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More adults recommend trade school for new high school graduates than those who recommend college, according to a June 5 report from the American Staffing Association.
When considering the “ideal post high school path” for today’s graduates, 33% of U.S. adults advocated for a vocational or trade school, followed by 28% who encouraged a four-year college or university, 13% who advised entering the workforce and 11% who supported apprenticeships.
“The time has come to radically rethink how we’re preparing America’s future workforce,” said Richard Wahlquist, CEO of ASA. “Americans are clearly concerned that colleges and universities are failing to equip students with the workplace-relevant skills that employers need.”
In the survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, opinions varied by generation. Vocational and trade school careers were most supported by baby boomers (41%), Generation X (37%) and millennials (31%), as compared to 22% of Generation Z.
On the other hand, Gen Z was the only generation to recommend a four-year degree (36%) over a vocational or trade school (22%). Members of Gen Z were most likely to say graduates should pursue a traditional degree, followed by entering the workforce or attending a trade school.
“These results underscore the importance of educators, policymakers and parents coming together now to develop, fund and support programs designed to prepare young people for the jobs of today and the future world of work,” Wahlquist said.
More than 40% of Gen Z adults are working in or pursuing a blue-collar or skilled trade job, according to a Resume Builder report. Workers said they’re choosing these jobs for better long-term options, higher pay and a lower risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence tools.
The labor market could face a “white-collar recession” as job postings decline for desk-based workers, according to an Employ report.
Although many Gen Z workers want to pursue skilled trades careers, they face challenges when trying to access critical training, according to a Dewalt report. Half of the students surveyed said they were placed on training waitlists, but once enrolled, they participated in internships, mentorship programs and real-world work experiences.
More adults recommend trade school for new high school graduates than those who recommend college, according to a June 5 report from the American Staffing Association.
When considering the “ideal post high school path” for today’s graduates, 33% of U.S. adults advocated for a vocational or trade school, followed by 28% who encouraged a four-year college or university, 13% who advised entering the workforce and 11% who supported apprenticeships.
“The time has come to radically rethink how we’re preparing America’s future workforce,” said Richard Wahlquist, CEO of ASA. “Americans are clearly concerned that colleges and universities are failing to equip students with the workplace-relevant skills that employers need.”
In the survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults, opinions varied by generation. Vocational and trade school careers were most supported by baby boomers (41%), Generation X (37%) and millennials (31%), as compared to 22% of Generation Z.
On the other hand, Gen Z was the only generation to recommend a four-year degree (36%) over a vocational or trade school (22%). Members of Gen Z were most likely to say graduates should pursue a traditional degree, followed by entering the workforce or attending a trade school.
“These results underscore the importance of educators, policymakers and parents coming together now to develop, fund and support programs designed to prepare young people for the jobs of today and the future world of work,” Wahlquist said.
More than 40% of Gen Z adults are working in or pursuing a blue-collar or skilled trade job, according to a Resume Builder report. Workers said they’re choosing these jobs for better long-term options, higher pay and a lower risk of being replaced by artificial intelligence tools.
The labor market could face a “white-collar recession” as job postings decline for desk-based workers, according to an Employ report.
Although many Gen Z workers want to pursue skilled trades careers, they face challenges when trying to access critical training, according to a Dewalt report. Half of the students surveyed said they were placed on training waitlists, but once enrolled, they participated in internships, mentorship programs and real-world work experiences.
University remains the most effective pathway for disadvantaged individuals to achieve upward social mobility. Graduates earn more, are less likely to be unemployed, and report higher levels of health, happiness and civic engagement. Yet, despite this individual impact, higher education’s benefits often fail to translate into positive outcomes for local communities.
Recent research from the Sutton Trust ranked constituencies by social mobility. Most interesting is the bottom 20. More than half have at least one university within their immediate locality, and some have as many as 18 in their wider region. Essentially, having a university – or, indeed, many universities – in your region doesn’t guarantee improved local social mobility.
The government’s ‘opportunity mission’ is built on the principle that every child, in every community, should have a fair chance to succeed.
