Author: Reporter

Washington, D.C.—While the Trump administration certainly hasn’t stopped its war on higher ed, the attacks have lost a little of the intensity that marked the president’s first nine months in office. “It just doesn’t quite seem to have the same focus in terms of making … life miserable as it did in July of 2025,” said Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work programs at New America, speaking on a panel the think tank hosted Tuesday titled “The Fifth Pillar: Where Higher Ed Goes From Here.” “The compact that was being put forward … it kind of came and went.” The…

Listen to the article 3 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: The U.S. Department of Justice and Nebraska’s attorney general office asked a federal judge Tuesday to strike down state laws granting in-state tuition rates to certain undocumented students.  If approved, Nebraska will become the fourth state to side with the Trump administration in court to roll back these benefits.  However, the DOJ hasn’t always prevailed when states defend such policies. Just last month, a federal judge dismissed the agency’s challenge to Minnesota laws offering in-state tuition rates and scholarship eligibility…

Listen to the article 5 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Dive Brief: The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education unanimously approved a resolution Tuesday to create and enforce a screen time limit policy for students districtwide by the 2026-27 school year, marking a significant step toward curbing classroom technology use in the nation’s second-largest school system. The policy will include a ban on district-issued devices for students in early education through 1st grade, and it will require the district to set maximum daily and weekly screen time limits by grade…

Under Grad PLUS, students have been able to borrow up to the full cost of attendance. That program is ending this summer. Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | DenisKot and EyeEm Mobile GmbH/iStock/Getty Images Some borrowers with an existing Grad PLUS loan may, starting July 1, no longer be able to take out more than $257,500 in federal loans, the Education Department said this week. It’s one of multiple changes the department has made to recent policy proposals months before they take effect. Student aid experts say the change—which stemmed from an updated interpretation of the One Big…

Michael and Susan Dell have donated a total of $1 billion to the University of Texas at Austin. Emma McIntyre/Staff/Getty Images Dell Inc. founder and University of Texas at Austin alum Michael Dell and his wife, Susan, gifted $750 million to the university to create a Dell Campus for Advanced Research and Dell Medical Center, university officials announced Tuesday. This gift brings the Dells’ total contributions to the public research university to $1 billion. “UT Austin, where Dell Technologies was founded from a dorm room, has always been a place where bold ideas become real-world impact. What makes this moment so…

Shae McInnis, Daily Caller Georgetown University provides a stark example of a deeply troubling pattern of how our nation’s universities have disguised their DEI initiatives.

State-sponsored preschool programs grew by 44,000 children in 2024-25, reaching almost 1.8 million seats nationally—a record high, a new report finds. But most of that growth was concentrated in five states—California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, and Missouri—which added 52,000 new seats, while 20 states enrolled fewer students than the previous year.As many states’ preschool programs continue to lag behind pre-pandemic enrollment levels, they must expand access without sacrificing program quality to do so, concludes the annual State of Preschool report, released Wednesday by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.“It’s not enough just to reach the enrollment finish…

Rethinking Student Support In A New Age For most of its modern history, K–12 education has evaluated students through a relatively narrow lens: grades, standardized test scores, and grade-level benchmarks. These measures have value, but they have never captured the full spectrum of what a student knows, can do, or is positioned to become. The emergence of AI-driven tools in education is beginning to change that, not by replacing human judgment, but by giving educators and students a far richer picture of individual capability. Nowhere is this shift more consequential than in the area of skillset recognition and allocation. This…

by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report April 22, 2026 More than a third of the federal government’s education research budget — an estimated $289 million — could go unspent this year, according to an analysis by an advocacy group.   The Knowledge Alliance, which represents 20 private research organizations including federal contractors, analyzed public documents from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) detailing how much the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has spent or plans to spend from the $768 million that Congress appropriated for fiscal 2025. The group estimates that $289 million will not be spent and is at…

Join our zero2eight Substack community for more discussion about the latest news in early care and education. Sign up now. If state-funded preschool programs are in a race, then it’s clear that some states are approaching the finish line while others have lost momentum.  So said Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, which has just published its annual report examining state-funded preschools.  “That’s the story this year — that the race is highly uneven,” said Barnett. “Even as some states are racing toward the finish line, more states are moving in the…