Higher education

Higher education

I crossed the street near where I was living in Milan on the verge of tears. I had had enough of feeling sad, lonely, and hopeless. That surely wasn't how I expected to feel in my first year of university. The previous spring, I had thought about which undergraduate degree I wanted to pursue for months, reading about courses, tuition, and life in a new place. Since I loved writing and dreamed of becoming a journalist, studying communication seemed like the best bet.

Don moved to San Francisco in 1942 with his parents and younger brother Richard (Dick). He often joked that leaving the frigid cold of northern Minnesota and moving to beautiful San Francisco was one of the best things his parents ever did. Don was an academic student, skipping half a grade after moving to San Francisco. In 1950, he graduated from Polytechnic High School, where he was a yell leader and an editor of the high school newspaper and yearbook.

Think AI makes you smarter? Probably not, according to Saul Perlmutter, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was credited for discovering that the universe's expansion is accelerating. He said AI's biggest danger is psychological: it can give people the illusion they understand something when they don't, weakening judgment just as the technology becomes more embedded in our daily work and learning.

Graduate and professional students could soon find themselves with more limited student-loan options. Yale has a plan. The Yale School of Public Health posted on LinkedIn last week that it will "soon introduce a replacement loan option" for student-loan borrowers who are affected by President Donald Trump's plan to eliminate the Grad PLUS program as part of his "big beautiful" spending legislation.

What's becoming clear is that this divide is no longer confined to the labor market. It's now embedded in its foundation: education. When access to advanced degrees depends not on ability or workforce demand, but on whether a household can absorb six figures of upfront cost, stratification accelerates. The upper branch compounds advantage through credentialed mobility. The lower branch absorbs risk, debt, and stalled progression.

California led the nation in 2020, outlawing a debt collection practice that sometimes kept low-income college students from getting jobs or advanced degrees. But five years later, 24 of the state's 115 community colleges still said on their websites that students with unpaid balances could lose access to their transcripts, according to a recent UC Merced survey. The communications failure has been misleading, student advocates said, although overall, students have benefited from the law.

Nowhere is this skepticism louder than in my own backyard. In Silicon Valley, the "skip college" mantra has evolved from a "hot take" to accepted wisdom. Fueled by the rise of generative AI, the logic is seductive: If artificial intelligence can code, write copy, and analyze data faster than a junior employee, why spend four years and a small fortune on skills a bot will master before you graduate?

One of the best-kept secrets about DEI is that it helps men-that includes white men-get into college. If you do not work in admissions, you are likely unaware of this fact, and that's by design; one admissions officer even told The Wall Street Journal it's " higher education's dirty little secret." But it's been true for decades. Women's college enrollment surpassed men's all the way back in 1979, and the gender gap has only widened in the interim.

Back in November, and first reported by The Oklahoman, junior Fulnecky said she was asked to write a 650-word essay reacting to an article about how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender, to which she penned a paper citing the Bible and no empirical evidence. Fulnecky wrote that removing the concept of gender from society would be "detrimental" because it would put people "farther from God's original plan for humans", and described society "pushing the lie that there are multiple genders" is "demonic and severely harms American youth".

From the get-go, Morris knew that something needed to change to create more opportunities for Black scientists in his field. In 2001, as a professor at Howard University in Washington DC, he became founding director of the first PhD-granting graduate programme in atmospheric sciences at a historically Black college and university (HBCU). Between 2006 and 2018, that programme produced at least 50% of African American and 30% of Latinx PhD graduates in atmospheric sciences in the United States.

As small colleges across Massachusetts struggle to stay afloat, Hellenic College and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology is taking a different path: selling up to 25 acres of land for conservation and directing $25 million into its endowment, a move leaders say will help secure the Brookline institution's long-term future. Over the past five years, the school has successfully turned its financial situation around. As of June 30, 2025, the endowment was just over $38 million, up from $28.5 million in 2019, according to financial statements.

Prestigious colleges and universities have long been epicenters of knowledge and innovation, responsible for influencing groundbreaking ideas and research. Around the world, a select group of institutions stand out among the thousands. These schools are known for academic excellence, research, historic legacy, and world-wide reputation. Examples of these brilliant institutions include centuries-old European establishments as well as modern niche universities. They attract high-achieving students and top faculty while setting the ultimate standard for higher education on a global scale.

Expanding opportunities for collaboration accelerates scientific progress.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will close its area studies centers in 2026, faculty members within the centers told Inside Higher Ed. The six centers-the Center for European Studies, the African Studies Center, the Carolina Asia Center, the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies-are all expected to close at some point next year.