But rising costs, frozen maintenance support, demographic shifts and widening attainment gaps threaten progress made on access. Moreover, targets tend to be institution-specific, creating duplications and silos, and encouraging competition between providers. Selective universities continue to meet access targets by disproportionately recruiting disadvantaged pupils from high-attaining London boroughs, leaving local disadvantaged learners behind – even when world-class institutions are right on their doorstep.
We must broaden how we assess universities’ social mobility impact. To be able to understand when, why and how the benefits of an institution do or don’t reach into local communities, we must also consider their roles as major employers, civic actors and research hubs.
In our new report, Leave to Achieve?, we set out a new framework for how universities can conceptualise and measure their local social mobility contribution. The framework consists of four key pillars, underpinned by the need for regional collaboration and long-term planning.
Access to higher education varies starkly by region: 27% of disadvantaged pupils in London hold an undergraduate degree by age 22, compared to just 10% in the South West.
Universities must work with local schools and colleges to raise attainment and create alternative entry pathways. They should be considering the extent to which they nurture and recruit talent locally, supporting pupils to progress and succeed. A place-based approach to widening participation, developed collaboratively with other regional providers, ensures local talent is not just nurtured but retained.
Some existing initiatives show promise. Durham Inspired North East Scholarships, Middlesex’s guaranteed offer scheme for local applicants, and the Warwick Scholar’s program providing financial, academic and practical support to local disadvantaged pupils, all show how targeted programs can work at a local level. However, articulation agreements with local further education providers are underutilised in England, and inconsistent contextual admissions policies limit impact.
Universities are often the largest, or among the largest, employers in the local region. This is often cited to give the impression that they are ‘too big to fail’, particularly in the current financial context. But little has been done to look at the extent to which universities are providing good jobs to local people, and whether these are open to people from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
Academic roles provide an opportunity for social mobility – for those who can secure one. For someone from a lower socioeconomic background to become a lecturer, for example, they have almost certainly experienced upwards occupational social mobility, if not also absolute (income) social mobility, too. Similarly, professional service roles are often well paid and secure, with a reasonable pension, and working within a university comes with a certain amount of cultural and social prestige, too.
A university performing strongly in this area would be spearheading initiatives to support local people from disadvantaged backgrounds into some of these roles and supporting staff from lower socioeconomic backgrounds whilst they are there. Southampton’s staff social mobility network stands out here, specifically recognising and seeking to tackle barriers in recruitment, retention and career progress for those from working-class backgrounds.
Research within institutions should address local needs and tackle inequalities, with outputs shared with local communities. Local residents should have opportunities to be involved in research and should understand why research carried out in their region is valuable.
There are excellent examples in this area, such as UWE Bristol’s ‘Engagement with Education‘ programme and London Metropolitan’s participatory knowledge exchange projects. But these remain examples of best – not yet standard – practice.
As civic institutions, universities must be more deeply integrated within their localities. Despite growing attention to civic engagement, activity is often fragmented and lacking an overarching strategy. Participation in local skills planning is inconsistent, and incentives to foster collaboration across providers are weak.
Great Manchester’s Civic Agreement is a great example of universities coming together with local leaders to work towards shared goals, recognising that collaboration is far more effective than competition, duplication, or silos. The South West Social Mobility Commission takes this a step further, bringing together all education providers (not just higher education), businesses, local leaders and third-sector organisations to promote better social mobility in the region.
This framework is not a checklist, but a tool for reflection. We do not expect every institution to be a star performer in every pillar, but we do see value in measuring impact more holistically, across the full range of university activity.
Universities should ask themselves:
Only by addressing these questions can we begin to understand how – and when – the presence of a university does improve social mobility in its immediate communities. And only then can we ensure that local people no longer feel that they must leave in order to achieve.
Two years after its Supreme Court victory against Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, Students for Fair Admissions has a new target in its sights: Hispanic-serving institutions. On Wednesday, the advocacy group joined the state of Tennessee in suing the U.S. Department of Education, arguing that the criteria to become an HSI are unconstitutional and discriminatory. The move is distressing HSI advocates, who hoped to see the institutions left out of the political fray.
