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.
Much like dual enrollment, the “college-in-three” movement has emerged with broad goals of streamlining and reducing the cost of college, with individual institutions taking a variety of approaches to accomplish those goals. In some programs, credit hours are replaced with work-connected learning experiences or competencies; other programs focus on teaching what’s essential to a particular career-connected field and cut the courses often seen as padding.
But what students learn in these programs, and whether they lead to career success and graduate admissions, is still unclear. And the distinction between essential and extraneous, it turns out, is subjective.
As colleges and universities navigate the changing role of artificial intelligence in the classroom, many have implemented broad policy changes—ranging from restricting AI use to fully integrating it into coursework.
However, one perspective is often missing from the conversations: the students themselves.
The movement to increase student success at community colleges has never been short on ideas. For two decades, hundreds of institutions have reshaped what student progress looks like and the meaning of institutional responsibility. Faculty and administrators have redesigned developmental education, built guided pathways that put students at the center of their institutions, and launched strategies to improve early momentum results so that institutions and students know if they are on track to completion.
In this op-ed, Achieving the Dream's Karen Stout offers her perspective on the next phase of the student success movement and why she believes it will require something different from innovation by invention.
At the beginning of her junior year, Arianna Brandt's high school counselor encouraged her to take advantage of dual credit courses, which were offered by Chicago's Michele Clark High School and would provide her with free college credit.
Students at Chicago Public Schools took more than 13,000 dual-credit classes last year, more than double the number pre-pandemic. The significant investment in dual credit is winning praise for sending students to college better prepared and helping them avoid crippling debt—a boon especially for low-income students of color like the ones Clark serves. But the expansion hasn’t always gone smoothly.
Over the past decade, California State University campuses pursued an ambitious plan to encourage students to complete their degrees faster and boost overall graduation rates.
Now the system is making a bold promise: Every student will graduate with a clear path to a career or graduate school. It's also planning changes to make the system’s degree programs more career-focused, possibly by phasing out some majors.
Students across the globe have now received their admissions results from the Ivy League and select top schools. In the lead-up to this admissions cycle, the landscape of elite higher education faced a new wave of changes, resulting from ongoing sparring between the Trump administration and Ivy League schools, as well as immigration-related policies that have threatened international student admissions.
Here’s what this year's results reveal about elite college admissions today—and what younger students should know as they prepare for upcoming admissions cycles.
