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  • The support paradox is a poverty problem

    The support paradox is a poverty problem

    The university mental health infrastructure has never been bigger, and students have never been less aware of it.

    The University Mental Health Charter now has 113 signatories, counselling teams have been expanded, wellbeing hubs have been built, digital platforms have been commissioned, and training has been rolled out to staff.

    And yet new polling data raises real questions – not just about whether all of that is reaching the right people, but about whether institutional investment is approaching the limits of what it can achieve when the external factors that most shape student mental health are all moving in the wrong direction.

    Cibyl’s Student mental health study 2025 – fieldwork October 2024 to August 2025, 6,685 respondents from 140-plus universities, weighted for gender and institution – opens with a modest improvement narrative.

    Life satisfaction is marginally up, at 5.7 from 5.6. There’s been a small decline in the proportion worrying about their mental health daily or weekly.

    Fewer respondents than ever – 13 per cent, down from 16 per cent – say they’ve never received any mental health training, information, or advice. The proportion with very low mental health by all three of the report’s composite measures has dipped fractionally, from 5 per cent in 2023 to 4 per cent.

    If you squint, you can see progress. But the structural picture tells a different story.

    Built it, didn’t come

    The headline finding is that service awareness is declining. In 2021, 53 per cent of respondents were aware of counselling services. This year, that’s down to 42 per cent.

    Mentoring and buddy pairing awareness has dropped from 33 per cent to 20 per cent over the same period. Two in five respondents weren’t aware their university offered preventative and recreational services like yoga, nature walks, or art classes.

    More than half – 54 per cent – have never used any university support service. And a quarter don’t know any services exist.

    This can’t be a teething problem with new provision. The UMHC was launched in 2019, Student Minds has been working with universities for years, and the services have been built, expanded, promoted, and evaluated. And students are less aware of them now than when the whole thing started.

    Among those who are aware, a fifth say shame stops them engaging, while three in ten saying they don’t know how to express what’s going on – as the report puts it, articulating mental distress is itself a barrier.

    A quarter feel nothing can be done to help them, and one in ten reports difficulty securing an appointment. In-person counselling is preferred over online by a margin of more than four to one – 62 per cent versus 14 per cent – but fewer than three in ten respondents have actually used the services offered through their university.

    Four in five who have used university and SU wellbeing sessions rate them effective or very effective. The services aren’t necessarily bad – the people who need them most aren’t walking through the door.

    Scroll to cope

    Something else is filling the gap. Two in five respondents agree they over-prioritise social media, and heavier use correlates with lower mental health scores – yet two-thirds use it to watch wellbeing videos, more than a third for mental health testimonials, and nearly three in ten cite it as a useful source of mental health information.

    Social media is simultaneously the villain and the substitute counsellor, and the report holds both positions without resolution.

    Harder to ignore is that as formal service awareness declines, informal digital self-help is expanding to fill the vacuum. Whether that’s a coping strategy or a warning sign depends on which page you’re reading.

    The report describes a kind of paradox of engagement:

    …those most affected by mental health concerns are often least likely to engage with or trust available support.

    The narrative framing reaches for stigma reduction and proactive outreach as solutions. But the data points somewhere else.

    When you ask respondents what actually prevents them from using strategies to stay mentally healthy, the answer isn’t shame or ignorance. It’s poverty. Fifty-seven per cent say financial constraints are the barrier – up from 43 per cent when the study launched in 2021.

    Among respondents with low mental health scores, 60 per cent worry about money daily. Among those with a mental health disability, 53 per cent worry daily. Among those in unsupportive environments, 60 per cent.

    That doesn’t just seem to be impacting access to formal services. Financial stress is preventing students from deploying the basic self-care strategies that every wellbeing campaign pushes at them. Exercise costs money, or at least time that could be spent earning.

    Eating healthily costs more than eating badly – the Food Foundation’s Broken plate 2025 report says the poorest fifth of the population would need to spend 45 per cent of their disposable income to meet the government’s recommended diet, rising to 70 per cent for households with children.

    Social events cost money. Even being in nature, one of the most commonly cited coping strategies, requires the time and transport that come from not needing a third shift at a part-time job.

    In our Belong polling last year, students told us in their own words what this looks like in practice.

    I can’t afford a lot of things. I struggle to buy food, period products, and other healthcare. I’m inclined to work when I’m sick because I need to cover tuition and rent.

    One wrote simply:

    Feel very tired due to uni, aware my health could be better, but do not have the time.

    Seven in ten respondents in this year’s study attributed their mental health difficulties either partly or fully to concerns about living costs. Daily money worry has risen steadily across the full five-year series, from one in four in 2021 to two in five today. Only 6 per cent of respondents enjoy the luxury of never worrying about money, and that falls to 2 per cent among those with low mental health scores.

    Students from low socio-economic backgrounds rank financial concerns at 8.2 out of 10, compared with 7.3 among those from high socio-economic backgrounds, and two-thirds of low-SE respondents say finances prevent them staying mentally healthy, compared with 43 per cent of high-SE respondents.

    Low-SE students are also less likely to have satisfying friendships – 38 per cent versus 61 per cent – and more likely to be dissatisfied with the friendships they do have – 40 per cent versus 21 per cent. Poverty doesn’t just deprive students of services. It deprives them of each other.

    Whose framework

    There are some uncomfortable questions that surround who the frameworks are even designed for. Black and Asian respondents are the most likely to report no experience of mental health difficulties – 25 per cent and 23 per cent, versus 10 per cent of White respondents – but they also receive less mental health training at school (22 per cent and 25 per cent versus 38 per cent of White respondents), less at university (40 per cent and 36 per cent versus 46 per cent), and are less likely to use social media for mental health information.

    A quarter to nearly a third say none of the suggested barriers to services applied to them, compared with 16 to 19 per cent of White respondents. The pattern raises a difficult question – are Black and Asian students genuinely experiencing fewer difficulties, or are the measurement tools and support frameworks culturally calibrated for White British experiences in ways that systematically miss how mental health presents in other communities? The data can’t answer that, but it should prompt the sector to ask it.

    Add it all up and you get the sense that the sector has spent years building mental health services that assume students have the time, money, and headspace to access them. The data increasingly suggests that assumption is wrong. The students who need help most are working extra shifts, skipping meals, and choosing between bus fare to a counselling appointment and eating dinner.

    As one graduate respondent in the Cibyl study put it:

    My full-time graduate role was incredibly demanding on my time, so I was unable to prioritise my mental health at all.

    Proactive outreach doesn’t fix that. The support paradox, on this reading, isn’t an engagement problem. It’s a poverty problem.

    Attitudes up, conditions down

    This matters because the report’s improvement narrative rests almost entirely on attitudinal shifts. Students value mental health provision more. Slightly fewer have never received any training. First-years who say good mental health provision was important when choosing their university rose from 39 per cent in 2021 to a peak of 60 per cent in 2023, and it’s still at 58 per cent this year.

    Among graduates, 82 per cent say it’s important that their employer prioritises employee mental health – up from 32 per cent in 2021. Only 5 per cent say it doesn’t matter. These are cultural shifts.

    But every structural indicator is moving the wrong way. Daily financial worry is up. The proportion saying finances prevent them staying healthy has risen from 43 per cent to 57 per cent over the study’s life.

    Six per cent of graduates have now quit a job because of mental health difficulties – double the 3 per cent recorded in 2021, and up from 4 per cent last year. One in four employed graduates finds themselves in a role that didn’t require a degree, doubled from one in eight last year. And awareness of the services designed to help is in decline.

    None of this is to say that the institutional effort doesn’t matter, or that the UMHC has been wasted. Charter progress has been real, if slow – but the vast majority of UMHC signatories have yet to achieve an award, and the framework itself has no enforcement mechanism.

    The harder question is what even an excellent institutional mental health strategy can achieve when the financial, housing, and social conditions surrounding students are all deteriorating simultaneously. There may be a ceiling on what universities can do from inside the system, and the data suggests we’re approaching it.

    Money worries don’t stop at graduation, either. Three in five graduates say finances prevent them using strategies to stay mentally healthy – 62 per cent – and two in five have daily financial concerns – 38 per cent – virtually identical figures to students. The financial stress is a condition graduates carry with them into the workplace.

    The graduates

    Some of the most uncomfortable – and underreported – data in this year’s study concerns what happens after graduation.

    More than a third – 37 per cent – of graduates seeking work have low mental health, compared with 23 per cent of employed graduates and 22 per cent of students. Job hunting is brutal – two-thirds say their mental health declined during the process, and graduates rate the stress of it at 7.5 out of 10.

