Higher education

Higher education

For three decades, Chula Vista officials and state lawmakers have dreamed of bringing a public university to town. But after years of starts and stops, some saw it as little more than a pipe dream. Now though, local officials feel that vision is finally beginning to take shape. City officials have laid the groundwork for a sprawling campus on 380 acres of city-owned land in the rolling hills between East Chula Vista's suburban outskirts and the Lower Otay Reservoir.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic forced many schools to move instruction online, some students have struggled to regain or even learn the interpersonal and organizational skills they need to succeed in college. To rectify that, the University of Mary Washington created a new four-week program this fall to help incoming students hone their planning and social skills. Called LaunchPad, the program aims to help ease students' transition into higher education, provide them with life-management skills and connect them with peers and supportive staff.

The Truman Scholarship represents an appropriation of $3 million a year, and directly impacts just 50 to 60 students annually,

For the first time, the President's Awards for Employee Excellence united Cornell employees across time zones and continents, as staff gathered in the Statler Ballroom and tuned in from New York City and Qatar to celebrate the achievements and contributions of their colleagues. More than 75 employees were honored in this year's ceremony on Dec. 3, representing Cornell's Ithaca campus as well as Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City and Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar.

On November 12, 2025, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) "gutted" Video Data Bank (VDB), the essential moving-image art distributor, archive and streaming platform. The elimination of 60% of its staff, including director Tom Colley, and announcement that it would as a result of this reduction no longer acquire new work, sent shock waves through the video art community, including the hundreds of artists represented by the distributor.

It's not very encouraging. According to very recent research from Stanford's Digital Economy Lab, published in August of this year, companies that adopt AI at higher rates are hiring juniors 13% less. Another study from Harvard published in October of this year cites that early-career folks from 22-25 years old, in these same fields, are experiencing greater unemployment while senior hiring remains stable or even growing.

Students complete rigorous professional-level coursework while rotating through multiple clinical sites to gain hands-on experience. Unlike in many graduate programs, PA students cannot work during their studies, as clinical rotations are full-time and often require travel across multiple locations. Within this context, federal student aid is not optional; it is the lifeline that allows students to stay in their programs and complete the training they have worked for years to achieve.

Free Application for Federal Student Aid completion is up this year, with 26 percent of high school seniors having filled out the FAFSA by Nov. 21, according to the National College Attainment Network's annual FAFSA tracker. That's an 11.7 percent increase over the number of students who had completed the form as of the same date in 2022, the last time the form successfully launched on Oct. 1. (This year, it opened a few days early.)

According to the lawsuit, Camille Rich and her ex-husband, Stephen M. Rich, also a professor at USC Law, and now a vice dean of the law school, divorced in 2019. During the divorce process, Camille filed a Title IX complaint alleging Stephen was carrying on an affair with a student. In the lawsuit, Camille says years of dealing with a hostile work environment and the implosion of her marriage left her with PTSD, trauma she says worsened when she learned Stephen's relationship with the student was ongoing.

While doing my PhD in geotechnical engineering at a small, slow-paced university in Italy, I spent years working in near silence, unravelling the mechanics of tiny clay particles in a laboratory where I was the only student. My first postdoctoral position, in China, presented a sharp contrast, immersing me in one of the world's busiest research centres, where I studied some of the mechanics behind geohazards.

I worked up the courage to ask Tavita what hound-two protection was, Luck said. Tavita spent 20 minutes with me on the couch. I couldn't hear anything the first 10 minutes because I was too intimidated that the starting quarterback was actually taking time out of his day to teach me something. That moment stuck with me his humility, his service, his belief in lifting up the people around him. And now they're back on the same team.

With student-led campus protests on the rise and polarization intensifying on both sides of the political spectrum, the need to have students media ready is mounting. For example, in recent weeks students rallied across the U.S. because of the Trump administration's assault on higher education; protests broke out at the University of California, Berkeley, during an event held by Turning Point USA; and students at the University of Florida protested the university's deal with ICE.

The school district was the first in Contra Costa County to ink an agreement with the university, said Pittsburg Unified School District Superintendent Janet Schulze. We are very fortunate to have such a well-respected university close by, accessible for our scholars, and that also happens to be an incredibly beautiful campus, said Schulze at a memorandum of understanding signing on Monday.

