Compiled by SUSAN JONES

A new report from the Department of Education details gifts and contracts reported by institutions of higher education valued at $250,000 or more. The total for all schools was more than $67.6 billion.

Carnegie Mellon University receives the second highest amount in foreign funding of any university in the country, trailing just behind Harvard University, according to the Post-Gazette.

Between 1986 and 2025, the CMU disclosed $3.9 billion in foreign gifts and contracts, the data shows.

The bulk of that funding comes from Qatar, a Middle Eastern country where CMU has a campus. In a statement Thursday, CMU said more than 90% of Qatari funding is used to operate its Qatar campus, which opened more than two decades ago.

The University of Pennsylvania had the second highest amount in the state, at $2.8 billion. Pitt reported foreign gifts and contracts of $149 million.

FEB. 12

• New gifts to college endowments fell 9.2% in fiscal 2025 to just under $14 billion, with some colleges suffering steeper declines in donations, according to a study of over 650 institutions from the National Association of College and University Business Officers and asset management firm Commonfund.

• Universities are spending more than 50 percent less on advertising than they were 10 years ago. According to data compiled by the Postsecondary Education and Economics Research Center at American University, after peaking at $1.29 billion in 2014, advertising spending by higher education institutions dropped to $600 million in 2022.

FEB. 11

• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently rolled out a new policy that permits university officials to record classes without notifying the instructor, Inside Higher Ed reported. It’s a practice administrators have used in the past to investigate professors but have now formalized in writing.

• Beginning in August, the LSAT — the required entrance exam for law school admissions — will only be administered in person to protect the “security and integrity” of the test, the Law School Admission Council announced. Test takers will still complete the exam digitally, but they must do so at in-person testing centers, which will help deter potential misconduct, Susan Krinsky, executive vice president for operations and chief of staff at LSAC, wrote in a news release.

FEB. 10

• The Massachusetts Board of Higher Education has opened the door for colleges and universities across the state to offer three-year bachelor’s degrees, a move aimed at boosting access to higher degrees while some have raised concerns it could diminish education quality. The board voted to approve a regulation allowing higher education institutions to submit pilot proposals for degree programs that differ from current criteria, like the 120-credit requirement, according to NBC Boston.

• Stanford University discontinued its Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Doctoral Fellowship, a graduate program aimed at diversifying its student body, The Stanford Daily reported. The university also will no longer offer housing and dining support for students from outside the Bay Area who participate in its Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship. 

FEB. 9

Seventy House Democrats sent a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon demanding answers on the department’s backlog in civil rights cases, The Hill reported. The Democrats, led by Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), expressed concern at the number of Office of Civil Rights employees laid off under the Trump administration when the president’s term started with over 22,000 complaints filed in 2024.

FEB. 6

• The U.S. Department of Defense plans to cut its academic relationship with Harvard University in yet another effort by the Trump administration to inflict pain on the Ivy League institution. The department said it will discontinue fellowships, certificate programs and graduate-level professional military education for active duty military members at Harvard beginning with the 2026-27 academic year. It will allow current students to complete their studies. In a social media post about the decision, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “Harvard is woke; The War Department is not.” 

• A federal prosecutor in Massachusetts said that the federal government will not return a 19-year-old college student who was deported over Thanksgiving despite a court order blocking her removal, ABC News reported. Any Lucia Lopez Belloza was deported to Honduras in November shortly after she was detained, even though a federal judge had ordered the government not to remove her from the U.S. or transfer her out of Massachusetts. 

• Chief Judge Albert Diaz of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a preliminary injunction affecting President Trump’s executive orders aimed at DEI programs in the public and private sectors, including at colleges receiving federal funding, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported. Higher-education advocates had argued in a lawsuit last year that the orders, signed during Trump’s first week in office, violated free-speech protections. While the ruling only concerned the injunction, which had been stayed for nearly a year, Diaz wrote that Trump’s orders likely did not violate the Constitution.

FEB. 5

The Education Department sent a message to colleges and universities nationwide Thursday: Any that use data released this year by a massive student voting study risk being labeled violators of a federal law protecting student privacy, and suffering financial consequences for it. The move — and the department’s new investigations into the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement — could impact college student participation in this year’s midterm elections

FEB. 4

• More than one-third of faculty are adjuncts who receive low pay and limited job security, and new data shows that women, Black people and instructors in non-STEM disciplines are overrepresented in the adjunct ranks. Those are some of the key takeaways from a new report about the state of the adjunct workforce that the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources published last week.

• Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt recently signed Executive Order 2026-07 immediately abolishing academic tenure at the state's public regional universities and community colleges, prompting sharp criticism from the Association of University Professors and raising questions about the future of faculty protections in the state, the EDU Ledger reported.

• A former English literature professor at Texas A&M University sued the institution’s leaders over her termination, which followed a wave of conservative furor aimed at her teaching of gender identity. The public university fired Melissa McCoul in September. In part, its termination notice said she failed to align her coursework and syllabus for a children’s literature class with the description listed in the course catalog, according to the lawsuit.  But in the lawsuit, McCoul described the university’s reasons for terminating her as “shifting, false, and nonsensical.” Instead, Texas A&M fired her over the content of her course — “content that was consistent with her syllabus, the course description, and the approved purpose of the course,” the complaint said.

FEB. 3

The Supreme Court ruling in 2023 banning race-conscious college admissions led to declines in Black and Latino admissions at highly selective universities, according to the New York Times. At many other schools, the opposite occurred, according to a new analysis by nonprofit organization, Class Action. Overall, freshman enrollment of underrepresented minority groups increased by 8 percent at public flagship universities, while at the nation’s 50 most selective schools, Black freshman enrollment was down by 27 percent and Latino enrollment down by 10 percent.

JAN. 30

A federal judge last week dismissed an antitrust lawsuit against six major academic publishers, ending a legal battle over their peer review and submission practices. The lawsuit against Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis, and Springer Nature argued that several of the publishers’ practices functioned as a conspiracy to fix the price of peer review labor at $0, restrict academics from submitting to more than one journal at a time and limit their ability to share their work. But U.S. District Judge Hector Gonzalez ruled the lawsuit relied on “a series of inferential leaps” and failed to demonstrate “direct evidence of an antitrust conspiracy.”

JAN. 26

A lawsuit filed last week alleged Cornell University allowed diversity, equity and inclusion administrators to create an interview list consisting only of “underrepresented minority scholars” for a faculty hire, violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Higher Ed Dive reported. “(I)t intentionally discriminated against qualified candidates by brazenly refusing to consider white candidates,” according to the plaintiff, who filed the lawsuit alongside attorneys for the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by Trump advisors.

JAN. 23

The high school class of 2026 has completed a collective 1.6 million federal student aid applications for higher education for the 2026-27 school year as of Jan. 23, or about 52% more than the class of 2025 by the same date, according to a tracker from the National College Attainment Network. The U.S. Department of Education, which oversees the FAFSA process, reports that it has processed a total of 7.6 million applications — including for the high school class of 2026 and all other filers — for federal student aid for the next school year as of Jan. 30. 

Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.

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