    From a small sample, just 3 per cent said their mental health actually improved while job seeking. Only two in five secured a job offer within three months, one in four took four to six months, and one in five waited more than a year. Job-seeking graduates were more likely than those in work to worry daily or weekly about not being good enough – 68 per cent versus 60 per cent – and about their finances – 65 per cent versus 59 per cent.

    Employment doesn’t just provide income and structure – it provides the social contact and framework through which people recognise and articulate their mental health difficulties. Working graduates are, on some measures, more distressed than job-seekers, but they’re also more capable of identifying what’s wrong.

    Unemployment appears to produce worse composite outcomes and less capacity to name them. The structure of work may help people see themselves clearly. The absence of it leaves them invisible – to services, to employers, and to themselves.

    This matters for how we think about the post-university transition. Neither universities, employers, the NHS, nor the DWP treats recently graduated job-seekers as a population deserving of targeted mental health intervention. The moment a student crosses the stage, they fall out of every institutional framework designed to catch them – and the data says that’s when a large proportion are at their worst, and least able to ask for help.

    As one international student told the study:

    All international students experience mental health concerns after moving abroad to study as they have to cope with immense study load, part time jobs, financial stress, and the stress of living alone with no proper friends.

    International graduates were significantly more likely than their UK peers to experience a mental health decline when looking for work, at 66 per cent versus 51 per cent.

    Belonging again

    Belonging is in there again, as we would expect. Students who live with friends, who have satisfying friendships, who participate in extracurricular activities – all report life satisfaction scores of 6.0 or above. Students with no friends score 4.6.

    Students with dissatisfying friendships score 4.5 – below the Covid-19-year average. The difference between a connected student and an isolated one is larger than almost any other variable in this study.

    One in three respondents worried about making friends daily or weekly, and among students taking a year out, that rose to 42 per cent. Seventeen per cent reported having no friends at university at all, while 53 per cent said social anxiety prevented them from using strategies to stay mentally healthy, rising to 64 per cent among those with low mental health scores.

    Isolation worsens mental health, and poor mental health deepens isolation – the cycle is hard to break from inside it.

    Before they arrived

    One other finding deserves more attention than it typically gets. Among respondents who had experienced suicidal thoughts, 85 per cent first had those thoughts before university. Among those who had self-harmed, 80 per cent started before arriving.

    Forty-two per cent of first-year undergraduates had some kind of mental health diagnosis prior to starting, with a further 13 per cent diagnosed during their first year. One in five of all respondents was diagnosed at university, while fewer than two in five had been diagnosed prior to arrival.

    Universities are inheriting real problems from a school system, an NHS, and a childhood and adolescence that are failing to provide adequate early intervention. Universities are coping with the downstream consequences of upstream failure – and being expected to do it within the tight timeframes and squeezed budgets that characterise the English system in particular.

    This is the context in which the diminishing returns question becomes acute – even the best-resourced university mental health service is intervening late in a process that began years before the student enrolled.

    One in six respondents had used A&E for mental health – rising to two in five among those taking a year out – suggesting crises severe enough to warrant emergency intervention, or barriers to GP care so profound that the emergency room becomes the only option.

    Nearly half of year-out students had used NHS or HSE counselling – 51 per cent – and close to half had used private counselling. Meanwhile, one in six respondents doesn’t seek advice from anyone when experiencing mental health difficulties, a group who are functionally invisible in any service-based strategy.

    It does raise real questions about where investment needs to go. Every pound spent treating a crisis at university is a pound that might have been better spent preventing it at school, and every policy that treats student mental health as a university problem is a policy that lets the NHS, local authorities, and the Department for Education look the other way.

    But as long as the only investment in non-clinical student mental health is expected to come from students’ tuition fees is as long as we’ll be prevented from having proper conversations about both coordination between providers and intervening early enough.

    What would actually help

    Students’ mental health is being shaped primarily by three things – whether they have enough money, whether they have friends, and what happened to them before they arrived. University mental health services are a fourth-order intervention, important for the minority who use them, invisible to the majority who don’t.

    Thus far, the sector’s strategy has been to build better fourth-order interventions. It has succeeded, in so far as those services exist and are, by most accounts, effective when accessed. But the students who need them most can’t afford to get there. Awareness is declining. The structural drivers are worsening. And the improvement narrative is resting on attitudinal data that masks material deterioration.

    As one respondent in our health polling said:

    I literally went to university at the wrong time with how much it currently costs. It’s impossible to concentrate on my studies without the constant fear of how am I going to eat tonight.

    Is there more that universities can do? There always is. But on this evidence, it would be a very silly place to start.

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  • Understanding complex ambiguous problems through the lens of Soft Systems Methodology

    Understanding complex ambiguous problems through the lens of Soft Systems Methodology

    by Joy Garfield and Amrik Singh

    As the future leaders of a society that is increasingly complex and challenging higher education students need a good grasp of social, political, economic and environmental issues and need to feel equipped to propose reasonable recommendations. This can seem a daunting prospect for anyone, let alone higher education students who may have little or no prior experience of working in these areas. Students need to understand the world view of the stakeholders and the what, how and whys of the situation being explored. What is the problem situation, how will we understand it, and why are we trying to understand it? Here we describe an approach successfully used in our postgraduate teaching at Aston Business School, UK.

    Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) (Checkland, 1986) has been successfully used in many different contexts for complex problem-solving. With its seven-stage structure it provides a framework for structuring/framing wicked problems by initially thinking about what is happening in the real world from the point of view of different stakeholders. An idealised world without any constraints is then explored from different stakeholder perspectives so that different wants/needs for a new system can be considered. Students are encouraged to use empathetic discourse to understand the multiple perspectives of the stakeholders in the problem situation. The comparison between the real world and idealised worlds allows for an eventual accommodation of future ways forward.

    Soft Systems Methodology is currently used to teach complex problem solving to postgraduate students at Aston. The module team have developed a group-based approach that has been found to produce a deeper understanding of concepts and yield better overall results, particularly given that students are mostly international postgraduate students. For most of the students their first language is not English, and they are new to complex problem-solving.

    Teaching sessions are structured around the different stages of the Soft Systems Methodology. Group work is used so that students support one another in their learning of the concepts and then apply these individually to their chosen assessment topic. The UK criminal justice system is taken as an in-class example and students are asked to think about a particular complex area to focus on, eg overcrowding in prisons in a particular city. Terminology can be particularly complex and hard to grasp if your first language is not native English, so the language used to explain concepts is kept simple and a number of areas of scaffolding are used to help to support the learning.

    The first task related to SSM involves students identifying the stakeholders and their power/interest in the complex situation. Students are then taught the concepts of a rich picture and they draw a rich picture as a group for their chosen problem situation using white board paper (example below). The rich picture itself enables students to understand the real world, stakeholder issues, conflicts, and relationships together with who interacts with the problem from outside of its boundary.  Students present their rich pictures to the wider group for formative feedback.

    This helps with constructive feedback and a deeper understanding of the complex issue. The rich pictures may seem simple, but simplifying a complex problem is complex in itself! This helps students to understand and tease apart the complexities of the problem situation. The rich picture depicts the problem situation better than just making notes alone.

    For the realisation of the idealised world, students put themselves in the shoes of the stakeholder.  This involves empathetic discourse whereby students interview one another about what they would want for a system, without taking into consideration any constraints from different stakeholder perspectives. Students are then able to expand these statements as a group to take into consideration the different aspects. From this, students construct a model which helps depict the transformation activities that the stakeholders wish to conduct to reach their desired output.

    By gaining a better understanding of the real world from drawing the rich picture and thinking about an idealised world and possible transformation activities, students can then gain an understanding for the changes going forward.

    Topics chosen by students for their assessment have included: housing refugees in the UK; online exams or in person exams at university; homelessness; impact of the pandemic on tourism; child marriages in India; a start up in France to reduce plastic packaging; finding the appropriate route for a railway between two cities in Germany. These are all complex and ambiguous problems that need to be understood before any potential solutions are made.

    During the module students develop confidence in the application of SSM and come to a true understanding of the process of accommodating different stakeholder perspectives – especially when consensus is not always possible. What we understand from this journey is that there is no ‘one shoe fits all’ solution when understanding complex ambiguous problems.

    Empathy enriches the SSM process by ensuring the human side of systems is as important as the technical side. It helps to create solutions that work not just in theory but in real, messy, human-centric environments. Empathetic discourse is very valuable to understand the voice of the stakeholders. What we have learned from the delivery of the module is that when complex ambiguous problems are human centric, then the solutions are human centric also.