An anonymous donation expected to exceed $50 million is helping cover tuition costs for medical laboratory science students at the University of Washington for the next half-century. The dean of the university's School of Medicine, Dr. Tim Dellit, made the surprise announcement Monday to about 30 grateful undergrads, who will each see two quarters' worth of tuition covered for their senior-year clinical rotations, The Seattle Times reported.

New data, however, suggests that the profession's talent crunch may be - cautiously - easing. Graduates who earned a bachelor's or master's degree in accounting fell to 55,152 in the 2023-24 academic year, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). That's a 6.6% decline from the year prior - still a drop, but a slower one than the 9.6% decline in 2022-23

Some social media users said President Donald Trump had signed legislation demoting nursing degrees from professional degree status or reclassifying nursing degrees as non-professional degrees. "The Dept. of Education just removed nursing from the list of 'professional degree' programs under the Administration's new loan rules - a move nurses say threatens the future of patient care," radio personality Angela Yee wrote Nov. 20 on Facebook.

Among the bigger stories on the latest Bloody Sunday for college football coaches was Michigan State's allegedly imminent hiring of Fitzgerald, the allegedly disgraced former Northwestern coach. The rumors swirled immediately after MSU fired Jonathan Smith, who went 9-15 in his two years in East Lansing, and Fitzgerald's hire became official on Monday. Fitzgerald's only other head coaching job to date came at Northwestern, where he went 110-101 over 17 years at his alma mater.

"worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off,"

Clearly outline program costs and the support services available to military-connected learners. Colleges should also share data on military student enrollment, completion and job outcomes, such as on a dedicated military-student web page. Streamline credit transfer policies using the American Council on Education's Military Guide as a starting point for military experience. Providing quality transfer advising can also ensure maximum allowable credits are awarded for prior service and can explain how a major program may increase or decrease transferred credits.

"My adviser said that I could graduate a semester early or triple major,"

Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, 19, was detained at Boston Logan International Airport on Nov. 20 when she tried to board a flight to surprise her family in Texas. She was sent to Honduras two days later despite a court order prohibiting the government from moving her out of Massachusetts or the United States, according to her attorney. Lopez Belloza, whose family emigrated from Honduras when she was 7, is now staying with her grandparents.

Trustees approved pay hikes and eliminated salary caps for the system's executive employees - presidents, vice chancellors and the system's chancellor, Mildred García - last week after a pay analysis presented by the consulting firm Segal found that about 75% of comparable institutions pay executives more than CSU. The new executive compensation policy also includes a performance-based pay incentive up to 15% of the executive's base salary, a more competitive retirement plan and increased housing allowances ranging from $60,000 to $80,000.

"I would not have signed this agreement without provisions ensuring that is the case," he said.

Donald Trump's administration had cut off $790m in grants in a standoff that contributed to university layoffs and the resignation in September of Northwestern's president, Michael Schill. The administration argued the school had not done enough to fight antisemitism. Under the agreement announced on Friday night, Northwestern will make the payment to the US treasury over the next three years.

Concerned that the rights of students and faculty have been violated, a national Muslim civil liberties organization has requested UC Berkeley turn over any information it has on its cooperation with a Trump administration investigation into antisemitism on campus. A California Public Records Act request was filed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations' San Francisco Bay Area office on Nov. 21 in response to the university's sharing of 160 students, staff and faculty names as part of the federal probe.

As part of the funding package, the U.S. Department of Education is ending the Grad PLUS loan program, which allows prospective graduate students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance. Instead, the agency will be instituting borrowing caps, making the maximum figures dependent on whether a student is pursuing a "professional degree." Currently, the list of the graduate programs designated as professional spans a variety of fields, from medicine, dentistry, and law to more surprising inclusions like theology.

Universities were once celebrated as places where ideas could be challenged, debated, and refined. Classrooms were meant to be arenas for civil discourse -spaces where disagreement was not only tolerated but valued. Yet that ideal is under strain. Divisions between social and political groups have deepened, and polarization-especially in the U.S.-has reached historic levels. Many instructors now hesitate to invite disagreement for fear that conversations will spiral into conflict. But learning depends on dialogue. And dialogue depends on difference.