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.
Belinda Needham submitted a grant application to the National Institutes of Health in October. The agency promptly informed her that it would review her grant application at an upcoming meeting. But when President Donald Trump took office, the meeting got taken off the calendar, and nine months after submitting, Needham still has no timeline for when her proposal will be evaluated. It hasn’t been rejected—just siphoned out of the peer-review pipeline into an administrative no man’s land.
Needham's experience showcases just one of the unprecedented ways in which the NIH, the world’s premier funder of biomedical research, is upending American science.
The U.S. Department of Education recently made a subtle change to Biden-era regulations that were designed to ensure for-profit colleges provide quality programs. Under the adjusted policy, for-profit colleges can now count proceeds from online courses that are not eligible for federal aid toward their 90-10 calculation, an accountability measure that requires 10 percent of a college’s total revenue to be from non-federal sources.
Opponents of the change say the new policy will likely have minimal consequences, but they are alarmed by how it came to be: They worry the Trump administration is finding new shortcuts to advance its political priorities without public feedback instead of going through the rule-making process to amend the regulations.
The domestic policy law signed by President Donald Trump will have major implications on how students in California and across the country pay for college, with analysts describing it as the most consequential federal higher education legislation in decades.
The most significant changes will impact access to federal loans and borrower repayment plans. The law also amends Pell Grant eligibility standards, expands qualified expenses for 529 college savings accounts, and is expected to raise the endowment tax on several private universities.
As an AmeriCorps-funded fellow in the American Connection Corps program in Nebraska, Oliver Borchers-Williams helped turn a $4 million American Rescue Plan Act allocation into an $11 million investment that ultimately brought broadband to thousands of homes.
Before the Trump administration slashed AmeriCorps in April, members worked across communities, both urban and rural, in all 50 states. These members represented a vital talent pool, especially in rural and post-industrial regions, overlooked towns, and smaller cities—locales that have experienced generations of skilled youth leaving for more “dynamic states” and major metro areas.
More than 200 Harvard University students have signed an open letter calling on their institution to resist what they characterize as unreasonable federal demands, as the Trump administration claims progress toward reaching an agreement with the prestigious university.
Harvard Students for Freedom, an unrecognized student organization established this spring, organized the letter that garnered 197 public signatures and 29 anonymous ones. The group extended the petition to all current graduates and undergraduates across the university.
A growing body of research shows that college-educated law enforcement officers tend to use less force and exercise better decision-making. In California, that mindset became the impetus for raising education standards of incoming law enforcement officers amid calls for police reform following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
The new bill would have required prospective police officers 18 to 25 years old to earn a bachelor’s degree before entering the police force. That was 2020. Today, with a widespread shortage of police officers in California, lawmakers are once again debating these reforms.
.jpg?width=500&upscale=true&name=istockphoto-2198899523-612x612%20(1).jpg)
.jpeg?width=500&upscale=true&name=images%20(2).jpeg)
