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.
As their enrollment and financial challenges increase, more colleges may need to consider merging with other institutions—or forming partnerships with them in alternative ways. Acquiring another college can help shore up an institution’s finances for the future. Acquisition can also prevent an institution from having to close. But mergers also carry risks—culture clashes, loss of institutional identity, and alumni feeling alienated. Many of these efforts struggle—or never get completed—because the merging colleges do not align on key issues.
In this interview, three experts offer insight about the obstacles that often prevent more mergers from happening or succeeding.
On the ground at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, faculty and researchers are working on solutions to the various challenges facing today's farmers while concurrently preparing students for the future of agriculture. The university’s fledgling major, agricultural systems technology, blends hard science, data science, engineering, and management.
It’s designed to prepare students for what’s known as "precision agriculture," which uses high-tech approaches to farming that can improve both efficiency and environmental impacts. Along with traditional training, this agriculture degree requires an understanding of data science to enable analysis of information from satellite imagery and myriad sensors that collect details on soil health, crop growth, and water usage.
Jair Solis recently became his family’s first-ever college graduate. It’s a milestone that had once felt unobtainable because of the long-lasting fallout from his dad’s detention in an immigration facility. With the return of the federal administration that once detained his father, more than 100,000 children—most of them U.S. citizens—have had their parents detained or deported, according to a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution.
On this podcast, Solis reflects on how his family’s experiences with the immigration system shaped his life and his educational journey.
For the 40 percent of all U.S. undergraduates who begin their academic journey at a community college, well-being investments are not a luxury. They are a lifeline, a path to a brighter future, and a means of emancipation from intergenerational poverty. However, community colleges have historically been the last sector of higher education to invest in comprehensive, integrated well-being offices, programs, and services and the last to commit to dedicated, senior-level well-being leadership positions.
A growing body of research makes the case for a structural solution: the senior well-being officer, or SWO.
Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence arrives at a moment of profound uncertainty about the future of human work and human purpose. What does it mean to live a meaningful life in an age of intelligent machines? What obligations do societies have to workers who have lost their jobs because of technology? And how do we ensure that innovation strengthens humanity instead of diminishing it?
The Pope is right to frame artificial intelligence as more than a technical challenge: At its core, it’s a moral one. Pope Leo XIV reminds us that the true measure of any economy is not how quickly it produces but whether it helps people flourish, writes Lumina Foundation's Jamie Merisotis in his latest column for Forbes.
For the past few years, declarations of the college degree's demise have flooded the headlines. COVID-19 exacerbated this trend by accelerating a decline in college interest. Rising tuition costs, student debt, and the AI jobs hysteria only add to this narrative.
But the data, and the broader reality of how careers and life actually unfold, tell a different story. Yes, the labor market for recent graduates has become more competitive. Yet college graduates still consistently outperform non-graduates in employment, earnings, and long-term career resilience. More importantly, a college degree cultivates the ultimate asset in a rapidly changing economy: the ability to think critically. This includes understanding AI, as those who do will be better positioned to shape its ethical and responsible use.
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