Many Americans say higher education is too expensive and not worth the cost. But ask them about a nearby community college and the response often changes.

The national numbers on higher education are bleak. A recent Gallup and Lumina Foundation survey found that only 38% of adults had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education. That figure was down from 57% in 2015. In a fall 2025 Pew Research Center survey, seven in 10 Americans said higher education is headed in the wrong direction, up from 56% in 2020.

But two-year community colleges are viewed differently, according to Gallup. Only 12% of adults said four-year colleges do an excellent or good job of keeping college affordable. For community colleges, that figure was 54%. Most people also gave them good marks for quality, access and workforce preparation.

Read more in Community College Today.

Artificial intelligence now does more of the grunt work that traditionally helped new high school and college graduates develop expertise as they enter the workforce.

The first-draft memo, the not-well-developed recommendation, and the research summary no one expected to be perfect were never only about the product. These entry-level work experiences were part of an informal apprenticeship system in which new workers learned judgment and practical know-how by doing imperfect work, having it corrected, and doing it better the next time.

The decline of these early learning opportunities creates what Deloitte, the professional services network, calls an experience gap for young people. A Harvard Business Review article by Matt Sigelman, Joseph Fuller, and Michael Fenlon makes a related point by arguing that traditional job learning curves are being redrawn. The open question is who fills the experience gap when software handles tasks that used to build expertise, especially how schools and colleges should respond.

Read more in Real Clear Education.

America’s schools have made progress reducing chronic absenteeism since the pandemic. But the problem continues.

Across 44 states and the District of Columbia, the percentage of students missing at least 10 percent of school days fell from a 28 percent peak in 2021-22 to about 23 percent in 2024–25, according to Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute. That still means more than one in five students are chronically absent.

He also reports that 21 states releasing attendance data for the 2025–26 school year show improvement in combating the problem. In 16 of those states, the pace of improvement accelerated compared with the previous year.

Read more in Datia K12. 

More students and families are asking about post-high-school career pathways that don’t start with a four-year degree. But most schools still measure mainly who graduates and who goes on to college. School counselors see that gap up close.

A new national survey of 600 counselors by Britebound and the American School Counselor Association found that 90 percent report growing student interest in non-degree pathways. And 78 percent say parents support their children exploring these options. Yet only 47 percent of those same counselors say their school measures awareness of non-degree pathways as part of career readiness.

Just over half of counselors (56 percent) say their district does a good job measuring students’ self-discovery and career exploration. But that’s about what students do while they’re in school, not how schools judge success after graduation. Other counselors say data are collected but often unused, measures lean toward college, and reporting focuses more on meeting compliance requirements than helping students.

Read more in Getting Smart.

No sector has more riding on the new college earnings test than community colleges. Students are betting on short-term credentials as a faster, cheaper path to a good job or a better one. More of them are placing that bet at a community college.

Community colleges enrolled about 750,000 certificate students last fall, up 28% in four years, with their overall enrollment growing 3.1% this year. Enrollment in undergraduate certificate programs grew 10% last spring, the most of any undergraduate credential. The new Workforce Pell program adds to that momentum for community college.

Until now, students couldn’t easily tell which programs pay off. A Texas study of more than 900,000 students shows why that matters.

Read more in Community College Daily.

This fall, millions of students are returning to public schools, where they will be regularly tested on how well they are mastering math and reading but not on how well they understand the American political tradition. They are beginning the school year in a country where the federal government invests 100 times less money in how they learn civics than in how they learn science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

For a long time, we got away with failing to teach young Americans the genius of our liberal democratic system and why it is worth defending. That’s because both political parties broadly endorsed the system. But in 2026, when the president of the United States routinely attacks liberal democratic norms, and a rising left-wing fringe is calling for repealing large parts of the U.S. Constitution, it’s long past time for a renaissance in teaching young people how to protect their freedoms and to detect the dangers of a demagogue.

The country needs to put the formation of citizens at the center of the educational experience and make it lively and engaging for students. In a new Progressive Policy Institute report, “Teaching American Democracy: Understanding Who We Are as Americans and Why,” we lay out a detailed plan for doing this. We hope both political parties will engage in this effort. Still, we think Democrats, who surveys find face a patriotism deficit of 19 points among working-class voters, have a special political incentive to do so.

Read more in Washington Monthly.

“Where does your child go to school?” used to be an easy question to answer with the name of a building. That straightforward response is getting harder to give.

A growing number of families now build their children’s education from parts. A young person might spend three days a week at a microschool, take an online math course, join a homeschool co-op, and take a dual-enrollment class at the local community college. More and more often, an education savings account pays for some of it.

American K–12 education is going modular. And new studies show families moving faster than the categories we use to describe, count, fund, and judge schooling. That gap between how families behave and how our systems are built deserves more attention than it gets.

Read more in Real Clear Education.