    Checkland, P (1986) Systems thinking, systems practice Chichester: Wiley

    Dr Joy Garfield is a Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Learning and Teaching for an academic department at Aston Business School, Aston University, UK.  Her subject discipline area is information systems, particularly systems modelling and complex problem solving. With just over 20 years of experience in academia, she has worked at a number of UK universities. Joy is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and is currently an external examiner at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Westminster. 

    Dr Amrik Singh is a Senior Teaching Fellow at Aston University, UK. He has over 15 years of academic experience in Higher Education. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Advance HE, SFHEA. His teaching areas includes operations management, effective management consultancy, and business operations excellence. 

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • The key contribution of effective financial support in student retention

    The key contribution of effective financial support in student retention

    Author:
    Peter Gray

    Published:

    This blog was kindly authored by Peter Gray, Chairman and CEO, JS Group.

    As universities and students settle into the term, attention inevitably turns to student continuation, retention, and belonging.

    Institutions are now assessing the impact of seasonal discontent among their students, as this is traditionally a point at which many, especially first-year undergraduates, begin to question their ongoing commitment to higher education.

    There are many reasons for doubts to creep in – but one of the most significant is the challenge of continued affordability. The latest National Student Money Survey produced by Save the Student identified that 41 per cent of students consider dropping out of university life purely due to money-related reasons.

    Alongside this, undergraduates will also be asking themselves how else they can increase the financial resources that are available to them. More than two-thirds (68 per cent) of undergraduates are now working part-time to supplement their income – a 12 per cent year-on-year rise, as shown by the findings of HEPI and Advamce HE’s Student Academic Experience Survey in 2025.

    While part-time work is an option, for many students it is the nature and smooth delivery of any additional financial support (in the form of bursaries, scholarships, hardship funds and the like) from their universities that really bolsters their commitment to stay the course. Policymakers and universities themselves need to be more aware of both the importance of such supplementary funding and of the most effective way to deliver this funding to achieve the greatest impact and outcomes (including student retention).

    In recent years, JS Group have been able to build an evidence base on effective student financial support using our Aspire platform. This has been used to deliver £296 million of funding and has actively engaged with 584,000 students. For our latest academic cycle report, we’ve been able to collect in-year data on £46.3 million of support funds used by more than 145,000 students.

    From the student perspective, 91.4 per cent of those receiving funding through Aspire report a significantly more positive higher education experience. Alongside this, 86 per cent say this way of providing funding has directly contributed to their continuation (amid the backdrop of the wide-ranging personal challenges they face). Nearly 80 per cent of students say the use of Aspire as the substantive method for accessing and deploying their funding allowed them to strengthen their sense of belonging and more fully participate in university activities and in overall student life.

    The key is providing a highly effective and proven mechanism for planning, organising, and channelling the most appropriate types of student funding at the right time and in ways that achieve the greatest impact on student success. In our work with universities (designed to strengthen the effective delivery and impact of their student financial support), we describe this as enabling greater optionality for funders and increased agency – meaning genuine choice for beneficiaries.

    While there are increasingly more institutions making use of Aspire (and therefore providing more sources of data year-on-year), we’ve been able to point to some key themes that are now emerging in student financial support:

    • Range: We have recorded 801 unique types of funding streams being made available to students from the 40 Aspire-active institutions. The overall trend we are seeing is a slimmer range of provision strands but (financially) much deeper interventions by universities.
    • Average investment: We have identified an average overall increase in funds being made available to students – rising from £244 (in 2023-24) to £318 per person (in 2024-25) – partly explained by the involvement of more institutions in our system, but nevertheless an interesting comparison of investment levels for individuals.
    • Methods: The use of cash-based support has slightly increased (by about one per cent), while the use of credit-based and voucher funds has increased even more (by three per cent). The use of grocery vouchers has especially increased as universities work more closely with supermarkets to facilitate this type of access and support.
    • Timing: Forty-seven per cent of cash funding is now being drawn down by students on the same day that these funds first become available – rising to 76 per cent within the first seven days. Credit-based funds are taking longer to access (just seven per cent on day one and 21 per cent in week one), with most funds being used more than a month after their launch.
    • Use of funds: Half of all funds are now being used for cost-of-living purposes. Just over 20 per cent of cash funding alone, for example, has been used by students to pay for their accommodation – and, alongside household bills and food/groceries, these make up the three most prevalent uses of student funds. One interesting trend from the last academic year is the increasing use of cash funding to support travel, placement costs, and expenses most commonly associated with work-related experiences. This use of funding support for placements has risen by three per cent.

    In terms of the difference that all this financial support is making to students, we are continuing to work with a growing number of institutions to strengthen the link between financial investment and measurable student outcomes, especially in areas such as retention, continuation, and performance.

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  • Higher Education in the Epstein Files Exposes Soullessness

    Higher Education in the Epstein Files Exposes Soullessness

    The Epstein files reveal a dark underbelly of humanity in the most vile, unconscionable, evil ways. The people involved lack a moral compass, flout the law and treat human beings horrifically to fulfill some despicable sense of power and greed that knows no bounds. With influence, power and money, they soullessly buy others to benefit themselves. Representing the worst of what can be labeled as “transactional people,” they base relationships on reciprocal exchanges (“quid pro quo” or “tit for tat”) and scorekeeping.

    Names in the Epstein files include those in higher education—professors, administrators and board members. Their involvement leaves ripples of abhorrence, disbelief and anger. Some in the sector may believe the people named represent anomalies, asking, How can they be so blatantly morally corrupt and shameless? Don’t those in higher education believe in the promise of individuals to meet their potential, individual agency and that education is the great equalizer in society? How could they treat girls as slaves and objects, in direct opposition to all that is human?

    Whether one believes it or not, transactional people are everywhere, including in higher education. They may not act as abhorrently as those implicated in the Epstein files, but they can do real damage. Benefiting others or the institution they purportedly serve isn’t top of mind. Institutions exist to do their bidding. They don’t believe it’s in their self-interest to help anyone unless it benefits them tangibly and directly.

    Transactional people can be found among faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, donors and board members. Here are four signs of potentially transactional people at your institution.

    Cult of Personality (Self-Promoters)

    People who:

    1. Spend more time socializing than working. Attend all campus events, especially ribbon cuttings and dedications. Establish their office as a hub for members of numerous departments.
    2. Find ways to ingratiate themselves with administrators and board members. “Coincidentally” show up when and where board members are meeting, dining or socializing.
    3. Have personal friendships and vacation with the director of human resources, controller, major donors and/or board members.
    4. Insert themselves in publications and social media photographs to virtue signal.
    5. Frequently send pitches to the public relations office about their achievements and activities.
    6. Have thousands of friends on Facebook, including donors and board members.
    7. Throw parties at work for themselves or people they seek to influence.
    8. Host lunches, dinners and benefit event tables and invite personal friends and university colleagues under the guise of “university business” using university funds.

    Remember: It’s not about you; it’s all about them.

    Invisible Webs of Communication and Tribally Based Subcultures

    Very little, if anything, is confidential on a college campus. Communication doesn’t follow the chain of command and the organizational chart. It follows alliances, allegiances and mutually beneficial relationships. To understand how information travels through a university, watch for patterns that may point to transactional people, including those who:

    1. Regularly have lunch with the same people.
    2. Attend events together.
    3. Socialize with colleagues, donors and board members outside work.
    4. Have numerous relatives working at the institution.
    5. Enjoy deep bonds with senior leaders, board members and donors because of mutual affiliations such as attendance at a particular college, sharing membership in a fraternity or church, and long-standing business partnerships.
    6. Espouse beliefs and values as a means of excluding others.
    7. Believe those with the same attributes (i.e., race, gender, political party, religion) equate with trust, loyalty, competence and value. This belief becomes manifested in phrases like “I don’t know those people,” “They’re not one of us” and “They aren’t from here.”

    Notice/identify:

    1. Similar phrases or information coming from various people. This is not a coincidence. Consider the pathways of who may have found out first, second or third, based on the connections noted above.
    2. Ulterior motives such as seeking promotions or business deals with the university.
    3. Out-of-the-ordinary remarks and actions, along with behavioral pattern changes toward an individual, are red flags; something is afoot.

    Remember: If you aren’t with them, they’re against you.

    Relationships Over Right and Wrong

    For transactional people, the means justify the ends, the self is above others and ethical, moral and legal considerations don’t apply to them. Countless cases of abuse, sexual assault, discrimination, maleficence, conflict of interest and misuse of funds in higher education regularly cross headlines to shocking effect. Then the truth comes out and people say, “Everyone knew what was going on and no one did anything about it.” People wonder “why?” and “how?” The reason is simple. The transactional offender kills the messenger and unleashes their circle of influence to attack the accuser without mercy.

