At a time when college enrollment is shrinking and public faith in higher education is faltering, the question of how we measure college value has never been more urgent. Against this backdrop, the just-released 2025 College Rankings from Washington Monthly offer a way to measure higher education’s value.

In an introduction to the issue, editor in chief Paul Glastris and editor Rob Wolfe write: “Instead of rewarding colleges for their wealth, prestige, and exclusivity, we measure how much they help ordinary middle- and working-class students get ahead, encourage democratic participation and service to the country, and produce the scholars and scholarship that drive economic growth and human flourishing. These, we think, are what most Americans want from their investments in the higher ed system.”

Read more in Forbes. 

A recent article in the New York Times seemed to signal an AI-fueled apocalypse for job seekers. The article profiled the plight of recent college graduates who’d expected six-figure jobs with their computer science degrees but were now scrapping for shifts at Chipotle. According to one expert quoted in the Times, the jobs “most likely to be automated are the entry-level positions that [recent graduates] would be seeking.”

Recent research shows that AI is replacing entry-level jobs, similar to how mechanical automation eliminated low-skill manufacturing roles in past decades. However, this expanding definition of “expertise” will eventually create new jobs and pathways for workers to gain skills necessary to stay competitive in a post-AI era. The outcome could be the democratization of expertise and wider opportunities for upward mobility.

Read more in Washington Monthly.

It’s back-to-school season, with an estimated 47.2 million K-12 public school students and 3.2 million teachers returning to their classrooms. They come back to a K-12 system offering an expanding menu of public education choices for families (and teachers) that are leading parents to reshape public education. A Tyton Partners report dubs them “activated parents.” While COVID-19 accelerated this parent uprising, other longer-term forces set the stage for it.

Upheaval In The Making

Three factors have fueled a slow but relentless wave of K-12-activated parent upheaval, one that began before COVID-19 but gained unstoppable momentum during and after the pandemic.

• Expansion of public school choice. Over more than 60 years, K-12 policy changes have created a variety of public school choices for families. They now include options such as magnet schools, charter schools, microschools, learning pods, open enrollment, dual enrollment, course choice, tutoring, homeschooling, and career pathways programs. Moreover, families can mix-and-match these options. For example, more than a third of homeschool families also use traditional district public schools, and another 9% have a child in a charter public school.
• Rising dissatisfaction with public education. A Gallup poll shows that satisfaction with public education has declined. Between 2017 and 2025 , the share of adults satisfied with the quality of public education fell from 37% to 24%, reflecting a broader erosion of confidence in U.S. institutions. The 2025 Phi Delta Kappan poll reports that Americans’ confidence in K-12 public schools is at an all-time low. Only 13% grade them an A or a B, down from 19% in 2019 and 26% in 2004. Adults have more positive attitudes toward their local schools, with over 40% grading them highly.
• Public funding for private school access. Policy changes over more than 35 years in 33 states have created 81 different K-12 programs that give families public funding to cover the costs associated with private schools. These programs include vouchers, tax credits, and education savings accounts.

Continue reading in Forbes. 

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall and began its destructive path through the Gulf Coast. New Orleans bore the brunt of the devastation, not only in the loss of homes and lives, but also in the destruction of its public infrastructure, especially its schools. Over the next two decades, the governance of New Orleans’ K-12 public schools underwent a significant reinvention.

This effort produced one of the most innovative and ambitious approaches to K-12 school reform in modern American education: a system of public charter schools funded by taxpayers and independently operated as schools of choice. This reinvention of the New Orleans K-12 public school system sparked a nationwide conversation about public school governance, autonomy, school choice, and accountability.

Now, with twenty years of evidence and the return of schools to a locally elected board, the question is no longer whether New Orleans succeeded or failed. What will U.S. K-12 public education learn from this unparalleled innovation to improve the lives of New Orleans’ young people? While the New Orleans model was born of crisis, the lessons it offers extend well beyond The Big Easy.

Tulane University economist Douglas Harris and his colleagues have led the effort to understand these lessons. Harris is the founding director of the University’s Education Research Alliance for New Orleans, whose reports serve as the primary sources of information for the discussion that follows.

Read more in RealClearEducation.

Finally—A Win For Political Bipartisanship

“We just expanded the definition of college,” writes Kathleen deLaski, capturing the spirit behind the new Workforce Pell legislation in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4. The legislation extends post-secondary Pell Grant financial eligibility to short-term training programs that currently are not eligible to be paid for using federal aid.

While the Beautiful Bill Act passed with a mostly party-line vote, Workforce Pell has long had bipartisan legislative support at the federal level in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Additionally, this approach has strong support from many quarters, including working-class voters, broadly defined as those without a four-year college degree.

A Progressive Policy Institute/YouGov Survey of working-class voters reports that when given five options to choose what would most help them have a good job, career, and get ahead, the number one response of nearly half (46%) was “affordable, short-term training programs that combine work and learning,” followed by “more opportunities for apprenticeships with companies” (23%). Only 9% said a four-year college degree, which came in four out of five.

As Lisa Larson, CEO of the Education Design Lab, writes in Community College Daily, “Workforce Pell has finally become law after years of advocacy, stalled negotiations in Congress and a groundswell of support from educators, employers, and learners.”

Read more in Forbes.

Teenagers from around the world enter the workforce blindfolded. They are intensely interested in future careers. Their expectations, though, are outdated because they are not aware of the career options available to them. Family background plays a significant role in shaping this mismatch, more than real-world insights or aptitude.

This news of teens adrift as they move from school to work is the central message from a new report released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the State of Global Teenage Career Preparation. The report uses 2022 data from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It surveyed roughly 690,000 15- and 16-year-old students from more than 80 countries, including the U.S. OECD began collecting this data in 2000 with a smaller group of countries, which allows it to make comparisons over this time period.

Read more in Forbes.

At a recent dinner party with people who would define themselves as “very liberal,” someone asked me whether my new center-left employer was uncomfortable with my long record of advocacy for charter schools. “No,” I shrugged, “because charter schools are public schools.”

“But they aren’t real public schools,” he chided.

I’ve had this same conversation dozens of times in the last twenty years, and it goes to the heart of the debate now about private school choice. What makes a public school “public”? What does it mean to provide children with a “public education”?

Ask most Americans to define “public schools” or “public education,” and you’re likely to get a response that goes something like “public education happens at public schools; public schools are schools everyone can go to, they’re free, and they have to follow the rules set by the government.”

Read more in RealClearEducation.

“We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education,” writes political and cultural commentator David Brooks in The Atlantic. What might be the foundation for the main elements of this rigorous education in morals?

As I thought about this question, I kept returning to two of my parents go to maxims, directed to me—and my siblings—on a regular basis. They offered me a springboard to answer this question.

The first maxim was, “Use your common sense.” The second maxim, meant to reinforce the first, was one of the worst things they could say about someone: “That person doesn’t have any common sense.”

As a young person, I was attracted to the simplicity of these maxims, though not always sure how to apply them as I navigated my way around Collinwood, our Italian-American neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. They have been with me for over 70 years, shaping my perspective on life.

Read more in Forbes.