Think getting into college is all but impossible? Think again. Sure, the most selective institutions still take only a tiny fraction of the people who apply to them. But at almost all the rest, the odds of getting in are good — and getting better. That’s because enrollment in higher education is already down by more than 1.5 million since 2010. Now the number of 18-year-old prospective college students is projected to begin a long decline. And federal data show that today’s high school graduates are less likely to go straight to college than their predecessors were.

Every December brings an end-of-year crush to Washington, D.C.’s pediatric clinics. In addition to the usual culprits — colds, the flu, RSV — that’s also the time when the city school district issues notices reminding parents of children who are behind on required vaccinations to get caught up by December 8, or risk being turned away from school. For Dr. Megan Prior, a pediatrician in the district, the vaccine rush brings an opportunity to catch families up on more than shots. This past December, Prior said, a 12-year-old overdue for her meningitis, tetanus and other vaccines also presented with severe prediabetes that was on the verge of becoming full-blown disease.

During Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show, my family, a mix of Filipinos and Cubans, was a hot and beautiful mess. We deeply resonated with the unapologetic pride, critical history and cultural wealth Puerto Rican star Bad Bunny brought to our living room. We smiled and cried, all while salsa-stepping to Bad Bunny’s performance. We immediately texted our extended families to invite them to share this beautiful moment: from the entire delivery in Spanish to the set design that showcased Puerto Rico’s rich agricultural history, and the performer handing his newly minted Grammy award to a Latino child — a symbol of a young Bad Bunny and perhaps the future of immigrant youth.

For more than three decades, grades in American schools and colleges have been going up, up, up. A’s are more common. Failure is rarer than it once was. At the same time, student achievement, as measured by standardized tests like the ACT and NAEP, has stagnated or declined. Grades say students are learning more. Tests say they are not. Credit: Slide from Feb 3, 2026 presentation by economist Jeff Denning at Harvard Graduate School of Education Does this disconnect matter? Maybe higher grades motivate students to show up to school every day and learn.

It was in the quiet of the summer when Jeff Kahlden heard that a promising young student he advised in a rural high school west of Fort Worth, Texas, was in trouble. The boy was left with no place to live after his grandmother, who was raising him, had a stroke. Kahlden was then counseling low-income high school students considering going to college. The work was part of Upward Bound, part of a collection of federally funded higher education support programs for lower-income Americans called TRIO. He and other Upward Bound staff took the boy into their own homes and gave him the help he needed to get through his senior year of high school, then on to community college and ultimately to a satellite campus of the University of Texas, where he earned a bachelor’s degree.

Every industrial revolution begins by creating a new middle class. The steam engine, for example, didn’t just replace blacksmiths; it generated a workforce of machinists, engineers and factory supervisors who helped build the infrastructure of modern industry. We’re seeing that pattern begin to resonate today with artificial intelligence. A rich tapestry of high-paying, high-demand jobs will define the next wave of economic development. A central challenge in creating these jobs is ensuring that people across all pathways can access the education needed to participate in the AI economy. The divide will no longer be between college-educated and non-college-educated workers; it will be between those trained to work with AI and those who are not.

This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission. SAN ANTONIO — Sandra Mosqueda watched with an amused smile as her 2-year-old son, Atreus, began sweeping the floor with a miniature mop. Atreus is part of the inaugural class of infants and toddlers receiving free preschool in a citywide program in San Antonio, Texas. It's something his mother doesn’t take for granted. As a child, she herself wasn't able to start preschool this young. In the case of her two older boys — now in first grade and kindergarten — the free preschool set them up for success in elementary school.

Last year, Susana Beltrán-Grimm was visiting Hispanic families for a research project about parents and math, when she started to notice a trend. Parents didn’t want to talk about math with the Portland State University professor. Instead, they wanted to talk about their fears as immigration enforcement ramped up across the country. “The concern was, ‘This is happening, and I’m scared to go to work, I’m scared to take my child to the park. I don’t feel comfortable taking them to school,’” Beltrán-Grimm said. Many parents told her, “I’m trying to figure out how I’m not as stressed so I don’t stress my child,” she recalled.