    Methods of killing the messenger:

    1. Implement the DARVO technique—deny, attack, reverse (roles of) victim and offender.
    2. Employ gossip, rumors and innuendo to undermine the reputation and credibility of the accuser.
    3. Disseminate insults, defamatory statements and derisive and discriminatory nicknames to break the spirit of the accuser, render the accuser unable to fulfill their job responsibilities and force the accuser’s resignation and/or termination (also known as mobbing).
    4. Gaslight the accuser with labels like “crazy,” “difficult,” “unlikable” and “dramatic.”
    5. Countercharge the accuser with an offense to deflect and redirect accusations.
    6. Engage powerful “transactional friends” in the circle of trust (i.e., donors, board members, senior administrators, alumni) to stand with the offender (also known as closing ranks).
    7. Enlist transactional friends to “befriend” the accuser, only to gather information for the offender (See above: Invisible Webs of Communication).

    Remember: Transactional people never admit wrongdoing. Nothing matters more than themselves and what they get from the institution.

    Wielding Power, Money and Influence as a Weapon

    Whether to receive material gain or protect their transactional circle of trust, transactional people always push limits of authority, keep score and use threats to receive personal benefit. This is as true for employees as it is for board members, alumni and donors. Conflict of interest means nothing to them.

    Indicators that a board member, alum or donor is transactional:

    1. Promises a contribution if the university hires their company to conduct work.
    2. Requests the university to invest in a friend’s business with the promise of a windfall to the university.
    3. Considers the university their own fiefdom, entitling them to resources and treating employees as personal servants. Transactional people shamelessly insist on preferential treatment for themselves, family members and friends, whether through admissions, scholarships, travel, accommodations, parties, access to athletics and so on.
    4. Insists on an appointment to the board’s investment or advancement committee but never makes contributions, attends full board meetings or participates in university events.
    5. Threatens to withdraw support if the administration won’t fire someone they don’t like or their employee “friend” doesn’t like because they were accused of wrongdoing.
    6. Nominates someone to serve on the board because “they are a good guy” (aka, a fraternity brother), even though they don’t meet the criteria for appointment, nor are they able to contribute financially.
    7. Contributes to the governor’s election campaign in exchange for a seat on the board but doesn’t contribute to the institution. Only focuses on personal and political agendas often not aligned with the institution’s mission, vision and values.
    8. Constantly questions why the underrepresented, underserved and differently abled deserve scholarships or other types of support.
    9. Only makes contributions associated with special, high-profile events like exclusive golf outings or galas to impress friends, ingratiate themselves with those more powerful and woo potential clients. Their attention focuses on the size of their logo, the number of perks, how many friends they can invite as guests and who’s sitting at the head table. Whatever they attend, consider it a circus to placate egos.
    10. Relentlessly pressures university administrators to abandon the humanities in favor of majors that result in careers, boost the workforce and ignite the economic engine.

    Remember: Money, influence, prestige and power represent the sole focus of transactional people. If you aren’t facilitating those needs, you aren’t needed.

    The Ultimate Problem

    The concept of the educational enterprise as a revenue-driven business and as a transaction between students and an institution (also known as the corporatization of education) gained traction in the 1970s and 1980s under President Ronald Reagan. Reagan believed the cost of an education should be shifted from the state and federal government to the student, who ostensibly “buys a product” (a degree). The degree can then be exchanged for a job that pays a salary.

    The tension between universities as corporations and universities as an entity for the public good now reaches a critical juncture. With the corporatization of education, only those individuals with enough money may access education. Thus, the system perpetuates a transactional society valuing sameness and groupthink. A person’s value is based on the value of their labor. A person’s contribution to the economic engine and the building of wealth for the few becomes paramount, negating their value as thinking human beings with agency and inalienable rights. Students are bought, sold and subjugated in corporate systems. People become pawns in service of money, power and prestige rather than society at large.

    The corporatization of education attracts transactional people in direct opposition to many in the sector who believe education serves the public good. Education in the service of the public good isn’t always for tangible, monetary effect. It is a pathway for self-actualization, knowledge development, independent thought and agency. It provides tools for communicating, problem-solving and betterment. Students are seen as individuals with innate value and potential for success, defined by their capacity, strengths and beliefs. Here, education is society’s great leveler—egalitarian and democratic.

    If an institution and the people running it focus on transactions that benefit the self and the acquisition of power, prestige and money, education for the greater good becomes impossible. Transactional people in higher education hold the greater good hostage by using scarce resources for themselves, withholding resources if they don’t receive tangible benefits and retaliating against individuals who question the ethics, morality and lawfulness of their actions. If leaders don’t do their bidding, they defame and terminate. Fear rules in corporate higher education. Without governmental checks and balances and financial support, desperate leaders have made deals with transactional devils. Our nation’s soul has been shamelessly traded for money, and it must stop.

    Kathy Johnson Bowles is the founder and CEO of Gordian Knot Consulting.

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  • Building Bridges, Not Just Programs

    Building Bridges, Not Just Programs

    For decades, higher education’s relationship with workforce development has been characterized by a kind of polite distance. Universities offered degrees. Employers hired graduates. And the space between credential and career was left to the margins of institutional life: scattered across units, underresourced relative to its importance and rarely treated as central to the academic mission.

    That arrangement is ending. The pace of change in labor markets, driven in no small part by artificial intelligence, has made it untenable. And the passage of Workforce Pell may be the clearest signal yet that the terms of engagement between universities, employers and learners are changing.

    It was not long ago that words like “skills” and “workforce” were rarely heard in the hallways of research universities, at least not without a hint of discomfort. Today, those terms are showing up in strategic plans, leadership addresses and faculty-led communities of practice in ways that would have been difficult to imagine a decade ago. The shift is real, even if the average institutional response has not yet caught up.

    How we respond to that shift matters. We should not read Workforce Pell as a stimulus to compete for new dollars. It is an invitation to re-engage with our mission and to discover that serving learners across a lifetime, in partnership with community colleges, employers and one another, is not a departure from what research universities are for but the fullest expression of it.

    A Structural Shift, Not a Policy Tweak

    Workforce Pell, signed into law as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, extends Pell Grant eligibility to students enrolled in shorter-term, workforce-aligned programs—those lasting at least eight but fewer than 15 weeks or between 150 and 599 clock hours. Implementation is set for July 1, 2026. Workforce Pell is the most robust federal need-based financial aid program specifically targeted at nondegree, short-term pathways at accredited institutions.

    This is not an incremental expansion. It is a structural change in how the federal government defines postsecondary value, and it arrives after more than a decade of failed attempts. There were various iterations of the JOBS Act starting in 2014, the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act in 2023 and numerous other proposals that never reached the finish line despite having bipartisan support. The fact that it finally passed reflects a growing consensus that our financial aid infrastructure was designed for a world that no longer exists.

    Understandably, most of the early conversation about Workforce Pell has centered on community colleges. They are the institutions most likely to offer programs in the eligible range, and they serve the highest concentrations of Pell-eligible students.

    But four-year institutions, including research universities, cannot afford to watch from the sidelines. Not because they should compete with community colleges for these dollars, but because Workforce Pell reshapes a landscape in which all institutions operate. The best results from this policy will come not from institutions acting as a set of territories but as an ecosystem, with learners, not organizational boundaries, at the center.

    Why Research Universities Should Pay Attention

    On its surface, Workforce Pell may seem like an awkward fit for research universities. While some of what it funds will align naturally with programs we already offer or are developing, much of it will not. The temptation is to conclude that this policy is mostly about other parts of the postsecondary sector.

    That conclusion would be a mistake. The policy represents a broader federal commitment to shorter, skills-aligned credentials as legitimate pathways—not alternatives to degrees, but complements to them. It changes how employers think about hiring, how learners think about educational investment and how the entire credentialing landscape is evolving. For institutions whose mission is life-changing education, the question is whether that mission extends across the full arc of a learner’s career or fades into something far more passive after commencement.

    Three dimensions of Workforce Pell are particularly relevant for institutions like ours.

    1. Reach. First, the eligibility provisions reach our learners, extending not only to current undergraduates but also, in some cases, to alumni. Major research universities collectively serve millions of living alumni, many navigating career transitions accelerated by AI and automation. That reach opens a meaningful new pathway for the kind of lifelong learning relationship our institutions have been building toward.

