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  • Team Teaching Benefits Faculty and Students

    Team Teaching Benefits Faculty and Students

    Most students expect to see one professor at the front of the classroom throughout the semester. But for those attending Harvey Mudd College, a STEM-focused institution in California, it’s not unusual to have four or more faculty members teaching one course.

    At Harvey Mudd, team teaching has been a distinguishing facet of the student experience for decades; most general education STEM courses for incoming students are taught by two or more professors.

    “It’s the water we swim in,” said Kathy Van Heuvelen, associate dean of faculty. “It’s so embedded in our culture.”

    Implementing team teaching as standard practice has helped the college train early-career faculty, establish more holistic courses and ensure students are aware of the various resources and experts available to them on campus.

    What is team teaching? Also called collaborative teaching or co-teaching, team teaching involves multiple instructors leading a course, each with their own responsibilities.

    Often, team teaching involves faculty of different disciplines covering a topic or issue from multiple perspectives. At Harvey Mudd, for example, a group of faculty taught a course on California wildfires, and the content included the history of forestry, atmospheric chemistry and air pollution, as well as the social implications of fires. Sometimes that means two professors teaching side by side, but often faculty split up lessons and take turns delivering content to students.

    Team teaching is less common than solo teaching, in part because it requires more time to implement. Faculty sometimes face logistical barriers, such as aligning schedules and co-creating materials, as well as personal differences in assessment or classroom management. But when done well, the format can equip students with greater critical thinking skills and a richer understanding of content.

    Prepped for success: To help professors navigate team teaching, Harvey Mudd offers them a variety of resources. New instructors participate in a weekly lunch led by college administrators where they gather, eat and engage in professional development, Van Heuvelen said. “Our sessions have included team-teaching strategies for communicating with your team and navigating this mode of teaching.”

    Van Heuvelen also provides a team-teaching checklist for faculty each semester to help them prepare for the upcoming term, which includes items such as communication, timeline for developing materials, classroom management and other course policies.

    “It has a list of questions for the team to discuss ahead of time to try to help teams get out In front of any challenges and establish their team norms,” she said.

    The college is part of the Claremont Consortium—a group of seven higher education institutions in Claremont, Calif.—which has a Consortium Center for Teaching and Learning and provides workshops on team teaching, as well.

    Most team-taught courses are designed to feature a junior and senior faculty member, allowing the early-career professional to learn from a more experienced instructor, Van Heuvelen said.

    “For an early-career hire who maybe does not have extensive teaching experience, it is like attending a master class,” Van Heuvelen said. “There is tremendous mentoring that can go on there.”

    Newer instructors also bring fresh perspectives and ideas to the classroom, which ensures content does not get stale over time.

    Supporting student success: One of the benefits of the model is that students have a group of instructors to engage with and call on if they need academic support, Van Heuvelen said.

    “For example, when we have a team that’s teaching, we all hold common office hours, so students can go to any office hours,” Van Heuvelen said.

    Past research shows that students are often unaware of the full range of supports available to them on campus, but engaging with many professors can get students more plugged in to institutional services, or at least provide more touch points, Van Heuvelen said.

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  • Why Founder’s College Is the Answer to Declining College-Going

    Why Founder’s College Is the Answer to Declining College-Going

    In a recent Forbes column, Lumina Foundation president Jamie Merisotis reminded us that degrees must do more than certify coursework—they must create real value for students and employers. In Indiana, where Sagamore Institute’s 2040 workforce economy study and the Indiana Commission for Higher Education warn of falling college-going rates, this challenge is especially urgent.

    That is the backdrop for Butler University’s boldest experiment yet: Founder’s College, launched August 2025.

    Compressing Time, Expanding Values

    The Founder’s College model confronts a growing national conversation: does the U.S. need more pathways beyond the traditional four-year degree? Institutions across the country are piloting three-year bachelor’s options and embedded two-year credentials to align faster, more affordable education with urgent labor market shortages while maximizing current infrastructure to meet needs.

