Despite the flame-throwing heat in today’s public discourse, it’s actually possible to find agreement—to weigh two conflicting ideas at once. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, that is the test of a first-rate intelligence.
Higher education is getting at least three things right as colleges and universities pivot to confront some of the greatest challenges in the nation’s history.
The road to higher educational attainment runs through every Hispanic household in America. With a population of 63.7 million, Hispanics are the country’s largest minority group, and today one in every five students in higher ed is Hispanic.
No one disputes the need for more—and better—news coverage that helps us make sense of an increasingly complex world. We need local angles on national news, better statehouse reporting, and more explainers and in-depth coverage of local communities.
These are odd days for American higher education.
More and more Americans doubt the value of going beyond high school. From 2016 to 2022, the proportion of young Americans choosing to continue their education after graduating from high school dropped significantly—from 70 percent to 62 percent.
There are many reasons why only half of American adults have an education credential beyond high school, and we’re starting to see one of the biggest: Communication.
We’re always stronger together—and that includes the effort to fix our system of education and job training.
If you want progress, work for justice. That’s a paraphrase of Pope Paul VI from 1972 amid the Vietnam War. Then, the sentiment was about peace. More than 50 years later, we’re still talking about justice—but now in the context of economic mobility and the promise of American progress.
What will American colleges and universities look like now that the Supreme Court has upended affirmative action? The evidence is clear: As we’ve seen from states that had already banned race-conscious admissions prior to the court’s recent decision, enrollment for students of color will decline. We can avoid going backward only if institutions embrace new approaches for increasing student diversity and abolish advantages for the privileged, such as legacy preferences.
