Delaying, dropping out of, or skipping college altogether have long been popular in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison have all done some version of it. As artificial intelligence hype draws young founders to San Francisco, programs at companies like Palantir Technologies are rolling out anti-college initiatives for high school graduates. Meanwhile, startup entrepreneurship programs like Y Combinator skew increasingly younger, as taking a gap year has become less contrarian and more mainstream for aspiring technocrats.
When a gunman began firing inside an academic building on the Brown University campus, students didn't wait for official alerts warning of trouble. They got information almost instantly, in bits and bursts - through phones vibrating in pockets, messages from strangers, rumors that felt urgent because they might keep someone alive. On Dec. 13 as the attack at the Ivy League institution played out during finals week, students took to Sidechat, an anonymous, campus-specific message board used widely at U.S. colleges, for fast-flowing information in real time.
Each summer, the University of California, Berkeley's College of Environmental Design (CED) becomes an intensive laboratory for architectural, landscape, and urban exploration. Through two complementary programs-Design + Innovation for Sustainable Cities (DISC) and the Summer Institutes-Berkeley offers an immersive curriculum grounded in disciplinary rigor, intentional exchange, and a shared institutional culture. Together, these programs reflect CED's long-standing multidisciplinary structure, with architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, and urban design thriving and collaborating under one roof.
Amid uncertainty about what the future may bring for international higher education, institutions are investing in new recruitment strategies or looking at new ways to reach international students, according to international education experts. That may involve recruiting more from countries that weren't as affected by visa delays, forging new partnerships with international recruiting agencies or launching new branch campuses to reach international students in their home countries.
Not too long ago, in the time before they became chiefs, our VPs would have been called deans, directors or, in the case of our chief financial officer, treasurer. (Indeed, some retain a dean title along with their vice presidential one-the vice president of student affairs and dean of students, or the vice president and dean of admission and financial aid.) I respect and value the work that they do, regardless of their title. I know them and am aware of their dedication to the college and the well-being of its students, faculty and staff.
The survey measured belonging by asking students to rate their agreement with the statement "I feel that I am a part of [school]" on a five-point scale, where 1 means strongly disagree and 5 means strongly agree. Students who rated their sense of belonging in their second year one step higher on the five-point scale than they did in their first year-such as moving from neutral to agree-were 3.4 percentage points more likely to graduate within four years.
This year, when we announced that Hostos Community College will open a new center for its life sciences and allied health programs in the historic Bronx General Post Office building, it was a vivid symbol of CUNY's trajectory over the past year. The expansion is just one example of the story of 2025 at CUNY, a year defined by growth and innovation to meet the evolving needs of our students and city.
Toby Arquette, vice president for strategic growth, marketing and digital transformation at St. Ambrose University in Iowa, will become president of Columbia College, headquartered in Missouri, starting March 1. Matt Baker, vice president of student affairs at Northwest Missouri State University, has been named president of Emporia State University in Kansas, effective March 2. Scott Beardsley, dean of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, has been named president of the university, effective Jan. 1.
Ray Jayawardhana, an astrophysicist and provost of Johns Hopkins University, will become the next president of Caltech - one the nation's wealthiest and most elite universities - as it enters a second year of challenging terrain amid Trump administration cuts to scientific research. The campus' board of trustees announced the appointment Tuesday morning after a months-long search to replace President Thomas F. Rosenbaum, who said in April that he would step down.
The workers' uniforms are smudged with stains earned underneath a car, wrench in hand. Their repair garage teems with an array of inoperable vehicles and twisted metal. One car's wheels have been removed; another sports a mangled fender. Here, the labor is free - and the mechanics are earning college credits. Los Angeles Trade-Technical College offers the largest community college auto repair program in the region, turning out graduates ready to work at dealership service centers, independent shops and the fleet departments of municipalities,
The college admissions process seems more tedious, nebulous and overwhelming than ever ... which is why one college admissions expert is breaking down high school extracurriculars by the numbers. Kate Stone, founder of Kate Stone Prep, says that not all extracurricular activities are created equal. "Anything that thousands of kids are doing is always going to be less helpful for you," Stone tells TODAY.com. It's not that you should completely avoid popular extracurriculars, though. "It just means that you have to bring something creative or differentiated to it," she says. "Do the common activity in an uncommon way." On an Instagram reel that has earned almost 3 million views since it was posted in November, Stone ranks a handful of popular high school activities according to their value on an application for a top tier university. Stone goes into detail about what her rankings meant and gives her top tips for students looking at applying to elite colleges.
Lowering college costs, boosting accountability and reforming accreditation will likely be at the top of congressional Republicans' to-do list for 2026. But as public approval ratings for President Trump continue to decline and midterm elections loom, higher education policy experts across the political spectrum say congressional conservatives could be running out of time. The push for more affordable higher education has been gaining momentum for years,
Given the importance of local considerations, there are few universal policy prescriptions that can be recommended with confidence. Sadly, this complexity was overlooked in Saul Geiser's recent Inside Higher Ed essay entitled " Why the SAT Is a Poor Fit for Public Universities." My position is not that all, or even any, public universities should require standardized test scores. In fact, I share Geiser's view that a university's "mission shapes admission policy."
The competition for graduate jobs is not just all because of AI filling out forms or taking away jobs. It's also because of the stalling of our economy and it's also because of a surfeit of graduates. So I feel that that simple promise [of a good job] has now become conditional on Which university did you go to? What course did you take?
As Albert Einstein wrote elegantly about our experience of time and space, he also devoted his days to the process of social transformation: the question of how one world becomes another. He was concerned about not just the perils of progress-including modern science's role in the creation of apocalyptic weapons-but also the promise of a more just society. From his very first years in the United States, Einstein wrote powerfully in opposition to American segregation, drawing
Founder of the Migration Story, India Shubham Sabar, 19, was working at a construction site in Bengaluru, capital of India's southern Karnataka state, when he received a phone call from his teacher back home, hundreds of miles away in Odisha state, telling him he had passed the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Neet) India's tough admissions examination for undergraduate medical and dental colleges.
University careers advisers are used to steering fresh-faced students towards the labour market but they are now increasingly seeing graduates in their 40s and 50s looking for help to revive their careers. More UK universities are now giving their graduates lifelong access to campus careers services, including advice with job applications and interview preparation as well as helping to find new opportunities for those who feel stuck.