Developer Patrick Kennedy bought the site in October. File photo: Natalie Orenstein Heads up: We sometimes limit access to non-subscribers. A former Berkeley rabbi's brother-in-law is among those who was shot during the antisemitic attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Australia. (J. The Jewish News of Northern California) The UC Berkeley Chabad celebrated the first night of Hanukkah at Sather Gate while honoring the victims of the shooting.

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration will appeal a federal judge's order reversing billions of dollars in funding cuts to Harvard University, extending a standoff over the White House's demands for reforms at the Ivy League school. The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal late on Thursday in a pair of consolidated lawsuits brought by Harvard and the American Association of University Professors.

In the intent to terminate letter, obtained by multiple media outlets through public records requests, university president Lori Stewart Gonzalez wrote that Smith's "extramarital affairs," including one with an undergraduate student, brought on "disrepute, scandal and ridicule," which violated his employment agreement with the school. Gonzalez also wrote that Smith told athletic director Slade Larscheid that he "carried on an affair" while at the Ohio University Inn, where he could be observed by athletes' families, donors and others connected to the university.

The organization and its member universities were making a fortune while the players whose talents and bodies fuelled college sports got nothing, or close to it. The Southeastern Conference had just become "the first to crack the billion-dollar barrier in athletic receipts," Branch wrote, in The Atlantic. "The Big Ten pursued closely at $905 million." TV rights had driven the deluge, along with "a combination of ticket sales, concession sales, merchandise, licensing fees."

Hettinger's mounting discomfort with US higher education led her last spring to Class Action, a two-year-old grassroots network of students and recent graduates promoting a critique of elite institutions' contributions to an increasingly divided American society. At times, the group's criticism echoes the one exploited by Trump in his campaign to reshape US higher education to fit his ideological agenda.

I didn't think college was going to be an option because of how much it costs with loans and things like that,

For humanities faculty, the past five years have felt like a relentless assault on our ability to do our jobs. We have endured COVID, generative AI, budget cuts, and bitter fights over the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and Israel's war on Gaza. At times it has been a challenge to remain human, let alone humanistic: to calm the nervous system enough to read a book, refine an argument, or show up for our colleagues and our increasingly fragile students.

no doubt a challenging time for our university community.

In the United States, HBCUs educate 1.5% of all university students - yet receive only 0.9% of federal research and development (R&D) funding. Data reported in 2024 show combined HBCU endowment assets around $100,000 per student. By contrast, the ten wealthiest US universities received $2 million to $7 million per student in 2023.

Yet a pattern of uncontested opinion pieces in spaces like The Atlantic (the newly published "Accommodation Nation"), The Chronicle of Higher Education ("Are Colleges Getting Disability Accommodations All Wrong?), The Wall Street Journal ("Colleges Bend the Rules for More Students, Give Them Extra Help") and, indeed, Inside Higher Ed itself ("How Accommodating Can (Should) I Be?") speaks to the enduring cultural conflict around how the Americans With Disabilities Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act are actualized in higher education.

Many have witnessed the challenges within their neighborhoods firsthand, but for some, this need becomes a personal mission. That's precisely what Chef Aarón Sánchez has embraced through his work with Emeril Lagasse Foundation. As a chef and restaurant owner, Aarón launched a scholarship program to support young aspiring chefs pursuing formal culinary education-opening doors to mentorship, professional training, and the opportunity to transform passion into long-term careers.

"The committee did determine that the two works highlighted last year contained select portions of text previously published by another author in the introductory sections. In a separate text, a discrepancy in assignment of authorship was made. However, President Pines was not found responsible for the inclusion of such text in any of the three works, nor was he found responsible for scholarly misconduct of any kind," College Park and system officials announced last week.

At the Center for Academic Innovation, my role as the inaugural Chief Education Solutions Officer (or CESO) is to open a new learning innovation horizon for the Center and help U-M achieve its next tier of educational impact. I do this by creating sustainable strategic partnerships that enable us to serve workforce and talent development needs of external organizations.

A senior Texas A&M University System official testing a new artificial intelligence tool this fall asked it to find how many courses discuss feminism at one of its regional universities. Each time she asked in a slightly different way, she got a different number. "Either the tool is learning from my previous queries," Texas A&M system's chief strategy officer Korry Castillo told colleagues in an email, "or we need to fine tune our requests to get the best results."