    Butler University has placed itself in this conversation with uncommon clarity. At Founder’s College, students complete a two-year associate degree in six structured semesters, front-loading the critical skills usually acquired in a student’s junior and senior years—career motivation, professional identity and workforce readiness. This compressed pathway is not cut-rate—it is deliberately sequenced with degree programs tied to Classification of Instructional Programs codes and O*NET occupational standards synced to NACE competencies, ensuring that every credential reflects real career demand in Indiana and beyond.

    Founder’s students walking down steps

    A Workforce-Aligned, Equity-Driven Blueprint

    The Indianapolis labor market, seeing a 3.1 percent GDP growth, underscores the need for this approach (Indiana University News, 2004). The monetary value of all that is produced in the state is outpacing state and national averages. At the same time, in-demand industries—especially health care, professional services, technology and advanced manufacturing—are confronting skill mismatches. Employers are offering jobs, yet Indiana’s college-going rate has slipped to historic lows, leaving pipelines partially empty (Indiana Business Research Center, 2024). The Indiana Department of Workforce Development reports wages are rising, up 4.1 percent in the metro area in 2025 according to InContext Indiana.

    Institutions like Butler University are not blind to the demographic challenges either. A declining birth rate, an aging workforce, admissions redesigns and disruptive technologies such as AI intensify the demand for midlevel, adaptable credentials to reskill workers quickly.

    Founder’s students walking a path on campus

    Here is where Founder’s College shifts the ground. It builds wraparound supports—career coaching, social workers, family inclusion and embedded apprenticeships—into the core of its structure rather than leaving them at the margins. By lowering tuition costs to nearly debt-free levels for students and building in work-integrated experiences, Founder’s College creates a system where opportunity is the design, not the exception.

    Global Research, Local Application

    Butler’s experiment does not arise in a vacuum. It mirrors and operationalizes the findings of major policy reports:

    A 2024 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report recommends expanded investment in skills and high-quality education to combat slowing productivity growth coupled by aging, digitalization and climate changes. It stresses repeatedly that the U.S. is falling behind peer nations in connecting academic programs to workplace readiness, particularly in apprenticeships and microcredentials. The Founder’s College requirement that every student engage in structured, mentored, for-credit work experience directly addresses that gap.

    The America AI Action Plan 2025 highlights the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence on the skills profile of jobs. Handshake reports increase in generative AI usage too. While OECD 2025 reminds us that there is a changing landscape requiring adaptability, complex interdisciplinary problem-solving and liberal arts and professional academic digital fluency are no longer optional. At Founder’s College, technical writing studios, digital credentialing, industry certification and technology integration prepare students to thrive in an AI-mediated workplace.

    FutureEd research from 2023 emphasizes transparency in skills attainment and the use of short-term, stackable credentials as levers of equity. By awarding credentials midjourney and maximizing learning mobility, a call from the LEARN Commission—not just at degree completion—Founder’s College signals value to students, employers and families at every step.

    • Founder’s students in backpacks walking toward buillding

    Taken together, these frameworks make Founder’s College not just a local response to Indiana’s challenges, but a globally informed model tuned to the future of work.

    Founder’s College directly widens the workforce pipeline—by lowering the cost barrier, embedding workforce credentials and signaling to families that college is not just accessible, but immediately useful.

    Founder’s students in student center

    A Case Study and a Challenge

    Across the United States, demographic and migration patterns are reshaping where and how higher education demand will grow. The U.S. South, with its younger, more racially and ethnically diverse populations and steady in-migration, stands poised to lead the nation in enrollment growth through 2035. In contrast, much of the Midwest faces different headwinds: smaller cohorts of college-age students, declining K–12 enrollments and out-migration of young families.

    Rather than a simple story of winners and losers, this shift underscores the divergent opportunities that regions face. In the South, higher education systems will need to expand capacity, affordability and culturally responsive pathways that meet the aspirations of new, more diverse learners. In the Midwest, the challenge is not only to stabilize enrollment but to re-engage adults with some college, no credential and to strengthen the link between education and regional economic renewal.

