Sara Hebel

Our nation’s two-year colleges often get little attention in national conversations about higher ed. And yet they enroll more than one-third of the undergraduates in America.

A new book probes what colleges can do to change public sentiment. “Universities are not doing a great job of communicating what they are doing,” says Stephen Gavazzi, one of the authors and a human sciences professor at Ohio State.

We started a new project back in June focused on covering the connections between education and work. It’s a topic getting a lot of attention in public-policy circles but not one that’s regularly covered on the ground. Here’s what’s struck us so far.

The wealth gap between historically Black colleges and predominantly white ones is staggering. The top 10 richest universities have endowments totaling $200 billion. The 10 richest HBCUs? Just $2 billion. And the combined endowments for every single HBCU is just $3.9 billion.

Colleges educate students, and they produce knowledge. But they also play other important roles in society that aren’t regularly examined. Our reporters have shed light over the past months on those other aspects of colleges’ public missions.

Instead of going to college in a pandemic, QuangHuy Bui became a barber. As colleges turn campus life back on this fall, will students like him return to school?

Year after year of insider appointments to Mississippi’s higher-ed governing board, Molly Minta writes, “not only raise ethical questions but are indicative of a system of favoritism that excludes the historically Black colleges and universities.”

There are gaps not just in where higher ed is being covered but also in what is being covered. So we’re excited to announce that this summer we’ll be hiring three national reporters to cover critical topics that are under-scrutinized.

There’s a shift underway—and whether it ends up being seismic or something smaller, it has major implications for the way we educate and prepare people for careers.

Fifteen years ago, hundreds of college presidents committed to take action on climate change. The results have been underwhelming.