To qualify as an HSI, a college or university needs to have a student body comprised of at least 25 percent Hispanic students and enroll at least 50 percent low-income students, or more than other comparable institutions, among other criteria. No Tennessee institutions operated by the state meet the threshold and are thus prohibited from applying for HSI-specific grants—even though they serve Hispanic and low-income students, according to the Tennessee attorney general and SFFA. As a result, the federal designation criteria amounts to discrimination, and Tennessee universities and students suffer as a result, the plaintiffs argue.
They also say Tennessee institutions find themselves in an “unconstitutional dilemma”: Even if they wanted to, they argue, they can’t use affirmative action to up their Hispanic student enrollments since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against using race as a factor in college admissions. That 2023 decision resulted from lawsuits SFFA brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The HSI program is particularly egregious in terms of how it treats students based on immutable characteristics,” Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti, who’s representing the state in the suit, told Inside Higher Ed. “It is just manifestly unfair that a needy student in Tennessee does not have access to this pool of funds because they go to a school that doesn’t have the right ethnic makeup.”
The lawsuit calls for “a declaratory judgement that the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements are unconstitutional” and “a permanent injunction prohibiting the [Education] Secretary from enforcing or applying the HSI program’s ethnicity-based requirements when making decisions whether to award or maintain grants to Tennessee’s institutions of higher education.”
HSI proponents may be jarred by the legal challenge, but they aren’t entirely surprised. Conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute and the American Civil Rights Project have previously proposed abolishing enrollment-based minority-serving institutions (MSIs), including HSIs and Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–serving institutions, which are defined as enrolling 10 percent of students from these groups.
“It was only a matter of time before the anti-DEI movement hit the enrollment-based MSIs,” said Gina Ann Garcia, a professor who studies MSIs in the school of education at the University of California, Berkeley. “It still was a punch to the gut.”
Congress established the HSI program in the 1990s to improve the quality of education at colleges and universities that disproportionately serve Latino students, who were concentrated at colleges with relatively fewer financial resources. They’ve historically enjoyed bipartisan support. Last year, the federal government appropriated about $229 million for the country’s roughly 600 Hispanic-serving institutions; $28 million of that funding went to 49 of the HSIs that applied for the competitive grants.
Deborah Santiago, co-founder and CEO of Excelencia in Education, an organization that promotes Latino student success, believes the lawsuit mischaracterizes the program and its role in the national higher education landscape. She said it’s in the country’s “self-interest” to invest in colleges and universities with limited resources that serve a growing student population with stubborn degree-attainment gaps.
“If a disproportionate number of students of any background are at an institution that has a high enrollment of needy students, low educational core expenditures and serves a high proportion of students that that could benefit from that [funding] to serve the country, I don’t think that’s discriminating,” she said.
She also stressed that the grant program “doesn’t explicitly require any resources to go to a specific population” but funds capacity-building efforts, like building new laboratories and facilities, that benefit all students at the institution.
The HSI program is a way “to target limited federal resources and meet the federal mandate of access for low-income students,” she said. “We know that it costs more to educate Hispanic students, because they’re more likely to be low income and first gen, so college knowledge, student support services—all of that takes institutional investment.”
But opponents of HSIs don’t buy it.
Wenyuan Wu, executive director of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, a think tank and watchdog organization focused on promoting “equal rights and merit,” firmly believes enrollment-based minority-serving institutions are discriminatory and applauded the lawsuit as a step in the right direction.
She argued that HSI funding has gone to efforts specifically to support Latino students, including some she sees as “ideological.” For example, the University of Connecticut at Stamford proposed using the funding to start a program called Sueño Scholars, to “recruit, support and mentor undergraduate Hispanic, other minority, low-income, and high-need students” to enter teaching graduate programs and included a goal of “developing and sustaining antiracist orientations towards teaching and learning,” according to the department’s list of project abstracts.
Wu asserted that putting federal money toward efforts like these is a problem. She’d rather see the funds designated for HSIs channeled into Pell Grants or other supports for low-income students.
“Taxpayer funds should not be used to engage in racial balancing, and that’s exactly the kind of behavior that has been incentivized by MSIs,” said Wu, who is also chair of the Georgia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Robert Kelchen, head of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, believes the lawsuit has “a possibility of success.” It was filed in a conservative-leaning federal district court in Knoxville, and Tennessee seems to have shown it has legal standing, he said.