MINNEAPOLIS — Kathy Cabrera Guaman not only survived the nail-biting process of applying to college; she got into three. But the celebrations were short-lived. Now she was sitting somberly and absorbing how much work comes after that triumphant moment of acceptance and before she sets foot in a classroom in the fall. For incoming students at most colleges and universities, this has long meant slogging through endless and complex steps they’re left mostly on their own to figure out — financial aid, loans, majors, placement tests, class registration, housing, roommates, textbooks, a meal plan, health insurance, public transportation, immunizations.

CHICO, Calif. — As an undergraduate studying psychology at California State University, Chico, Gabriel Muñoz thought that his degree might lead him to a career in human resources. Not because he was excited about that prospect — he wasn’t — but because he wasn’t sure what other options he’d have. Then he learned about the university’s Future Scholars Program, in which undergraduate students get paid to do summer research and have access to mentors and professional development workshops. He applied and was accepted, and the experience sparked in him a love of research, he said; now he plans to enroll in a master’s program in psychology at Chico State and go on to earn his Ph.D.

In matters both big and small, women in education leadership are treated, spoken to and viewed differently than their male colleagues. And it impacts everything from their assignments and salaries to promotions. The career moves available to aspiring women leaders often set them up to lead in the toughest conditions in schools and districts with the highest stakes and the least margin for error. When states and districts fail to confront the reality of this glass cliff, they constrain the advancement of some of their most capable current and would-be leaders.

In the fall of 1918, Edward Kidder Graham, the president of the University of North Carolina, tried to reassure anxious parents. The Spanish flu was spreading rapidly, but Graham insisted the university was doing all it could to keep students safe. Weeks later, Graham himself contracted the virus and died. His successor, Marvin Hendrix Stacy, promptly succumbed to the epidemic two months later. Many universities endured similar chaos during the Spanish flu, as I learned from reading a chapter in a forthcoming book on higher education, “From Upheaval to Action: What Works in Changing Higher Ed…

As a researcher who studies school closings and counsels local districts facing closure decisions, I know the pressures are multiple. Many districts are facing dropping enrollments. In some places, like Boston, rising housing costs are fueling the decline; in other, more rural, areas, dropping birthrates and a graying population are causing it. Lots of students who left public schools for private ones during the pandemic still have not returned, with new voucher programs fueling the exodus. As districts lose students, they also lose state funding. This, coupled with rising costs and uncertain…

This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission. When Hurricane Helene swept through Kelsey Crabtree’s small hometown of Black Mountain, North Carolina, two years ago, its fierce winds uprooted a large tree that landed on the roof of her house, jolting her and her husband awake. She went into the living room and noticed a huge crack where water had started to pour in. The couple grabbed their two sons, dragged a spare mattress to their laundry room and sheltered there overnight. Eventually, Crabtree and her family made their way to her mother-in-law’s home in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Spring semester at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, where I serve as president, began with the sound of helicopters on January 20 — one year after the second Trump inauguration, two weeks after the killing of Renee Good, and four days before the shooting of Alex Pretti. Our campus in the heart of the city is seamlessly integrated with the surrounding neighborhood, so what happens in Minneapolis reaches into the heart of Augsburg. The city offers our students extraordinary opportunities for learning and service; in every discipline, the city acts as an extension of the classroom.

Artificial intelligence is already reshaping how we work, communicate and create. In education, however, the conversation is stuck. Sensational headlines make it seem like AI will either save public education (“AI will magically give teachers back hours in their day!”) or destroy it completely (“Students only use AI to cheat!” “AI will replace teachers!”). These dueling narratives dominate public debate as state and district leaders scramble to write policies, field vendor pitches and decide whether to ban or embrace tools that often feel disconnected from what teachers and students actually experience in classrooms.

Washington is sending confusing and even contradictory signals to people with student loans. New repayment plans, reversals on wage garnishment for people in default and trouble getting staffers on the phone to clear up problems are adding to the lack of clarity. Last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency set up to help consumers, received more complaints about student loans than in any year in the entire history of the bureau. A quarter of those complaints were about delays in service or information, so if you’re not sure what’s going on, you’re not alone.

