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.
With higher education under fire from the Trump administration, a dozen private college presidents gathered at the National Press Club last week to discuss mounting pressure on the higher education sector.
The wide-ranging discussion was part of an annual Presidents Dinner hosted by Bucknell University, now in its ninth year. For 90 minutes, college presidents fielded questions on conflict with the federal government, artificial intelligence, graduate earnings, and more. Their answers were sometimes surprising.
For one foreign-born professor, generative AI was a way to make minor wording tweaks, mostly to improve punctuation and grammar. Another academic offloaded nearly all his writing to an AI helper before pitching an article to a leading science journal.
Somewhere in between, faculty members have turned to large language models like ChatGPT and Claude to smooth sentences, organize ideas, and condense summaries, saving time but sometimes raising uncomfortable questions. Beneath the swirling debate lies a bigger question: What does it mean to be an author in an age of AI?
Core classes are meant to nudge college students beyond the bubbles of their chosen majors and leave them more well-rounded. But the question of which courses qualify as core has prompted fierce jockeying among politicians, college presidents, and professors, especially in Republican-controlled states where many conservatives are suspicious of academia.
How colleges resolve the clashes over which courses to count will shape undergraduate experiences for years to come.
Every community college reformer wants to help more students earn degrees and get through college faster. A much-admired City University of New York support program has done that, some say brilliantly—but a recent 14-year study finds that those additional degrees haven’t translated into higher earnings.
College Board research shows that 84 percent of high schoolers had used generative artificial intelligence for school by mid-2025. And on college campuses, over 85 percent of college students report using AI in their coursework. Experts agree: no technological development has altered the admissions landscape as quickly as generative AI.
Increasingly, however, the question students ask is not whether they can use AI, but where appropriate assistance ends and outsourcing begins.
Many community college students juggle classes with work, family, and long commutes—a balancing act that requires them to fit in their studies whenever they can. Campus libraries are key to this dynamic, offering a convenient and quiet environment, not to mention technology sometimes unavailable at home.
As college libraries expand, public demand for their resources also grows, which is challenging given limited funding. Yet, these facilities continue to act as a “third space” outside the home and classroom, serving a vital role for students pulled in numerous directions at once.
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