    Consider a Pell-eligible alumna five years out from graduation. Her degree gave her a strong foundation and launched her career. But the environment around her has shifted. AI now performs tasks that once filled her workday, and advancement requires skills that simply did not exist when she was a student. Workforce Pell means she may be able to afford the credential she needs to keep pace. The deeper question is whether her university still sees her—not as a former student but as a learner whose success remains part of its mission.

    1. Quality. Second, the policy creates an opportunity and an obligation to define quality. The stakes for learners are high: Workforce Pell dollars count against a student’s lifetime Pell eligibility. A student who uses limited federal aid on a credential that doesn’t meaningfully improve their economic prospects has lost something they cannot get back. This risk is compounded in an AI era, when the skills a credential validates may shift faster than the programs designed to teach them. Existing data show that most adults with short-term certificates earn modest wages and there are significant racial disparities in outcomes.

    Research universities can contribute here in at least two ways. First, they can leverage their research capacity to track long-term labor market outcomes, wage trajectories and demographic equity across credential programs. This produces the kind of evidence the entire sector needs to improve program design and delivery. Second, they can draw on deep disciplinary expertise and learning design capabilities to build high-quality credential programs themselves. This sets a standard that lifts the broader ecosystem rather than leaving quality to chance.

    To be clear, quality in education has never and should never be reducible to earnings data alone. But for credentials that are explicitly designed to advance careers and that draw on limited federal financial aid to do so, economic outcomes are a legitimate and necessary measure. If research universities sit this out, those standards will be shaped without the rigor and evidence these institutions are uniquely positioned to contribute.

    1. Infrastructure. Third, research universities have been building the infrastructure this moment requires, even if they didn’t build it with Workforce Pell in mind. Across the sector, institutions are investing in unified online learning platforms, industry credential partnerships, CRM systems that nurture learner relationships over time and intentional pathways that connect noncredit exploration to for-credit engagement. At the University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Arizona State, the University of Texas system and many others, this work is well underway. Institutions are developing new ways to link advanced technology capabilities with learner-centered design to create coherent pathways rather than disconnected catalogs.

    The architecture of lifelong learning is also the architecture that enables workforce-aligned credentialing to work. The question is whether enough institutions are building it with the intentionality and scale this moment demands, and whether they are building it in ways that connect across institutions, not just within them. Learners will increasingly move between community colleges, research universities and employer-based training. If the systems that track their progress, recognize their credentials and support their transitions cannot talk to each other, the ecosystem we describe will remain an aspiration. The same AI capabilities reshaping the labor market also offer tools to help build this infrastructure: personalized learning pathways, predictive analytics for learner support and more adaptive approaches to credentialing. Interoperability is not a technical detail. It is a precondition.

    Partnerships, Not Transactions

    If Workforce Pell changes the funding landscape, the harder question is what universities and employers will actually build together. And here, the distinction between a transaction and a partnership becomes critical.

    Too often, university–employer relationships are organized around a narrow exchange: One side licenses content or enrolls employees; the other delivers a course and issues a certificate. These vendor relationships can be useful, but they rarely transform either organization. They meet immediate needs without changing how either side thinks or grows. Over time, they tend to narrow rather than expand opportunity.

    The partnerships that will matter most in the Workforce Pell era look different. They are built on co-design, where employers help shape learning outcomes from the start. This is fundamentally different than the act of endorsement after the fact. They prioritize stackability, ensuring that short-term credentials serve as on-ramps to longer pathways rather than dead ends. And they solve what many think of as the “last mile” problem: The strongest partnerships build employer commitment to interview, hire or promote completers into the program architecture itself. When federal financial aid is flowing to these programs, the accountability dynamic changes. Completion rates, placement outcomes and wage gains will be federally tracked and reported. Partners on both sides will share responsibility for results that are no longer internal metrics but public commitments.

    While Workforce Pell is sure to further popularize these types of collaborations, we are already beginning to see what this looks like in practice. Partnerships between universities and companies like Google, Amazon, IBM and others are placing industry-recognized credentials inside university ecosystems. Credentials are connected to academic advising, career services and degree pathways in ways stand-alone training providers cannot replicate. At Michigan, our partnership with Google now provides students, faculty, staff and alumni with free access to career certificates and AI training. But the model is not unique to us. What makes these collaborations promising is that they treat credentials as part of a learning relationship, not the entirety of one.

    This is not easy work. It requires sustained attention from both sides. It demands ongoing conversation about what value looks like, how it is created and how it is shared. But it is the only kind of work that will produce credentials learners can trust and employers will recognize.

    The Institutional Challenge

    Workforce Pell removes the financial excuse for inaction. The labor market removes the strategic excuse. What remains is cultural and organizational.

    For too long, workforce development has lived in the institutional periphery. Related activities are distributed across units without clear ownership, disconnected from academic governance and often invisible to university leadership and boards. That arrangement may have been sustainable when shorter-form credentials carried little federal funding and modest institutional consequence. It is no longer sustainable. Not when AI is reshaping entire professions, not when employers are rethinking what skills they value and not when federal policy is actively incentivizing institutions to respond. Implementation begins in less than five months. The institutions that are not already preparing will find themselves reacting rather than leading.

    The institutions that respond well to this moment will be those that treat workforce-aligned credentialing not as a side project but as a dimension of their core educational mission. That means engaging faculty in program design, building data infrastructure to rigorously track outcomes and investing in the staffing, systems and partnerships that allow new directions to endure.

    And it means doing all of this in genuine collaboration with community colleges and other providers, not in competition with them. The ecosystem works only if different institutions play to their strengths. Research universities bring disciplinary depth, industry research relationships and the ability to connect short-term learning to longer academic pathways. Community colleges bring proximity, flexibility and deep expertise in serving the populations Workforce Pell is designed to reach. Both are essential.

    Questions for the Campus of the Future

    Later this week at the University Network Summit during ACEx2026 in Washington, D.C., I will be joining a panel on this very topic. We will explore how universities and employers can build more effective partnerships as Workforce Pell reshapes the landscape. In preparation, I have been sitting with a set of questions I think institutional leaders will need to confront. They do not have easy answers, but they are the ones that matter.

    Research universities already serve a far wider range of learners than our public narratives often suggest—the 35-year-old alumna returning for a credential that leads to a promotion, the 50-year-old career changer from the surrounding community, the working professional fitting a course around caregiving responsibilities. The question worth asking is not whether we serve them but whether our infrastructure has kept pace with their needs. Have our advising systems, academic calendar, faculty roles, instructional teams, enabling technology and definitions of student success been designed with their lives in mind, or are they built primarily around a residential undergraduate experience that represents only part of what we do?

    What if we measured institutional success not only by graduation rates and research expenditures but by the economic mobility of learners who engage with us across their lifetimes, including those who never pursue a degree? And what if that ambition led us to rewrite the social contract with our alumni entirely so that commencement marked not the end of an institution’s obligation but the beginning of a different kind of relationship, one in which the university committed to supporting learning across a lifetime and alumni understood that coming back was not a sign of insufficiency or episodic nostalgia but an expected part of a life well lived? We have learned how to scale content and curriculum to reach learners at different points in their lives. The harder question, and the one this new social contract would demand we answer, is whether we can also scale community and coaching to support them throughout.

    What if the most important partnerships between universities and employers were not about placing graduates into jobs but about co-creating the learning itself, with shared accountability for whether it works? What would it take for an employer to invest not just in tuition benefits but in program design, mentorship and hiring commitments?

    What if short-term credentials earned at a research university became genuine on-ramps to deeper learning, not because we mandated it, but because the experience was designed so well that learners chose to continue? What would stackability look like if it were driven by learner aspiration rather than institutional architecture?

    And what if the institutions that moved first on these questions did not do so alone but built regional and national coalitions with community colleges, employers, workforce boards and one another? What if collaboration, rather than competition, became the defining characteristic of how higher education responded to this moment?

    These are speculative questions. But they point toward a version of the research university that takes its public mission seriously—not by becoming something it is not, but by extending its reach into a part of the learning continuum where it has not yet been fully present. Workforce Pell does not answer these questions for us. It simply makes them harder to avoid.

    The bridges between credentials and careers will not build themselves. They require intentional design, sustained investment and a willingness to work across boundaries that have traditionally defined our institutions. The good news is that the foundations exist and that many of our institutions are already building them. The question now is whether we will build together, with the learners and communities who stand to benefit most clearly in mind. Workforce Pell is not asking research universities to become something else. It is asking whether we are willing to become what we already claim to be.

    James DeVaney is associate vice provost for academic innovation and the founding executive director of the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan.

