On average, the decreases don’t appear to be as steep as some college leaders predicted, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute. And he believes colleges can still do more to promote racial diversity, such as giving greater preference to students from lower-income families and eliminating legacy preferences that tend to benefit wealthy, white students.
“I wouldn’t want people to draw from the data a conclusion that the situation is hopeless,” he said.
“There is a huge hypocrisy in failing to examine legacy preferences, which have nothing to do with merit and everything to do with accident of birth,” said Kahlenberg, a longtime advocate for eliminating both racial and legacy admissions preferences who testified as an expert witness against affirmative action in the Supreme Court case.
Blum, Kahlenberg and Arcidiacono, the Duke economist who also testified against Harvard in the affirmative-action case, jointly sent their recent letter to the federal government.
“The reaction to Mamdani’s proposal on kindergartners represents a larger fear,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher who advised de Blasio on gifted education policy. “The socialist ethos applied to education is alarming to people who believe in merit.”
Richard Kahlenberg, who testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs who challenged Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies, said he was disappointed by the decline in Black and Hispanic undergrads.
Kahlenberg said he believes Harvard could do more to maintain Harvard’s racial diversity through legal means, such as ending preference for relatives of Harvard grads and giving more advantages to low-income applicants.
“They are not doing as much as they could,” said Kahlenberg, a researcher for the Progressive Policy Institute think tank, which he described as center-left.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, called the U-Va. deal “pretty outrageous” and said the federal memorandum “provides a gross misreading” of the landmark 2023 Supreme Court case on affirmative action. He said the guidance says “‘criteria like socioeconomic status, first-generation status, or geographic diversity must not be used’ if a university’s goal is to further racial integration on campus.” But he said the high court’s decision “outlawed the means of using racial preferences, not the ends of achieving the benefits of a racially diverse student body.”
Democratic politicians grappled with the issue of racial preferences for decades without much success at reconciling competing beliefs. On the one hand, the American public has long been against the practice. In 2020, even as liberal California voters supported Joe Biden over Donald Trump by an overwhelming 29 points, an effort to reinstate racial preferences was soundly defeated by 14 points. On the other hand, Democratic interest groups in Washington, D.C., have been diehard supporters of racial preference policies, driving positions on these issues that many politicians feared to challenge.
So, for years, Democratic politicians spoke one way, then acted another. In 1995, President Bill Clinton launched a trial balloon, saying he wanted to shift the basis of affirmative action from race to economic need, but he backed down after interest groups rebelled. More than a decade later, presidential candidate Barack Obama said he thought his own daughters did not deserve racial preferences in college admissions and that working-class students of all races did. When I told a top Obama staffer after the election that I would like to help the new administration develop a class-based affirmative action program, however, I was told there was no way Obama could go against powerful Democratic interest groups. The courts would have to force him to make the shift.
In his latest piece for the Monthly, legal scholar Rick Kahlenberg wrote about the College Board’s shameful termination of “Landscape,” a college recruiting tool designed to identify promising students from low-income communities, regardless of their race. Rick called it “the worst kind of capitulation” to Trump.
What’s significant about Rick’s stance is that he’s among the nation’s most prominent opponents of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. In fact, he testified against the practice in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—the landmark Supreme Court case that made racial preferences in college admissions illegal.
Rick argues that race-neutral admissions policies are not only acceptable but should even be encouraged. The result would be more diversity, but on terms that Americans believe fair. Trump, on the other hand, is waging war on diversity itself.
College students are increasingly voting with their feet when choosing a degree program that will produce a return on their financial investment. They are moving away from institutions that offer poor economic returns and toward those with a more promising payoff.
In Learning with Their Feet, Preston Cooper, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, offers compelling evidence that students are not just responding to rising costs or demographic shifts. They are actively rejecting or choosing colleges based on quality, value, and outcomes.
Using over a decade of data, he documents a striking divergence in enrollment trends across the postsecondary landscape. Since its peak in 2010, undergraduate enrollment in the United States has declined overall. But that decline is far from uniform.
“This situation seems pretty bleak to me,” writes journalist Matthew Yglesias in an article published in The 74 entitled “American Students Are Getting Dumber.” He was reacting to the latest student achievement results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the Nation’s Report Card. He goes on to lament how “we’re suffering mostly from a big national failure to take the educational goals of the school system seriously.” He makes no grand proposal for a way out of this misery. But he implies that the time has come for a renewed educational excellence compact with K-12 public school families.
The NAEP results he laments tell us that the high school class of 2024 posted the lowest 12th-grade reading scores on record and the weakest math performance since 2005. Compared with 2019, 12th-grade scores fell three points in both reading and math, with the largest decline among the lowest-performing students.
Reading scores are lower than any prior senior assessment. Roughly one-third scored below NAEP’s Basic Level in reading, indicating limited comprehension of grade-level prose, not simply texting fluency.
The Trump administration’s newly passed federal tax credit scholarship program could dramatically reshape the education landscape, providing families with potentially billions of dollars in funding for private schooling, beginning in 2027. But states must opt into the Trump program, raising a host of policy and political questions.
FutureEd hosted a timely conversation about what the program could mean for students, families, and the future of elementary and secondary education. The discussion explores what we know about the program and what’s still undecided, how it could work in practice, the political challenges it poses to state leaders, and what we can learn from states’ past experiences with private school choice programs. Moderated by FutureEd Director Thomas Toch, the conversation featured:
Too many countries send young people into adulthood without the skills or support they need to thrive at work. That is the central warning of Education at a Glance 2025, the latest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s annual series of global education reviews.
This year’s edition devotes particular attention to career education, workforce readiness and the critical transition from grades 10-12 — what the report calls upper-secondary schooling — into employment or further study. The findings are stark: While some countries provide clear pathways from classroom to career, many — including the United States — leave too many teenagers unready for the next stage of life.
Released each autumn since 2010, the report compares data from 38 member nations and about a dozen partner economies. The current version covers more than a billion students worldwide. It is filled with tables and charts on topics from preschool enrollment to the wage premium for education and training beyond high school, including diplomas, academic degrees and vocational certificates — all of which it groups under what it calls tertiary education.
