Headlines
What one state learned after a decade of free community college Hechinger Report A new College Promise report offers encouraging signs that the Tennessee Promise scholarship program, which now costs about $29 million a year…
Government
Alamo Colleges wins second Baldrige Award
The Alamo Colleges District (ACD) has become the first higher education institution to receive the prestigious Baldrige Award twice. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on Thursday announced that…
Advocacy quick hits: ED names colleges eligible for new ‘success’ awards
The U.S. Education Department (ED) announced this week the 200 institutions — nearly half of which are community and technical colleges — that are eligible for the new Postsecondary Success Recognition Program. Part of the…
DataPoints: How many credentials are students earning?
U.S. postsecondary educational institutions conferred nearly 5.4 million officially recognized graduate and undergraduate credentials — degrees, certificates, etc. — during the 2022-23 academic year. However, the count of credentials does not represent the number of…
…and Education for All
Community colleges’ efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), launched or ramped up in many cases during the “racial reckoning” that swept across the U.S. after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, have…
Follow-up on A-B Tech, North Carolina
Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College won’t open for classes until at least October 14 as the college and the entire North Carolina community and region continue to recover in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Helene. A-B…
Washington Watch: GAO details FAFSA missteps, mismanagement
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the watchdog for federal agencies, last week released two new reports on the troubled rollout of the 2024-25 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and coordination and leadership shortcomings…
Q&A: Young people and higher ed
The mission of Young Invincibles (YI) is to amplify the voices of young adults in the political process and expand economic opportunity for their generation. We asked Executive Director Kristin McGuire about the higher education…
Purveyors of apprenticeships?
As of 2023, 541 community or technical colleges were registered apprenticeship “sponsors,” meaning they officially administered and operated apprenticeship programs. However, only 208 of these colleges had an active apprentice. Therein lies the rub in…
State efforts provide models for Workforce Pell
As the push to extend Pell Grant eligibility to include quality short-term education training programs continues, some community college leaders say Exhibit A for federal legislators considering Workforce Pell legislation should be how much state…