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  • Student finance: student loans aren’t broken – they protect inherited advantage

    Student finance: student loans aren’t broken – they protect inherited advantage

    This blog was kindly authored by Hannah Rolley, Head of Access at Trinity College Oxford.

    We are told, endlessly, that student finance is a problem of scale: the size of the loan, the length of repayments, the psychological weight of ‘lifetime debt’. Graduates are warned to expect forty years of deductions, balances that never quite fall, interest quietly compounding in the background.

    But student finance isn’t broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect inherited advantage while shifting risk onto those with the least.

    There is a profound difference between students who must borrow the maximum available and those whose parents can afford to pay the full cost of university outright: tuition fees, accommodation, living expenses, the lot. No debt. No repayments. No interest. No forty-year shadow.

    For years, I wondered whose parents were wealthy enough to do this. Then I remembered the cost of private education. In 2026, it is cheaper to fund a UK home student through three-years at the University of Oxford (fees of £29,379) than it is to send a child to Eton, Radley or Westminster for just one year as a boarder. For families who have already paid over £60,000 a year for secondary school, university fees are not a hardship, they are a staggering 84 per cent discount.

    The system works precisely as intended. Tuition fees do not come close to covering the true cost of a degree. This is certainly true at Oxford and other Russell Group universities, where students from the most advantaged backgrounds remain disproportionately over-represented. These students graduate with a world-class education at a fraction of its real cost and then pay nothing further once they enter their high-earning careers.

    Meanwhile, students from less wealthy backgrounds borrow the maximum, accrue interest from the moment they enrol, and repay for decades. Two students sit in the same lectures, receive the same degree, and leave with radically different futures – not because of talent or effort, but because of parental wealth. And for some, the barrier comes even earlier: the system quietly excludes those whose faith forbids interest-bearing loans and deters working-class students for whom the prospect of decades of debt is enough to rule university out altogether.

    This is not meritocracy. It is inheritance, laundered through policy.

    I agree that the psychological impact of graduating with huge ‘debt’, where students see their balance grow year on year despite making monthly payments creates a stifling sense of being trapped. Those whose faith means they have to self-fund rather than borrow, end up putting themselves and or their families through years of hardship – or see attending university as impossible to even contemplate.

    I am realistic enough to know that the argument for free university education no longer wins political traction, even though I believe, deeply, that education should never have been commodified in the first place. I was among the first students to take out a loan to pay my tuition fees, and every postgraduate qualification since has required further borrowing. I continue to make repayments today.

    But if we are going to insist that degrees must be paid for, then everyone who benefits from them must contribute. That is why I agree that we need a graduate tax. Not as a punishment. Not as an ideological crusade. But as a basic correction of an indefensible imbalance. A graduate tax would ensure that contributions are based on outcomes, not upfront privilege. It would finally lift the burden of loans accruing interest and capture those who currently glide through the system debt-free and go on to lucrative careers without ever paying back into the education that enabled them. It would finally acknowledge that the real subsidy in higher education flows upward toward those who need it least.

    The current system asks the least advantaged to shoulder the greatest risk, while the most advantaged are insulated entirely. That is not accidental. It is a political choice. And it is one we should no longer accept.

    If we truly believe that higher education has economic, social, and civic value then that value must be shared. Not deferred onto the backs of those with the fewest options but reclaimed from those who have benefited most.

    Until we are willing to say that out loud, student finance reform will remain a distraction. The problem is not just the loan. The problem is who never has to take one and why.

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  • Four years on, research excellence in wartime is not a luxury – it is infrastructure

    Four years on, research excellence in wartime is not a luxury – it is infrastructure

    When war breaks out, the instinct is to protect what is immediately visible: people, buildings, energy grids, borders. Research rarely features in emergency plans. It can appear secondary – something to stabilise later, once the urgent has passed.

    Ukrainian universities have operated under sustained disruption – damaged campuses, displaced academics, interrupted laboratories, fractured research teams, daily air-raid alerts and energy blackouts. And yet, they have not retreated from international collaboration. They have intensified it. If universities are engines of long-term societal capacity, then weakening research during conflict compounds the damage long after fighting stops. Sustaining research excellence under crisis conditions is not a luxury. It is part of the infrastructure of resilience.

    The story of UK-Ukraine higher education cooperation over these past four years is not simply one of solidarity. It is a story about structure, and about what happens when solidarity is organised, moderated and sustained over time. Much of this cooperation began through early institutional pairings between UK and Ukrainian universities under the Twinning Initiative, driven forward by Cormack Consultancy Group. Those initial connections – pragmatic, rapidly assembled, often crisis-driven – created channels of trust and communication. But what has defined the past four years is not the announcements. It is the sustained, hands-on work that followed. That sustained moderation laid the groundwork for deeper research collaboration.

    From solidarity to structure

    In the early months of the invasion, UK universities mobilised quickly; partnerships were announced; emergency support was provided; equipment was delivered; and access was offered. Among international partners, the UK has been one of the most organised and strategically engaged supporters of Ukrainian higher education. UK institutions did not stop at symbolic affiliation – they embedded Twinning partnerships into active research engagement, hosted structured matchmaking, mobilised funding expertise and maintained contact over time. That organisation matters as emergency solidarity can be rapid, but structural integration takes persistence.

    Over four years, these moderated institutional relationships evolved into more focused projects under the umbrella of Twinning: structured support for competitive research collaboration. Two recent initiatives illustrate this trajectory – the Twinning Seed Fund for Research Excellence and the UK-Ukraine Horizon Europe Support Initiative. They did not emerge in isolation. They were products of four years of accumulated networks, working relationships and shared practice.

    The Twinning Seed Fund was designed to provide small-scale catalytic funding to initiate or strengthen UK-Ukraine research partnerships, with a clear pathway toward participation in major European funding frameworks such as Horizon Europe. The response revealed the scale of academic mobilisation under war conditions.

    The first application round received 234 applications, requesting £6.7 million against a much smaller available budget. Ukrainian institutions participated 288 times across proposals. Seventy-one unique UK universities engaged. Partnerships extended beyond bilateral collaboration, involving institutions from 29 countries outside Ukraine. These figures matter not as promotional statistics, but as indicators of intent.

    Four years into war, Ukrainian universities were not retreating into academic survival mode. They were actively seeking structured international research integration. But seed funding is, by design, limited. It supports early workshops, mobility, mentoring, joint publications and it builds conceptual alignment and trust. It does not, on its own, convert partnerships into multi-million-pound European consortia – and that exposed a structural gap.

    The myth of networking as enough

    Higher education often assumes that if researchers are introduced to one another, collaboration will naturally follow – organise a workshop; create a contact list; sign an agreement. In stable systems, that sometimes works, but in fragile systems, it rarely does. This became clear through the pilot phase of the UK-Ukraine Horizon Europe Support Initiative – a structured intervention focused not on connection alone, but on conversion around how to translate research ideas into competitive Horizon Europe proposals.

    Over 450 Ukrainian researchers and more than 230 UK researchers engaged in the programme. Ukrainian participants submitted 385 Horizon-aligned concept notes. Nearly 300 structured introductions were facilitated. More than 180 moderated partnership calls were delivered. Consortia began forming within months, and joint proposals were submitted early in the cycle. The critical difference was not enthusiasm, it was facilitation. Researchers were not simply connected and left alone. They were supported through call interpretation, impact alignment, consortium architecture, budget structuring, role clarification and submission readiness.

    Horizon Europe is not a simple funding pot. It is a policy-driven framework requiring alignment with societal missions, balanced consortia, governance clarity and precise impact articulation. For researchers operating under air-raid interruptions and institutional strain, navigating that system without structured support is unrealistic. At the same time, UK researchers – though strongly motivated to collaborate – face their own pressures: workload intensity, reduced internal bid development capacity, and financial uncertainty within their institutions. In both systems, time and coordination matter.

    Four years of experience point to an uncomfortable conclusion: excellence does not self-organise under pressure. Introductions are necessary, but insufficient, as without sustained mediation, early momentum dissipates and partnerships stall before submission. The intermediary layer – often invisible in policy discourse – is not administrative excess, it is delivery infrastructure.

    The human face behind the metrics

    Behind every “concept note screened” is a research team trying to protect continuity. For Ukrainian academics, participation in European research frameworks is not just about funding, it is about institutional visibility, intellectual belonging and strategic positioning within the European Research Area. It signals to early-career researchers that there is a future in academia at home and it anchors departments that might otherwise fragment.

