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Why community colleges can’t be fixed — they must be rebuilt
Community College Daily
Mordecai Ian Brownlee
January 15, 2026
As America’s demographic, economic, political and technological realities continue to shift, so too do society’s expectations of higher education and its community colleges. Resilient by Design, recently published by the American Association of Community Colleges, is a transformative guide for institutions to embrace the reality that resilience is not about absorbing disruption, but about being designed to adapt.
Historically, the term “relevance” was not something that higher education had to defend. For generations, colleges and universities were seen as the go-to path for success and opportunity. While public confidence in higher education has weakened over the years, according to Gallup data, public trust appears to be rising once again. However, this recovery in trust does not erase a deeper structural challenge: the expectations that learners and employers place on higher education have fundamentally changed, and many institutions remain misaligned with the demands of today’s economy, workforce partners and the learners themselves.
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Trump Administration Begins to Send ED Employees to DOL
NASFAA
Maria Carrasco
January 16, 2026
The Trump administration on Thursday announced its next steps to dismantle the Department of Education (ED) by sending higher education agency staff over to the Department of Labor (DOL) beginning next week, a move that is also complicating congressional negotiations over ED’s annual funding.
Staff in the Higher Education Programs (HEP) Division of ED’s Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE) will begin working at DOL starting on January 20. With this transition, ED noted that HEP grantees will transition to DOL’s Grant Solutions and Payment Management System in an effort to align the grants management and payment systems across ED and DOL’s postsecondary and workforce programs.
Earlier in November, ED announced six new interagency agreements (IAAs) aimed at transferring several of the department’s responsibilities to other federal agencies, which include DOL. Under this agreement, DOL will “take on a greater role in administering postsecondary education grant programs authorized under the Higher Education Act (HEA),” ED stated in November.
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Five Takeaways From the Higher Ed Accountability Rulemaking
AEI
Preston Cooper
January 15, 2026
Colleges which fail to deliver a return on investment for their graduates have been put on notice.
Last week, the Education Department convened a negotiated rulemaking committee to draft implementing regulations for a section of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) that holds colleges accountable for students’ earnings outcomes. The committee—in which I participated as the designated advocate for taxpayers and the public interest—adopted the 64-page regulation by consensus, meaning the Department is bound to use the language we agreed on when it issues a formal proposed rule.
Here are five major takeaways from the rulemaking.
1. Programs will need to pass a harmonized earnings benchmark.
The Education Department’s goal in crafting accountability regulations was “harmonization”—the principle that the same standards should apply to all higher education programs, regardless of the college’s sector or the credential type. To that end, the regulation requires all programs receiving federal student loan funding to pass an earnings test.
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