Even “if the court here in Knoxville doesn’t agree, another state could choose to file a similar lawsuit in their district court as well,” he said. Ultimately, “the question is, can they find one court that agrees with the plaintiffs’ interpretation.”
The move by Tennessee comes just a week after the federal government successfully sued Texas to eliminate in-state tuition for undocumented students—a policy Republican state lawmakers had tried but failed to end. The Texas attorney general celebrated the challenge, siding with the U.S. Department of Justice in a matter of hours, and a judge promptly quashed the two-decade-old state law. (Stephen Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, called the episode “transparently collusive.”)
Kelchen believes the Tennessee lawsuit is following a similar playbook. He expects to see more red states and conservative organizations sue the Education Department on issues where they align “to get rid of things that neither of [them] like,” he said—though in Tennessee’s case, it’s unclear how the department will respond.
Skrmetti told Inside Higher Ed that “from Tennessee’s perspective, this is not part of a broader strategy to influence education policy. This is about discrimination against Tennessee schools because of the ethnic makeup of their student bodies.”
If the plaintiffs win, it’s unclear whether that would mean changing the federal definition of an HSI to eliminate a Hispanic enrollment threshold or axing the HSI program altogether. The implications for other types of enrollment-based minority-serving institutions are also hazy.
Skrmetti is open to multiple options.
“At the end of the day, there’s [HSI] money out there to help needy students, and we want to make sure that needy students can access it regardless of the ethnic makeup of the schools they’re at,” he said. “There are a couple different avenues I think that could successfully achieve the goal operationally. We need to just get a declaration that the current situation does violate the Constitution.”
Santiago, of Excelencia in Education, said there’s room for “thoughtful discussion” about reforming or expanding requirements for HSI grant funding, but she believes “it needs to come from the community.”
She also pointed out that the lawsuit is against the Department of Education, which administers HSI funding but doesn’t control it—Congress does. So the department doesn’t have the power to end the funding.
Nonetheless, “it would be foolish to not take it seriously,” she said.
Garcia, the Berkeley education professor, said that while she’s not a lawyer, she believes there are legal questions worth raising about the lawsuit, particularly the way it leans on the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in admissions.
She pointed out that HSIs tend to be broad-access or open-access institutions that admit most applicants, rather than selective institutions explicitly recruiting Latino students; only about two dozen of the 600 HSIs are highly selective, she said. So, the assertion that HSIs have any connection to the affirmative action ruling is up for debate, she said.
Skrmetti believes it’s a cut-and-dried case.
“You can’t make determinations about the allocation of resources based on ancestry or skin color or anything like that without inherent discrimination,” he said. “We need to help all needy students. And the HSI designation is an obstacle to that.”
Garcia believes that regardless of whether the lawsuit is successful, it’s already done damage to HSIs by dragging them—and enrollment-based MSIs in general—into the country’s political skirmishes over diversity, equity and inclusion.
“I’ve been just watching HSIs fly a little bit under the radar,” she said. “They don’t come up a lot” in national conversations about DEI. But the lawsuit “brings HSIs into the light, and it brings them into the attack.”
She worries that students are the ones who will suffer if HSIs no longer receive dedicated funding.
HSIs “are often underresourced institutions,” she said. “They’re institutions that are struggling to serve a large population of minoritized students, of students of color, of low-income students, of first-gen students. We’re not talking about the Harvards and the Columbias.”
An environmental researcher at Tulane University resigned Wednesday after accusing campus officials, reportedly under pressure from Gov. Jeff Landry, of issuing a “gag order” that prevented her from publicly discussing her work, which focused on racial disparities in the petrochemical workforce.
“Scholarly publications, not gag orders, are the currency of academia,” Kimberly Terrell, the now-former director of community engagement at Tulane’s Environmental Law Clinic, wrote in her resignation letter. “There is always room for informed debate. But Tulane leaders have chosen to abandon the principles of knowledge, education, and the greater good in pursuit of their own narrow agenda.”
Terrell’s resignation comes amid wider efforts by the Trump administration and its allies to control the types of research—including projects related to environmental justice—academics are permitted to pursue and punish campus protesters for espousing messages the president and other public officials disagree with.
