It’s easy to get disheartened right now.
The ratio of bad news to good is almost incalculable, even if, like me, you try to filter how much information you take in every day by spending less time on social media, never turning on TV news and covering your ears and going “nah nah nah nah” when certain people around you decide that bedtime is the perfect moment to ask if you’ve seen the latest outrage coming out of Washington (he said to no one in particular).
I’ve never been accused of being a Pollyanna, but even I feel the need for some positive signals now and then about the state of postsecondary education.
Here are a handful of recent news reports and other developments that help keep me believing that higher education can do what this moment demands: proving that it can help more Americans improve their lives.
- Georgia (finally) embraces need-based financial aid. Arguably the biggest problem facing higher education is the lingering reality represented by this statistic: Wealthier Americans are still several times likelier than their low-income peers to earn a bachelor’s degree.
There are many reasons for the fact that colleges and universities, despite their promises, often reinforce rather than overcome the nation’s wealth disparities, but our flawed method of distributing financial aid is a major one. And arguably no single action has been more responsible for driving in that direction than Georgia’s decision in 1993 to create the HOPE (Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally) scholarship program, which covered full college tuition for high-achieving graduates of the state’s high schools.
The HOPE scholarships kept more Georgia students in the state and also increased the academic competitiveness of incoming students at the state’s public universities, spurring imitators in numerous—mostly Southern—states. But the scholarships have also gone disproportionately over the years to white and Asian students and to wealthier Georgians, and the state’s poured all of its financial aid resources into the merit-based scholarships.
Until now, that is. The state’s governor, Brian Kemp, this month signed legislation to create the DREAMS Scholarship program and Georgia’s first-ever endowment for need-based financial aid. The initial investment includes $300 million for the endowment and $25 million in grants for 2026.
That sum is dwarfed by the $840 million in HOPE funds awarded in 2024, of course. But the signaling effect of the state that essentially drove the shift of state-based aid toward merit over need going in the other direction can’t be underestimated.
- AI could end up being a boon for liberal education. After reading a seemingly endless flood of news and commentary about how generative artificial intelligence and agentic AI will destroy many millions of jobs and wreak havoc on the early career arcs of college graduates and others entering the workforce for the first time, a heartening companion (rather than counter-) narrative has begun emerging.
It can be found in essays like this one from Wally Boston, president emeritus of American Public University System and board chair of the College-in-3 Exchange, and even in comments from people like the co-founder of Anthropic.
The gist, very much to oversimplify, is that instead of dooming those of us inclined toward the humanities, social sciences and arts to second-class citizenship and a lifetime of barista-hood (as the “everyone should learn to code” and skills-based hiring movements seemingly threatened to do), is that the emergence of AI will make liberal education more important than ever.
“A liberal arts education, especially one that integrates technological fluency, will retain value and remain durable amid troubling AI-driven workforce trends,” Boston writes. “Students who prioritize uniquely human capabilities as a part of their education will be prepared for decades of change.”
Some of the commentary along these lines, especially essays from humanists bruised by years of being told of their growing irrelevance amid the drift toward STEM and technical skill dominance, understandably reads a bit defensively. But the smartest and soundest analysts of the intersection of education and workforce have always understood that it’s not either-or (technical, job-ready skills vs. “durable” skills) but both-and, and that the best preparation for a first job and for a lifetime of work is a blend of active, integrative learning and practical work-place experience.
No kind of college—and perhaps not even a traditional degree program—has a lock on that sort of learning, and in an age of AI, every institution and program can—must?—strive for its own version of it.
- (Some) headway for low-income students at highly selective colleges. I questioned the country’s wealthiest and most selective colleges and universities a few weeks ago when I suggested we stop calling them “elite.” Among other things, I criticized them for disproportionately serving students from privileged backgrounds.
I stand by that high-level assertion, but several recent analyses suggest that they’re making more headway in enrolling low-income learners. A report from the Progressive Policy Institute, analyzing data from the Associated Press and its own research, finds that enrollment of students eligible for Pell Grants has increased at most of the highly selective colleges and universities examined since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision barring consideration of race in college admissions.
The report, co-written by Richard Kahlenberg, who has long advocated for affirmative action based on class rather than race, also suggests that enrollment of Black and Latino learners has declined modestly and concludes, per its title, that we’re seeing “the rise of economic affirmative action,” with universities finding “new and better paths to recovery.”
Another look at this data, by Julie J. Park, an education professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, offers a slightly different (and more critical) perspective. Economic diversity is “ticking up” at wealthy and highly selective colleges (she, despite my pleas, calls them “elite”), Park notes, “and that’s a good thing.”
But she takes issue with Kahlenberg in two ways. First, she attributes more of the increase in the number of low-income enrollees at these institutions to federal changes in how eligibility for Pell Grants is calculated.
More significantly, she questions his assertion that the increase is mostly a response to the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision. The country’s wealthiest and most selective institutions have been working for years—through initiatives like the American Talent Initiative (driven by the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program and Ithaka S+R, the latter of which I work with)—to increase socioeconomic diversity and equity. That’s “hard, often unglamorous work” that does not happen by accident, Park writes.
- An actual (bipartisan) strategy for developing American talent. I haven’t had time to dig fully into “A Nation at Risk to a Nation at Work: The Case for a National Talent Strategy,” a report last week from the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Commission on the American Workforce. (I mostly read Paul Fain and Elyse Ashburn’s typically insightful analysis in Work Shift.)
But the report’s vision of creating a coherent national strategy for developing tomorrow’s workforce—of overcoming the structural impediments, federal/state divides (and the federal government’s own divisions), and disconnects between K–12 and higher education and workforce pathways, among other things—is enticing enough that we should all pay attention to it, no matter how unlikely our current polity is to make it happen.
OK, that’s probably enough optimism for now. Back to your usual programming next time.
