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.
DeRionne Pollard is working to raise the profile of community colleges. The new president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges believes two-year institutions are key to the country’s innovation and national security, in part because they enjoy increasingly rare bipartisan support, but their outsize role too often goes overlooked.
Pollard served as president at three institutions—Nevada State University, Montgomery College, and Las Positas College—before taking the helm at AACC last October. In this interview, she discusses her hopes and goals for community colleges in the years to come and the challenges facing the sector.
The U.S. Department of Education is rolling out a new federal test, one that most colleges and universities will eventually have to pass. The test is the "Do No Harm" provision of the One Big Beautiful Bill, which Congress passed in 2025. Do No Harm works like this: If a program's graduates don't earn more than someone who never went to college, that program and its students could lose access to federal student loans.
Education reporter Cory Turner explains how the Do No Harm program will work and the impact it might have.
College scholarships aimed at students of color, women, and others are becoming less common in the face of lawsuits, legal complaints, and pressure from the Trump administration. Conservative activists who have filed lawsuits and complaints to stop colleges, nonprofits, and others from using race and ethnicity as factors in scholarships argue that the financial assistance amounts to illegal discrimination.
But many student advocates argue that diversity scholarships are still needed to address generations of discrimination and improve access to higher education.
For decades, parents of undergraduate students could rely on the Parent PLUS loan program as the ultimate financial safety net, borrowing up to their child’s full Cost of Attendance to close any remaining tuition gaps left by scholarships and other grant aid, like Pell grants.
Now, under new federal frameworks, Parent PLUS loans are strictly capped at $20,000 per academic year for each dependent student, with a hard aggregate lifetime limit of $65,000 per student. While the policy was designed to curb predatory multi-generational debt, its implementation has exposed a structural vulnerability in higher education financing and created a real risk that families could reach a junior-year wall, where they run out of funding before a student finishes school.
The U.S. Department of Education released several regulatory packages recently as it raced to implement the education-related provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act before July 1. Those regulations introduce new federal loan limits and create an earnings test that college programs must pass to retain eligibility for federal student loans, among other measures.
With those regulatory packages now complete, the agency is looking to carry out the Trump administration’s other education-related policy priorities. That includes targeting race-focused education programs via regulations.
A federal appeals panel has struck down a significant chunk of Ron DeSantis’s so-called "Stop Woke Act," delivering another rebuff to the Republican Florida governor’s efforts to stifle free speech in higher education.
In a scathing order, judges ruled by a 2-1 majority that the higher education component of the law—which prevented college and university professors from teaching or sharing thoughts on concepts of race and gender—breached the free expression rights guaranteed under the First Amendment.
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