News from Higher Ed | December 2025

Workers are being crushed by the soaring costs of basics—housing, healthcare, childcare, college, even the cost of keeping up with credit cards or medical bills. We want to hear from you. What are the most urgent affordability issues you experience? Help us shape the resources we build to help members get the relief you need. Please fill out this confidential AFT Debt Survey and share it with your members.

 

Maris Cinelli loves the McNair scholars who come through her medicinal plant chemistry lab each year. Their fresh perspectives and creativity introduce important ideas she and other established scientists might never consider—like new sources for antibiotics and other medicines. Now, all that may end as cuts to the McNair program eliminate the resources these students need to stay in school; research will be abandoned, and the students will lose crucial opportunities to advance their academic careers. What’s more, the world will lose out on their brilliance. Read Cinelli’s AFT Voices post reflecting on that loss.

 

As access to affordable healthcare is threatened, many Americans live in fear that they’re just one medical emergency away from financial crisis. In this AFT Voices post, adjunct professor Thomas Moomjy shows us exactly what that feels like, describing the serious illness that landed him in the hospital and the impossible medical bill that followed—with no insurance to cover it.

 

Higher ed has been grappling with the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence technologies that have a huge and immediate impact on institutions and the people who keep them running. Our Key Principles for Using Artificial Intelligence will help you capitalize on the benefits of AI, thwart the problems it can cause, and—through your union and campus governance body—have a strong and vital voice in crafting policy, protecting student and worker privacy, safeguarding intellectual property and ensuring accessibility for all.

 

Misinformation can divide communities and endanger lives. That’s why a group of faculty librarians at Seattle Central College partnered on Co-Designing for Trust, which engaged students in helping to develop lesson plans to identify and counter falsehoods. In April 2025, the Trump administration cut its funding despite the work being almost complete. In the Fall 2025 issue of American Educator, learn how students and librarians were collaborating—and why this work must continue.

 

For a long time, Target was everyone’s darling, and its diversity, equity and inclusion programs won customer loyalty, especially among Black and Latino shoppers. But shortly after President Trump took office in January 2025, Target abandoned those policies. Customers are not having it, and as the holiday season approaches, the AFT has joined a renewed Target boycott that is gaining momentum, inspired in part by its own success.

 

The latest issue of the American Association of University Professors’ Journal of Academic Freedom thoroughly explores the impact of large private donations on academic freedom and the educational mission of colleges and universities. The effects are particularly salient at a time when fiscal constraints—resulting from decades of disinvestment in public higher education—form the backdrop for increasing dependence on philanthropy. Take a look at the entire journal issue here. Image: Deagreez/Getty.