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A week after Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team voted to form the first athlete union in college sports, House Republicans warned Tuesday that unionization poses an “existential threat” to the future of college sports. Democrats countered that “the sky is not falling.” While congressional committees have held a number of hearings in the past year about the state of college athletics and athlete compensation, this was the first to tackle head-on what’s become one of the key questions facing college athletics today: whether players should be considered employees who can collectively bargain.

Fissures in colleges’ finances have been starting to show in the past year, with some prominent institutions, like West Virginia University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Chicago, experiencing unexpected budget shortfalls coming out of the pandemic. Further down the rankings and prestige ladder, the environment is considerably tougher, as regional-public and small-private institutions have had to offer generous scholarship and financial-aid packages just to bring in students. All this instability has people asking how any particular institution — my safety college, my alma mater, my employer — is faring these days. It can be difficult to find the answer.

After months of delays and technical hiccups, some colleges and universities have started to receive federal data they need to put together financial aid offers for incoming students, the Biden administration said Monday.
The Education Department says it sent a batch of student records to “a few dozen schools” on Sunday and is making final updates before expanding to more universities. The department did not say which schools received the first batch or how many student records were sent.

President Biden wants $2.1 billion next fiscal year to increase the Pell Grant and cover a funding gap in the $29 billion program that could lead to eligibility cuts if not addressed. The increase is part of a proposed 2025 budget released Monday that includes free community college and new funding for student support programs and institutions that serve underrepresented students. Spending on the Pell program, which helps low-income students pay for college, has gone up by nearly 15 percent in the past year following a series of increases to the maximum award and changes to eligibility that expanded access to the pot of money, according to the Office of Management and Budget, which projected a $1.3 billion shortfall for fiscal year 2025. The additional $2.1 billion will help but not avert a shortfall, according to OMB projections, leaving a gap of $4.6 billion in 2026.

Logan Zielinski, a high-school senior in Sterling Heights, Mich., spent much of the fall getting wooed by football coaches at small Midwestern colleges. Scholarships were a major part of their pitches. This week he is committing to enroll and play at one of those schools, Concordia University Ann Arbor, without having any idea how much it will cost. The federal government hasn’t yet sent colleges any information about applicants’ family finances, which the schools need to make financial-aid offers. Coaches, though, were pushing Logan to commit so they could firm up their team rosters.