“It started with the pro-Palestinian activism on our campus and others across the country. It’s emboldened a lot of political leaders to feel they can make inroads by silencing faculty in other areas,” Michelle Lacey, a math professor and president of Tulane’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Inside Higher Ed. “That was the catalyst for creating a climate where university administrators are very nervous, especially now as we see the government pulling funding for areas of research they don’t like.”
Last spring, Landry praised Tulane president Michael Fitts and university police for removing students who were protesting Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Soon after, the Legislature passed a provision creating harsher punishments for protesters who disrupt traffic, which Landry later signed into law.
Landry, a Republican aligned with Trump, has a history of trying to exert control over the state’s public higher education institutions.
Last summer, he enacted a law that allows him to directly appoint board chairs at the state’s public colleges and universities. And in November, following Trump’s election, Landry publicly called on officials at Louisiana State University to punish a law professor who allegedly made brief comments in class about students who voted for the president.
Landry’s office denied to the Associated Press (which first reported on Terrell’s resignation) that it pressured Tulane to silence research from the law clinic. Michael Strecker, a Tulane spokesperson, also told the outlet that the university “is fully committed to academic freedom and the strong pedagogical value of law clinics” and declined to comment on “personnel matters.”
Strecker added in a statement that Tulane administrators have been working with the law school’s leadership on how the law clinics could better support the university’s education mission.
“Debates about how best to operate law clinics’ teaching mission have occurred nationally and at Tulane for years—this is nothing new,” Strecker said. “This effort includes most recently input from an independent, third-party review.”
But Terrell’s account of the events that led to her resignation call the universities’ academic freedom commitments into question, while also implying that Landry—and powerful industry groups—wield some influence over private higher education institutions in the state.
And it’s not something Tulane, a private university in New Orleans, should tolerate, Lacey said.
Kimberly Terrell
“The academic freedom of all university researchers must be unequivocally defended at both public and private institutions,” Lacey wrote in a statement. “This includes the right to conduct and disseminate research that may be unfavorably viewed by government officials or corporate entities. Political demands to stifle controversial research are an affront to the advancement of knowledge and open exchange of ideas, as is the voluntary compliance with such requests by university leadership.”
The latest controversy at Tulane stems from a paper Terrell published April 9 in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Economics. Her research found that while Black people in Louisiana are underrepresented in the state’s petrochemical workforce, they are overexposed to toxic pollutants the industry releases into an area of the state between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as “Cancer Alley.”
But according to emails obtained by Inside Higher Ed and other outlets, Fitts worried that publicizing Terrell’s research and the clinic’s other work, which includes legal advocacy, could jeopardize funding for the university’s $600 million plan to redevelop New Orleans’ historic Charity Hospital into residential and commercial spaces as part of a broader downtown expansion plan.
As Terrell explained in her resignation letter, Fitts and other top Tulane executives were at Louisiana’s state capitol on April 16 lobbying for the project when “someone accused the university of being anti–chemical industry” and cited her study, which was receiving media attention after it was published the week prior. According to Terrell, “the story that came down to me through the chain of command was that Governor Landry threatened to veto any bill with funding for Tulane’s Charity project unless Fitts did something about the Environmental Law Clinic.”
After that, Terrell says, she was “placed under a complete gag order,” which the emails appear to confirm.
“Effective immediately all external communications that are not client-based—that is, directly related to representation—must be pre-approved by me,” Marcilynn Burke, dean of Tulane’s law school, wrote in an April 25 email to law clinic staff. “Such communications include press releases, interviews, videos, social media postings, etc. Please err on the side of over-inclusion as we work to define the boundaries through experience.”
A week later, on May 4, Burke wrote another email to clinic staff explaining that “elected officials and major donors have cited the clinic as an impediment to them lending their support to the university generally and this project specifically,” referring to Fitts’s plans to redevelop the old hospital. Terrell wrote that when she pleaded her case to Provost Robin Forman, “he refused to acknowledge my right to freely conduct and disseminate research” and also “let slip that my job description was likely going to be rewritten.”
Terrell described the entire law clinic as being “under siege” and said she would rather leave her position “than have my work used as an excuse for President Fitts to dismantle the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic.”
Other academics, free speech experts and environmental justice advocates also believe Tulane’s moves to silence Terrell’s work amounts to an attack on academic freedom with implications beyond the campus.
