Today’s opening note is authored by W/A’s Ted Eismeier.

Almost a decade ago, I worked with Julie Peller and Emily West — a pair of (D) and (R) former Capitol Hill staffers who went on to found the Today's Students Coalition — on some early efforts to reframe who higher education was actually for. The argument was pretty simple: the working adult, the parent, the person juggling a job and a credential was already the majority. And that majority was — and is — disproportionately first-generation, Latino, Black, and low-income. Back then, Congress hadn't updated the Higher Education Act in years. Almost a decade later, they still haven't.

But the students haven't waited. And the case for policy that reflects their reality has never been stronger.

Dr. Aarti Dhupelia, a former City Colleges of Chicago chief student experience officer now leading One Million Degrees, writes in Community College Daily that community colleges — which enroll roughly 40% of the nation's undergraduates, skewing heavily toward students of color and working adults — didn't need to discover workforce alignment. They built it. Siemens training 25,000 people for electrical careers through community college partnerships. Volkswagen building an academy at Chattanooga State. Their programs are built around in-demand skills and alignment with industry needs — all in service of producing talent ready for real jobs. The infrastructure exists. Now, we need policy to fund and scale it (a possibility depending on the results of the Workforce Pell policy experiment).

Elsewhere, Jillian Klein of Strategic Education makes the demographic math explicit in University Business. This spring's graduating class is one of the last big ones, but from here on it, the pipeline will shrink. Her framing is personal — she left her own Ph.D. when life got complicated — but her argument has important policy implications for the 40 million+ adults who started college and never finished aren't a philanthropic talking point. They are disproportionately working parents whose lives couldn't pause for an institution that wasn't designed for them. Redesigning for those students — credit transfer, prior learning recognition, flexible scheduling — isn't an accommodation. It's the whole game.

New data from InsideTrack's California Reconnect initiative shows what's possible when you do. Coaching stopped-out adults back to re-enrollment at nearly three times the state and national average — and the gains were largest where the need is greatest: first-generation students made up nearly two-thirds of all learners who persisted after re-enrolling, and Hispanic/Latino learners represented nearly half. As InsideTrack's Ruth Bauer puts it: "The adults who stopped out are not people who gave up — they're people whose potential was interrupted, but not extinguished, by the real demands of work, family, and financial pressure."

The Today's Students Coalition was making this case when it was easier to dismiss. Much harder to ignore today.

-Ted

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