving their lives or no longer interested in helping.
Few students at Polk County High School, one of two high schools in the rural county near Tennessee’s border with Georgia, imagine themselves going to a four-year college. Most see four-year college as unaffordable—especially at the state’s flagship institution, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
The UT system’s president, Randy Boyd, is working to change that view. He's visiting 16 rural high schools over the course of two weeks as part of an effort to sell students on the value of a UT education—and fight the perception that a four-year degree isn’t right for rural students.
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