“The administration of Tulane University, far from standing up for academic freedom, is participating in the effort to suppress free inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge by scientific methods,” Michael Ash, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Any effort to reduce academic freedom for Dr. Terrell either by changing her job classification or by redefining whether the protection applies is a blatant and un-American attempt to suppress the type of free inquiry that has made this country great.”
Joy Banner, co-founder and co-director of the Descendants Project, a community organization that works in Cancer Alley, added that the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic is a vital public health resource.
Without the clinic, “it would be far more difficult to show the racially discriminatory practices of the industry, from preferential hiring practices to a pattern of concentrating pollution in majority Black neighborhoods,” she said in a statement. “President Fitts must commit to protecting it at all costs.”
Students will soon have to show a government-approved ID either in person or online in order to receive federal aid.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | michaeljung and robas/iStock/Getty Images
College financial aid offices and students’ advocates say that a Trump administration plan to crack down on fraud in the federal aid system could burden university staff and hinder access to college programs.
Although they support fighting fraud as a concept, they particularly worry that real, eligible Pell Grant recipients will get caught up in the detection system and won’t be able to jump through the extra hoops to verify their identity.
“In general, verification is a little bit of threading the needle between making sure that the right dollars are going to the right students, but also not putting up an inordinate number of barriers, particularly to low-income students, that are insurmountable,” said Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “You have to walk a fine line between those two things.”
Department of Education officials, however, say their plan, announced June 9, is necessary to protect American taxpayers from theft and won’t become a burden for colleges. They aren’t worried about students losing access, either.
Ultimately, the Trump administration plans to verify the identity of each financial aid applicant with the help of a new system that should be up and running “this fall,” according to the department’s announcement. Before then, the department is planning to screen more first-time applicants for verification—a process that could affect 125,000 students this summer and will be handled by financial aid offices. (About 40,000 students were checked last year, according to a department spokesperson.)
McCarthy, however, is concerned that if the new system isn’t ready by the fall, “institutions will be assuming this larger burden for a longer, indeterminate amount of time.” The department’s botched launch of the 2024–25 Free Application for Federal Student Aid showed the challenges of standing up new systems quickly, she noted.
A senior official at the Department of Education told Inside Higher Ed that the Office of Federal Student Aid and the department procurement team are in the process of purchasing an identity-validation product similar to the ones used by financial services companies like banks. The product would be incorporated into the online FAFSA portal.
If an individual is flagged for potential fraud at any point while filling out the form, a pop-up box would appear with a live staff member on the other side, the official explained. The applicant would then be asked to display a government-issued ID. If that ID is deemed valid, the person could then continue.
“Once that’s done, the process is over,” the official said. “That’s really as simple as that effort is. I believe rental car companies are using it, too.”
The official was optimistic that the department could have the system up and running by early September, though that won’t be soon enough to get aid disbursed in time for the fall semester. The official also acknowledged that the timeline means that colleges may have to do some verification in person even in the fall, but that process should not be too much of a burden for the college or the student. Similar to the online process, a student would just need to show a valid ID to a college financial aid administrator, either in person or over a video call. Previously, when identity verifications were conducted, students had to present a Statement of Educational Purpose and submit a notarized copy of their identification document.
But advocacy groups that work with low-income students worry that even requiring a government-issued ID could give some students a leg up over others when it comes to accessing financial aid and affording to enroll in college.
“We want to see fraud eliminated as much as anyone else … We just need to make sure that gets balanced with a reasonable process for students,” said MorraLee Keller, a senior consultant for the National College Attainment Network. “A lot of low-economic kids may not have secured, for example, a driver’s license. If they don’t drive, they may not have a driver’s license, and that is probably the primary form of a government-issued valid ID that most people would be able to present.”
Keller noted that some states may have alternate IDs available for those who do not drive, but even that may take time to obtain if a student doesn’t already possess it.
“We want to make sure that timing doesn’t interrupt the aid getting credited to their account to pay their bills on time so that they could start classes, get refunds to go get their books and all those kinds of things,” she said. “So one of the questions that we still need answered is, what else would be considered a valid ID?”