    Four years into war, research participation is an act of resilience, but this is not a one-sided narrative. For UK higher education, these partnerships also deliver tangible value. They deepen internationalisation beyond recruitment metrics; they reconnect UK researchers substantively with European consortia; they embed UK teams within Horizon Europe pipelines; they bring external research funding into UK institutions; they strengthen science diplomacy credibility; and they immerse international teams in sustained joint problem-solving.

    In a post-Brexit environment where rebuilding structured European research engagement has required careful diplomacy and persistence, UK-Ukraine collaboration has provided a practical and policy-aligned route back into active continental networks. These collaborations are reciprocal. Ukrainian researchers bring strong disciplinary expertise – from AI and cybersecurity to materials science, environmental resilience, public health and governance reform. This is not symbolic inclusion, it is substantive intellectual partnership. Four years on, the narrative is not about charity, it is about shared excellence under strain.

    The funding dilemma

    Initial crisis responses are often swift and generous, but over time, other priorities emerge. Funding pressures intensify, and attention fragments. The UK higher education system itself is operating under strain – recruitment volatility, cross-subsidy pressures and constrained public R&D budgets – and in such an environment, sustained international engagement must justify itself strategically.

    Under Horizon Europe, collaborative research projects typically unlock between £3 million and £5 million per consortium. A structured acceleration model supporting 20–30 large-scale submissions – even assuming a conservative success rate – can generate £13-23 million in external funding from investment below £1 million. Modest coordination investment can leverage significantly larger European research flows, but the deeper risk is not financial inefficiency, it is momentum loss.

    Four years of relationship-building have created trust, working rhythms and research pipelines. Without sustained support, partnerships formed under extraordinary circumstances risk dissipating and researchers revert to domestic pressures. The narrative shifts from “long-term integration” to “short-term gesture” – fragile systems are particularly vulnerable to stop-start engagement, but consistency is stability. If long-term UK-Ukraine research cooperation is viewed as strategic, not merely symbolic, then facilitation is not an optional extra. It is the mechanism through which early investment converts into measurable impact.

    Staying in the room

    Perhaps the clearest lesson from four years of collaboration is simple but demanding: someone must stay in the room. Someone must translate complex calls into accessible briefs, moderate early conversations, follow up when energy dips, clarify roles within consortia, review draft impact sections, keep timelines visible despite disruption, and bridge policy logic and scientific ambition.

    That connective work is rarely visible in headline announcements, but without it, partnership remains aspiration. Four years on, Ukrainian and UK researchers have demonstrated that excellence does not disappear under pressure – it adapts, persists, and seeks connection. The question is not whether collaboration is possible, it is whether we sustain the structures that allow it to mature. That’s because in wartime, and in the uncertain period that follows, research is not something rebuilt once stability returns – it is one of the ways stability is built in the first place.

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  • What the first National Disabled Staff Survey tells us

    What the first National Disabled Staff Survey tells us

    Disabled staff in UK universities are delivering a clear and urgent message: inclusion is still too often an aspiration rather than a lived reality.

    I self‑describe as deaf and disabled. At a recent EDI event on intersectionality, I felt excluded, frustrated, and unable to fully participate. I reflected that giving voice to my experiences could lead to change. (Jackie Carter)

    Early findings from the first National Disabled Staff Survey (NDSS), completed by 837 disabled staff across 127 institutions in 2025, expose deep structural barriers that undermine wellbeing, career progression, and retention. RIDE Higher, a new initiative emerging from the National Association of Disabled Staff Networks (NADSN), has led this research to ensure that disabled staff voices shape understanding and action across the sector.

    This work comes at a pivotal moment. Alongside the NDSS, the launch of Advance HE’s Inclusive Institutions Framework gives universities a coherent structure for embedding inclusion across their organisations. Together, these developments represent a rare alignment of evidence, lived experience, and institutional infrastructure. They also reveal the gap between intentions and outcomes, and signal what must now change.

    How collaboration between RIDE Higher and Advance HE took shape

    The spark for this collaboration was lived experience: the recognition that stories like the opening quote are not isolated incidents, but part of a patterned, systemic problem across the sector. Colleagues within NADSN had long been aware that disability inclusion was often the “poorer cousin” of other protected characteristics, with no staff‑focused charter equivalent to Athena Swan or the Race Equality Charter. Data on staff experience was limited, and disabled staff were frequently expected to navigate systems not designed with them in mind.

    In response, disabled staff came together to create RIDE Higher (Realising the Inclusion of Disabled Employees in Higher Education), a peer‑led initiative committed to collecting evidence, building capacity, and strengthening the voices of disabled staff. In parallel, Advance HE was developing a whole‑institution approach to EDI through its new Inclusive Institutions Framework, shaped primarily through extensive consultation with more than 450 stakeholders and situated within the wider sector landscape of inclusion research and practice. The shared desire to close the gap between rhetoric and reality created the foundation for partnership.

    What disabled staff are telling us

    The NDSS findings paint a stark picture of life for disabled colleagues working in UK higher education.

    Some forty-four per cent of respondents have considered leaving their job because of poor disability inclusion, most within the past year. Nearly one‑third say disability has negatively influenced how colleagues perceive their career potential.

    Across 120 institutions, staff report fragmented support services and unclear processes. And in 121, respondents rated their university’s responsibility for providing an inclusive working environment as poor.

    Leadership visibility, transparency around available support, and the quality of disability‑inclusion training were consistently criticised – and a persistent gap between support for disabled students and disabled staff left many feeling undervalued or overlooked.

    These findings sit against wider sector patterns. Although disability declaration rates have risen to 7.2 per cent, disabled staff remain underrepresented in senior roles. Only 7.1 per cent of disabled academic staff are professors, compared with ten to twelve per cent of non‑disabled peers. Many also undertake significant “hidden labour” to secure basic adjustments, labour that contributes to exhaustion, slower career progression, and feelings of exclusion.

    Put simply: the barriers are not isolated incidents. They are structural.

    What universities need to do next

    The NDSS evidence points directly to the areas where institutions are falling short, and where meaningful action must begin.

    Providers need to make accessibility the default. Disabled staff should not have to fight for adjustments or repeatedly navigate opaque systems. Accessibility must be embedded into HR processes, digital infrastructure, events, and estates management. Proactive inclusive design is cheaper, fairer, and more efficient than retrofitting.

    There is a need to strengthen leadership and accountability. Many respondents did not know who held responsibility for disability inclusion. Universities should identify clear institutional leads, publish transparent support pathways, and track progress against measurable indicators, just as they do in other strategic areas.

    We need to join up support for staff and students. The stark disparity between staff and student support signals a cultural problem. Integrated approaches reduce fragmentation, lessen administrative burdens, and reinforce that inclusion is a shared institutional value rather than a student‑only concern.

    From chasing adjustments to educating colleagues, disabled staff spend disproportionate time on navigating systems. Universities must streamline processes, strengthen coordination across HR, estates, occupational health and IT, and ensure that line managers are trained and empowered to act – to reduce the amount of hidden labour required of disabled staff.

    With the Inclusive Institutions Framework now available, institutions have a tool for proportionate, evidence‑informed action, even during financial constraints. Inclusion should be part of risk management, workload allocation, and strategic planning — not an optional add‑on.

    A new model for systemic change

    RIDE Higher is now positioning itself as a “go‑to” resource for disabled staff, managers, and EDI leads. It is building a community of practice, developing resources, and strengthening the evidence base that has long been lacking. Advance HE’s Inclusive Institutions Framework, in parallel, provides a structured way for universities to act on that evidence — holistically, sustainably, and with institutional buy‑in.

    In March 2026, RIDE Higher and Advance HE will present together at the Advance HE EDI Conference, showcasing what becomes possible when lived experience expertise is paired with sector‑wide infrastructure and strategic commitment.

    We believe this partnership is not only timely — it is essential. It demonstrates a model that the sector must now embrace: evidence plus lived experience plus institutional commitment will lead to meaningful change.

    Whatever your role, you can act now to audit your accessibility using tools such as UCU’s event accessibility checklist, and fix what you find. You could use use Advance HE’s Inclusive Institutions Framework to identify priorities and take proportionate, sustainable steps

    And you need to listen to disabled staff, perhaps by engaging with networks like NADSN or resources such as the Let’s Talk Disability podcast.

    Disability inclusion is everyone’s responsibility, and today is the day to start. The question for each of us, and each institution, is simple: what will you do next?

    The authors are grateful for the significant contributions of their colleagues Jackie Carter and Melanie Best to this article and to colleagues from RIDE Higher and Advance HE.

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  • The Office of the Independent Adjudicator is reviewing its Scheme rules, and it wants you involved

    The Office of the Independent Adjudicator is reviewing its Scheme rules, and it wants you involved

    There is a familiar tension in any public service. Do you keep improving step by step, or occasionally pause, look at the whole system, and make more substantial changes?

