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.
A Black History Month event, canceled. A lab working to fight hunger, shuttered. Student visas revoked, then reinstated, uncertain for how long. Opportunities for students pursuing science careers, fading.
The first six months of the Trump administration have brought a hailstorm of changes to the nation’s colleges and universities. While the president’s faceoffs with Harvard University and Columbia University have generated the most attention, students throughout the country report changes to campus clubs and activities, diminished research opportunities, and fears for international students’ safety.
The story of Santa J. Ono, an aspiring college leader who renounced diversity, equity, and inclusion and walked away with nothing, has taken on an allegorical quality. His experience strikes at the heart of the most pressing moral and practical questions confronting higher education today: What do we stand for? What are we willing to abandon? And how much will ever be enough?
In the days since Ono’s botched appointment at the University of Florida, academics across the country have been wrestling with what this episode says about higher education’s precarious trajectory in the current political environment.
Public investment in farming and higher education coexisted for a significant portion of the 20th century, supporting the productive middle class in America.
That partnership is now frayed. Today, both systems often ask young people to go heavily into debt—without the public backstops that once made those risks reasonable.
The boxload of typewritten notes, yellowed newspaper clippings, audio cassettes, and videotapes might well have been museum pieces for the group of Gen Z students visiting the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office.
From the technology of yesteryear, a grisly story emerged: the 1990 double murder of a woman and her adult son in Whiteford Township near the Michigan-Ohio line. And for some University of Michigan-Dearborn students—unlocking the Whiteford Township homicides—the course materials were all in that cardboard box.
More students and workers are seeking artificial intelligence literacy—whether they want jobs in tech or in other industries affected by AI. Fundamental to this skill attainment are community college AI programs, which offer affordable, accessible, and employer-aligned training to upskill incumbent workers and educate the next generation of talent.
But AI education is still the Wild West. Colleges must navigate hype traps, upskill faculty and staff, help students understand career pathways around AI, and go the extra mile to ensure their courses are aligned with the needs of nascent and ever-changing clusters of industries, occupations, and skills.
President Donald Trump is trying to remake the global economy. He’s overseeing a much more restrictive and aggressively enforced immigration policy. Artificial intelligence is, potentially, about to change everything. And in the past five years, everyone has lived through a pandemic and serious inflation for the first time in generations.
In this interview, 13 young people—12 relatively recent college graduates and one rising college senior—share their thoughts on navigating the rocky surface of all this change in America.
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