Lumina Foundation is committed to increasing the proportion of Americans with high-quality degrees, certificates and other credentials to 60 percent by 2025.
Federally funded scientific research has become the latest target of the diversity antagonists now in control of Congress and the White House. Free speech advocates and researchers say it’s a scare tactic that undermines scientific inquiry.
Senator Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, recently released a database of more than 3,400 National Science Foundation grants he believes push “a far-left ideology.” Included in the targeted projects are efforts to help hospital patients recover from strokes, encourage women to earn computing degrees, build research consortiums among HBCUs, and preserve endangered languages.
In Maryland, the state’s flagship university in College Park is Prince George’s County’s second-largest employer. In D.C., universities gave $248 million in aid to 85,000 students. And in Virginia, more than 100,000 residents went to college in their home state.
That’s according to a new report released Tuesday by a coalition of D.C.-area universities that aims to show the breadth of higher education’s influence across the region as institutions endure greater scrutiny by the federal government and President Donald Trump.
Ella Smith understands the predicament that administrators at Colorado State University Fort Collins are facing when it comes to diversity efforts. But Smith, an organizer with the CSU Student Coalition for DEIA, says it doesn’t make sense that the school began to make changes to DEI efforts last week when most Colorado universities haven’t. Smith and other students have organized rallies, sit-ins, and other protests.
Recent directives from the Trump administration are creating immense uncertainty about how far colleges and universities should go in accepting cuts and complying with the federal government’s DEI demands—or if schools should fight back.
The Trump administration earlier this month imposed a 15-percent limit on indirect expenses paid as part of medical-research grants, which is about half of the average rate the agency previously offered. Officials call the administrative and facilities costs wasteful, but colleges and hospitals, which have sued to block the cuts, argue that the funds pay for critical needs beyond researchers’ salaries and supplies, such as hazardous waste disposal and electricity that operates critical laboratory equipment.
The fallout could ripple throughout the economy, experts say.
Just one week after the U.S. Department of Agriculture suspended its 1890 Scholars Program, the USDA website showed that it had returned. The program covers full tuition, fees, books, and housing assistance for students pursuing agricultural, food, and natural resource sciences degrees at 19 land-grant universities.
The USDA’s earlier decision rocked the HBCU community, raising concerns that students would lose the scholarship opportunity. Congresswoman Alma S. Adams called the original program suspension “a clear attack” on access to education and highlighted its role in correcting historical inequities within the land-grant system.
With a four-year college graduation rate about half the state average of 35 percent, the Inland Empire is falling behind in educating students for well-paid, professional jobs, limiting the economic prospects of the region’s youngest inhabitants.
In an effort to raise that ceiling, the University of California, Riverside, is trying to get tweens to envision their potential for a college education and career.
