Almost immediately after Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House and the Department of Education launched a shock-and-awe assault against its perceived foes in higher education, announcing a new investigation or seizure of funding seemingly every week. Their targets appeared overwhelmed by the speed and severity of the offensive. By the end of November, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and Northwestern had all made deals with the administration to stop the onslaught. Harvard was rumored to be close to reaching a deal as well. But the aggressive pace that won the administration so many early victories eventually proved to be its great weakness. The government could move so quickly only by skipping almost all of the procedural steps required by federal law. Once universities and their allies recovered from their shock and challenged the Trump administration, they were able to block many, if not most, of the White House's moves in court. Trump has certainly left his mark on America's universities. But he has not broken them....

Leslie 'Les' Perelman, an influential figure in college writing assessment; a champion of writing instruction across all subject matters for over three decades at MIT; and a former MIT associate dean for undergraduate education, died on Nov. 12, 2025, at home in Lexington, Massachusetts. He was 77. A Los Angeles native, Perelman attended the University of California at Berkeley, joining in its lively activist years, and in 1980 received his PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. After stints at the University of Southern California and Tulane University, he returned to Massachusetts ' to MIT ' in 1987, and stayed for the next 35 years. Perelman became best known for his dogged critique of autograding systems and writing assessments that didn't assess actual college writing. The Boston Globe dubbed him 'The man who killed the SAT essay.' He told NPR that colleges 'spend the first year deprogramming [students] from the five-paragraph essay.' His widow, MIT Professor Emerita Elizabeth Garrels, says that while attending a conference, Perelman ' who was practically blind without his glasses ' arranged to stand at one end of a room in order to 'grade' essays held up for him on the other side. 'He would call out the grade that each essay would likely receive on standardized scoring,' Garrels says. 'And he was consistently right.' Perelman was doing what automatic scorers were: He was, he said in the NPR interview, 'mirroring how automated or formulaic grading systems often reward form over substance.'...

XCL operates K-12 school campuses across Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Its portfolio includes XCL World Academy in Singapore, the American School of Bangkok's Sukhumvit campus, and Vietnam Australia International School. Temasek Holdings is also a shareholder. The $1.3bn agreement reinforces KKR's conviction in education platforms across Asia. The firm has backed multiple education assets in the region, including Lighthouse Learning in India and Taylor's Education Group in Southeast Asia, as well as EQuest Education, Vinschools, and Cognita Schools. KKR has deployed approximately $15bn across Southeast Asia. Earlier this month, the firm led a consortium to acquire data centre operator STT GDC for S$6.6bn, equivalent to $5.2bn. In November, it provided $750m in financing to Chandra Asri Group. Subscribe to our Newsletter to increase your edge. Don't worry about the news anymore, through our newsletter you'll receive weekly access to what is happening. Join 120,000 other PE professionals today....

Training for a clerical military role in France, Gustavo Barboza felt a spark he couldn't ignore. He remembered his love of learning, which once guided him through two college semesters of mechanical engineering courses in his native Colombia, coupled with supplemental resources from MIT Open Learning's OpenCourseWare. Now, thousands of miles away, he realized it was time to follow that spark again. Joining the military in France in 2017 was his answer. For the first three years of service, he was very military-minded, only focused on his training and deployments. With more seniority, he took on more responsibilities, and eventually was sent to take a four-month training course on military correspondence and software. At that point, Barboza realized that military service was only a chapter in his life, and the next would lead him back to learning. He was still interested in engineering, and knew that MIT OpenCourseWare could help prepare him for what was next. He dove into OpenCourseWare's free, online, open educational resources ' which cover nearly the entire MIT curriculum ' including classical mechanics, intro to electrical engineering, and single variable calculus with David Jerison, which he says was his most-visited resource. These allowed him to brush up on old skills and learn new ones, helping him tremendously in preparing for college entrance exams and his first-year courses....