The California Community College system, which has grappled with increasing financial aid fraud, recently considered an application fee to help screen legitimate students from fraudsters. A spokesperson for the system said they are waiting on additional guidance from the department before they can know how big a deal this shift will be.
“We wouldn’t be able to speculate on the level of concern among students and institutions until the federal guidance is known,” she wrote. But “financial aid fraud is a nationwide trend and additional identification verification processes will help in the fight against it.”
President Trump said that Chinese international students would be welcome in the U.S. in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday announcing the terms of a pending trade agreement with China.
In exchange for shipments of rare earth metals, the U.S. “WILL PROVIDE TO CHINA WHAT WAS AGREED TO, INCLUDING CHINESE STUDENTS USING OUR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES (WHICH HAS ALWAYS BEEN GOOD WITH ME!),” Trump posted (capital letters his).
The about-face comes less than two weeks after Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to “aggressively revoke” Chinese students’ visas and implement a much stricter review process for nonimmigrant visa applications from the country.
That announcement, an escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign to decrease the number of foreign students at American universities, threw higher education into a panic. International enrollment has become a financial lifeline for many institutions, and Chinese students make up nearly a quarter of all international students in the U.S.—around 280,000 in 2023–24, according to the Institute of International Education, more than students from any other country. They make up 16 percent of graduate STEM programs and 2 percent of undergraduate programs.
Rubio’s visa-revocation announcement also led to distress among Chinese families, whose hopes of sending their children to a prestigious American university seemed to be fading. In May, the Chinese foreign minister called the policy “politically discriminatory” and “irrational.”
A judge released a Harvard Medical School research associate and Russian native Thursday. She had been held in federal detention for nearly four months after she tried to re-enter the U.S.
Kseniia Petrova still faces a criminal charge for allegedly trying to smuggle frog embryos into the country through Boston’s Logan International Airport, where Customs and Border Protection detained her, but she’s been freed for now.
“I hear it’s sunny. Goodbye,” U.S. magistrate judge Judith G. Dein said after approving Petrova’s release, the Associated Press reported.
The AP wrote that Petrova, standing outside the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse in Boston, thanked her supporters, saying, “I never really felt alone any minute when I was in custody, and it’s really helped me very much.”
The court set a probable cause hearing in the case for next Wednesday.
Despite being detained Feb. 16 and transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Louisiana, it wasn’t until mid-May that prosecutors announced the smuggling charge. One of her lawyers, Gregory Romanovsky, has said that Petrova “was suddenly transferred from ICE to criminal custody” less than two hours after a judge set a hearing on her release.
On May 28, a U.S. District Court of Vermont judge said that Petrova’s immigration detention was unjustified and granted bail, but that didn’t immediately lead to her release, NBC News reported.
“It’s difficult to understand why someone like Kseniia needed to be jailed for four months,” Romanovsky said. “She poses no danger and has deep ties to her community. Her case is a reminder that immigration enforcement should be guided by law and common sense—and not deportation quotas.”
Before a federal judge blocked its plans, the Education Department reached a deal with the Department of Labor to hand over some of its career, technical and adult education grants, according to court records.
Under the agreement, reached May 21, the Labor Department would administer about $2.7 billion in grants, including the Perkins Grant program, which funds career and technical education at K–12 schools and community colleges, Politico first reported. But that plan is now on hold, as is an agreement with the Treasury Department regarding student loan collections, according to a status update in New York’s lawsuit challenging mass layoffs at the agency and President Donald Trump’s executive order to dismantle the department.
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to overturn the lower court’s injunction so officials can proceed with the layoffs and other plans.
The department didn’t publicly announce the handover, which appears to be a first step toward Trump’s endgame of shutting down the agency. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has acknowledged repeatedly that only Congress can legally shutter the department, but she’s also made clear that she can transfer some responsibilities to other agencies. In addition to administering the funds, Labor officials agreed to oversee the implementation of career education programs and to monitor grant recipients for compliance.
Advance CTE and the Association for Career and Technical Education criticized the plan, saying the agreement “directly circumvents existing statutory requirements” related to the Perkins program and would cause confusion.
“We strongly oppose any efforts to move CTE administration away from the U.S. Department of Education given the disruption this would cause to the legislation’s implementation and services to students in schools across the country,” they said in a statement released Wednesday evening.