This week in college admissions, Princeton leads U.S. News college rankings, Shonda Rhimes makes a major donation to Dartmouth, a federal judge orders the NIH to restore grants to UCLA, and MacKenzie Scott makes a donation to strengthen HBCUs.
This year’s U.S. News & World Report college rankings have been published. The list looks very similar to last year’s, with Princeton maintaining the top spot, followed by MIT and Harvard. Williams was named the nation’s best liberal arts college, and U.C. Berkeley took over from UCLA as the top-ranked public university.
Shonda Rhimes has pledged $15 million to Dartmouth, which will be used to construct a new dormitory bearing her name. Rhimes, a Dartmouth alum, is the writer and producer behind hit shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal. The new residence hall will be both the first campus building named after a woman and the first named after a Black alum.
A federal judge has ordered the NIH to temporarily restore research grant funding it cut from UCLA. She also ordered the departments of Defense, Transportation, and Health and Human Services to restore funding to University of California researchers. Researchers and faculty from the UC system are involved in an ongoing lawsuit with the Trump administration over grant terminations.
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has donated $70 million to the UNCF, the nation’s largest private provider of scholarships for BIPOC students. The gift will be used to strengthen endowments at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has pledged to donate more than half her net worth to philanthropic causes.
Leave a Reply