A narrator speaks over images of busy cityscapes, children playing in a field and ominous scenes of natural disasters and civil unrest. “There’s no sugarcoating it,” the deep voice warns. “America’s future is under attack.” Its salvation: higher education, personified by young people shown listening attentively in classrooms and busy at work in high-tech labs. “College,” the speaker concludes with the heroic inflection of a movie cowboy: “Proud sponsor of America at its best.” This 60-second public service spot is part of a small but growing response by the higher education industry to more than a decade of plummeting public confidence and falling enrollment followed by a year of political attacks against which insiders and advocates concede it has until now been mostly silent.

Like millions of students across the country, we recently graduated from college. We know how unlikely this moment once seemed. It wasn’t easy to get to college in the first place, let alone graduate. Our senior year of high school was abruptly upended by the chaos of the pandemic. Schools shut down, isolation set in and the future became clouded with uncertainty. The already-confusing path to higher education suddenly felt nearly impossible to navigate. In addition, one of us (Raven) is a Filipino American, while the other (Javonte) is a Black first-generation college student.

For decades, economists could rely on a comforting graph about happiness over a lifetime: It followed a U-shape, like a smile. Young people were carefree and happy. Middle age was rough but joy returned again in old age. This wasn’t a flimsy finding. More than 600 academic papers, published from 1980 to 2020, documented this up-down-up trend in human psychology across 145 countries.

New York’s youthful mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is buoying the hopes of families and educators, boldly seeking to create universally available child care starting when infants turn 6 weeks old. Sworn in by fellow socialist Bernie Sanders, the Big Apple’s new mayor will begin with no-cost (hopefully quality) care for all 2-year-olds, averaging roughly $22,000 in economic relief for young parents — the price of infant-toddler care. No American city or state has attempted to enrich the earliest learning of toddlers on such a grand scale for free. Mamdani’s proposal vividly departs from the Trump administration’s fumbles on affordability.

This story appeared in our climate and education newsletter. Sign up here. I’m one of those rare people (there are others out there, right?) who have yet to try ChatGPT or any other generative artificial intelligence program. Part of my hesitation is driven by a vague concern that AI is killing the planet: Researchers predict, for example, that U.S. data centers could consume as much water as 10 million Americans and emit as much carbon as 10 million cars. At the same time, there’s hope that AI could combat climate change, by accelerating research on climate solutions.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — “They took her, they took her, they took her.” Those were some of the words Assistant Principal Cora Muñoz could discern while on the phone with the guardian of one of her students. As the caller sobbed and struggled to speak, Muñoz realized that immigration enforcement agents had detained a kid from Wilbur Cross, the high school she helps lead. Again. There was a reason why Muñoz was a go-to contact for the student and her guardian: She — and New Haven public schools more broadly — have worked hard to earn the trust of immigrant families in their diverse district, even as the second Trump administration has made it easier for immigration officers to enter schools and launched a mass deportation campaign.

LACONIA, N.H. — Three dozen 4- and 5-year-olds trooped out onto the stage of the ornate, century-old Colonial Theatre of Laconia in this central New Hampshire town. Dressed in plaid, red, green and sparkles, some were grinning and waving, some looked a bit shell-shocked; a tiny blonde girl sobbed with stage fright in her teacher’s arms. No sooner did the children open their mouths to sing, “Merry Christmas! … This is the day that the Lord was born!” than the house lights came up and a fire alarm went off. …

To an untrained eye, the “gross motor room” at the Edgerley Family Horizons Center in Boston looks like any other indoor gym for preschoolers. There are mats on the floor, large foam blocks, shapes and stairs to play with and climb on, fabric swings hanging from the ceiling and sensory boards attached to the walls, covered with various materials that provide touch-based activities. But this room was thoughtfully designed to be much more than a play space: It includes features meant to support emotional development and provide a calming place for children experiencing big feelings.