    For most of the OIA’s two decades, our Scheme has evolved through careful, incremental development. That has been a strength. It has allowed the sector to understand how the Scheme works, enabled consistency to build over time, and helped the OIA respond to new issues without losing sight of what matters most: fair outcomes, independence, and a process that students can access without cost.

    But the context we are operating in has shifted, and it has shifted decisively.

    Our 2025 operating report showed demand at record levels. Complaints were up 17 per cent on 2024 and rose above 4,000 in a single year for the first time. At the same time, the number of days taken to resolve complaints has reduced. That combination tells an important story. The OIA is coping with unprecedented volume, and our people are delivering. It also tells us that the way students and providers engage with complaints is changing, and that the Scheme needs to be ready for what comes next.

    That is why, during 2026, we will be undertaking a comprehensive review of the OIA Scheme rules and, alongside it, a review of our casework process and how we support early resolution.

    This is not a rejection of what has come before. The current Scheme has served students, providers and the wider sector well, and it is respected for good reason. Our aim is to take the Scheme’s core strengths and present them in a clearer, more navigable, more future-proof way. Some of this will involve a change of language, some a change of substance. We want a scheme that remains rigorous and independent, while being easier for students to understand, easier for providers to work with, and more efficient for the OIA to operate at scale.

    A move away from talking about “rules” to referencing the scheme as a whole, and with it a more principles-based approach, supported by clearer guidance, will help people understand how decisions are made and what to expect. It will also give greater clarity about how discretion is used, including in cases we decide not to consider.

    Why we are doing this now

    The first reason for the review is that the Scheme is being used by more students than ever. Behind every complaint is a person who has reached the end of their provider’s process and is looking for an impartial final review. Many students who come to us are doing so at a difficult moment, often while balancing study, finances, health, family responsibilities, or the stress that complaint processes can bring.

    A significant proportion are disabled, and many are international students. Some will be engaging with formal systems for the first time, or coming from backgrounds where challenging decisions feels unfamiliar or intimidating. We have a responsibility to make the Scheme as approachable and understandable as possible, while maintaining the high standards of review and decision-making that fairness requires.

    Second, we need to modernise how the Scheme is expressed and the language we use. At the moment we talk about “the rules”, which include a great deal of operational and process detail. Over time, that can become hard to follow, particularly for people who only encounter the Scheme when something has already gone wrong. We hear from students, providers and advisers that parts of the Scheme can feel dense, overly procedural, or difficult to interpret. Changing how we talk about and present the scheme will make a difference.

    Third, our operating environment is evolving. Our planned expansion in Wales, and changes in the wider regulatory and consumer landscape, mean we need a Scheme that can adapt without constant heavy rewriting of the rules. Creating a clearer separation between core principles and operational detail will give the OIA more flexibility to improve processes, while maintaining transparency about how and why decisions are reached.

    What will the review seek to achieve?

    We want the refreshed Scheme to:

    • set out, in plain language, the principles that guide our casework and the exercise of discretion
    • provide a clearer explanation of our role and the boundary between what we can and cannot do
    • improve confidence and consistency, for students, providers, and our own people
    • support a more flexible and user-focused process, including a thoughtful approach to early resolution
    • strengthen learning for the sector, so that complaints lead to improvement as well as redress.

    A faster process is in everyone’s interests, but speed is not the only measure that matters. Students and providers need decisions they can understand. They need a process that feels fair, compassionate and proportionate. And the OIA must maintain the independence that underpins trust in the Scheme.

    For the sector as a whole

    Some things will not change. The Scheme will remain free for students to use. The OIA will remain independent in its decision-making. Our commitment to learning from complaints and supporting improvement across the sector will remain central. Our subscriptions-based funding model will continue.

    We are also very conscious that the OIA does not operate in isolation. The Scheme shapes, and is shaped by, provider complaints processes and the work of students’ unions, guilds and student advice services. The interdependence here matters. A scheme that is clearer and easier to navigate should help the sector as a whole, not just the OIA. That is why we want input, challenge and ideas from those who work with students every day, and from providers who are managing complex decisions in a difficult financial climate.

    We will run a formal consultation during the spring. I would encourage organisations across the sector, and especially student-focused bodies, to take part. We will bring our own evidence and two decades of practice to the table, but consultation is not a formality. It is a chance to shape a Scheme that remains trusted, fair and effective for the next 20 years.

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  • NY attorney general threatens to remove school board members over trans comments

    NY attorney general threatens to remove school board members over trans comments

    Jacob Roth is a third-year law student at Villanova University and a FIRE legal intern.

    Last May, New York Attorney General Letitia James warned school boards across the state that when debating bathroom access or sports participation, board members can be removed if they make or even allow comments that “demean” trans students.

    This is a problem. School board meetings are where the future of our children’s education is shaped. They offer a venue where the public can openly debate matters of public education, parents can stay informed and advocate for their children, and the community can offer needed feedback. Muzzling speech at these board meetings doesn’t just silence opinions; it undermines the community’s role in shaping their children’s future. 

    In her letter, James tells boards to shut down any such comments because “purely ideological statements opposing students’ rights under New York law are an unproductive diversion from boards’ important work,” adding that boards should “not entertain baseless allegations that transgender students’ identities and experiences are illegitimate, or that their mere presence in school spaces and participation in school activities is harmful to other students.” She also warns boards not to let speakers intentionally misgender students.

    Incredibly, James not only threatens to remove board members who make such comments but also those who refuse to censor members of the public for doing likewise. 

    But when a school board opens the floor for public comment, the First Amendment limits its power to regulate what speakers say. A board can set reasonable ground rules, including time limits on comments and prohibitions on genuinely disruptive conduct, such as speaking out when it’s not your turn. But the government cannot restrict speech simply based on its viewpoint. If a school board member believes there’s no such thing as a “trans child,” they have every right to express that view in a meeting. If a parent thinks letting trans students play on the sports teams of their choice is harmful to other students, they can say that too. 

    But what isn’t allowed is viewpoint discrimination by the state. The attorney general wants to punish people for making statements she considers transphobic, but she makes no mention of trans-affirming statements. Those are apparently just fine. In other words, whether the state censors your opinion under her direction depends on what that opinion is. The First Amendment simply doesn’t work that way.  

    Worse still, the attorney general is placing school board members in an untenable position: either carry out her censorship demands and violate the First Amendment, or risk losing their positions.

    The references to “harassment” in her letter do not fix the problem. The government cannot evade the First Amendment’s prohibition on viewpoint discrimination by simply affixing the label “harassment” to opinions it dislikes. As a legal matter, harassment generally refers to a pattern of targeted, unwelcome conduct directed at a particular individual, not the public expression of views on matters of public concern. 

    Even in the educational setting — which does not include a government-run public meeting — the Supreme Court has made clear that “harassment” is actionable only when it is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.” A school board official or member of the public expressing an opinion relevant to an ongoing public debate, even in sharp or uncomfortable terms, is not harassment under any recognized legal standard. It is protected speech.

    This isn’t the first time New York’s attorney general has attempted to stifle speech she doesn’t like. FIRE sued James in 2022 and secured a court order blocking enforcement of a New York law regulating online speech the state deems hateful — an order she later violated. Last month, Glenna Goldis — an attorney in the attorney general’s consumer fraud bureau — was fired after she raised concerns, in her personal capacity, about pediatric gender medicine. Nor is this the first time government officials have tried to control the terms of discussion during public comment periods. In fact, FIRE has frequently warned other government entities against imposing viewpoint-based speech restrictions at their meetings — and, when necessary, sued to vindicate censored speakers’ rights. 

    FIRE also has been a fierce advocate for local elected officials who face state-directed violations of their First Amendment rights. In Nazarene v. Laux, FIRE represents a New Jersey school board member facing a state ethics investigation for asking residents, via social media, their thoughts on a proposed school tax increase. The state’s School Ethics Commission has interpreted state law as preventing board members from discussing matters of public concern on social media and in op-eds. As in that case, board members in New York now face the threat of the state controlling how they communicate with constituents. That’s why parents and school board members are fighting back. The Southeastern Legal Foundation recently filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of two parent advocates and two school board members seeking to challenge James’s guidance letter, claiming a violation of their right to free speech.

    The First Amendment protects the rights of parents and school board members to speak freely on educational matters at public meetings. There’s no exception for speech a state official finds offensive. The attorney general may disagree with others’ views, but as Justice Louis Brandeis famously put it, “the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

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