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.
Paul LeBlanc is considered a social innovator in higher education—and the individual who led the transformation of Southern New Hampshire University from a small regional institution with several thousand students to one of the largest nonprofit providers of online higher education in the country. In his latest book, Reclaiming Purpose: The University in an AI World, he presents a vision of higher education that shifts from knowledge transfer to teaching students how to develop the human skills that will set them apart from artificial intelligence in an evolving workforce.
In this interview, LeBlanc explains what his prediction could mean for faculty and institutional leaders, as well as why he believes higher ed must take a leading role in ethical AI design.
A calculus class may not be the first place you’d think to find oral exams. But Robin Pemantle is a longtime fan. A math professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Pemantle believes that having conversations with students about math is a uniquely valuable way to assess what they grasp and how they think.
Pemantle’s approach is straightforward. He asks students to work out problems on a board, talking through the solutions as they go. His goal is not to trip them up but to draw them out. If they are nervous, he encourages them. If they are confused by a question, he adjusts. When they make minor errors, he helps them course-correct. For Pemantle, it's not just about teaching calculus. He’s teaching students how to learn in an AI-dominated world.
More than 870,000 first-year applicants who used Common App last year reported that they experienced at least one significant home-based responsibility or extenuating life circumstance, such as caregiving or working to help pay family bills. Many of those students, representing about 57 percent of the 1.5 million applicants, clicked several boxes, according to new data by Common App.
The information, which comes from Common App’s newly added responsibilities and circumstances question, may help admissions officers get a fuller picture of an applicant’s life, illuminating how students spend their time outside school and how that might affect their grades and ability to participate in traditional extracurricular activities.
In 2020, the eight Ivy League colleges and universities in the United States waived the standardized testing requirement for admissions. Slowly, the institutions have brought back ACT and SAT requirements, saying test scores are in fact an indicator of student success. Columbia University, the last of the holdouts, recently announced applicants for the Fall of 2027 will be required to submit test scores.
Columbia's reversal doesn't exist in isolation. It lands amid a broader, increasingly political reckoning over what test-optional admissions policies cost the students they were meant to help.
It’s the question just about every parent has when their kids start looking at colleges: How much is the education really going to cost? More than a dozen colleges advertise a $100,000 price tag, and others are on the cusp, even though few students pay that amount. Meanwhile, an increasing number of colleges are offering some families free tuition. Still, financial aid can be confusing because every school calculates the final cost differently and students don’t see that until they are admitted, says Phillip B. Levine, a professor of economics at Wellesley College.
In this interview, Levine offers his thoughts on why prices vary so much in higher education, why merit aid is a distraction, and the thinking behind tuition discounts.
Lloyd Duman has tried to retire twice. The former North Idaho College provost hopes his third attempt will be successful. Duman kept returning to NIC after retiring because he saw the opportunity to stabilize the college as it nearly lost accreditation and faced fears of closure. Stopping that “became his mission,” Duman says. NIC returned to full accreditation this spring. And, true to his word, he retired in June.
Duman and his replacement, Gwen Cash-James, share a key similarity: They both took nontraditional paths to and through college, similar to the students NIC serves.
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