    Nationally, forecasts for the next decade suggest that the future of higher education will depend on how well institutions adapt to a shrinking pool of traditional-age learners while expanding access for new groups, including working adults and first-generation students. Recruitment, funding models and program design will need to evolve accordingly.

    Using the 2020 U.S. Census as a baseline, when 43 percent of Americans identified as people of color and more than half of minors identified as nonwhite, it’s clear that the next generation of university-bound students will be more multiracial and more globally connected than ever before. Their appetite for education will be shaped by digital fluency, early exposure to STEM and environmental learning, and a social consciousness steeped in sustainability, mental health and civic responsibility.

    For Indiana, where college-going rates are at historic lows, this is more than institutional innovation. Founder’s College is therefore both a case study and a challenge.

    • To other universities: Reimagine the traditional degree in ways that speak to today’s students and employers.
    • To states: Invest in models that don’t just get more students in the door, but get them to good jobs, faster.
    • And to students themselves: Butler is showing you that higher education is within reach, aligned with your life and positions you for thriving success.

    As Merisotis wrote, the future belongs to institutions that make degrees more valuable. Indiana may have just found its vanguard.

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  • Many 2025 “Genius” Fellows Affiliated with Universities

    Many 2025 “Genius” Fellows Affiliated with Universities

    Fourteen of the new MacArthur fellows announced Wednesday are associated with universities.

    ilbusca/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

    Numerous academics are part of the 2025 class of MacArthur Foundation fellows announced Wednesday. This year, the foundation selected a slate of 22 “extraordinarily creative individuals” to receive the “genius award.” Each recipient will get $800,000—no-strings attached—over the next five years to “foster and enable innovative, imaginative, and ground-breaking ideas, thinking, and strategies.”

    Since the fellowship launched in 1981, fellows have included writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers and entrepreneurs. While no institutional affiliation is required, the award went to the following 2025 fellows with ties to a college or university:

    • Atmospheric scientist Ángel F. Adames Corraliza, an associate professor in the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for investigating the mechanisms underlying tropical weather patterns. 
    • Epidemiologist Nabarun Dasgupta, director of the Opioid Data Lab at the University of North Carolina’s Injury Prevention Research Center, for advocating for harm reduction and creating practical programs to mitigate harms from drug use, particularly opioid overdose deaths.
    • Archaeologist Kristina Douglass, associate professor of climate at Columbia University, for investigating how human societies and environments co-evolved and adapted to climate variability. 
    • Astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry, assistant professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, for leveraging astronomical data sets and theoretical modeling to investigate binary star systems, black holes, neutron stars and other stellar bodies.
    • Political scientist Hahrie Han, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor in the political science department at Johns Hopkins University, for employing a range of ethnographic, sociological, experimental and quantitative methods to examine organizational structures and tactics that encourage individuals to interact across lines of difference and work together for change in the public sphere.
    • Cultural anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte, the Watson Family University Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University, for exploring the political and moral ambiguities of border regions, where state policies regulate historically shifting distinctions between legal and illegal practices.
    • Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers, research chair and professor in the Ecology and Evolution Department at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, for illuminating the evolutionary mechanisms underlying cooperation between species and the role of plant-microbe mutualisms in ecosystem health. 
    • Structural biologist Jason McLellan, professor and Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, for investigating virus fusion proteins and developing new interventions to prevent infectious diseases.
    • Fiction writer Tommy Orange, faculty mentor in the creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, for capturing a diverse range of Native American experiences and lives in novels that traverse time, space and narrative perspectives.
    • Nuclear security specialist Sébastien Philippe, assistant professor in the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for exposing past harms and potential future risks from building, testing and storing launch-ready nuclear weapons.
    • Interdisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim, visiting critic in sculpture at the Yale School of Art, for proposing new ways to make visible the layered meanings and functions of cultural artifacts held in museums and institutional collections.
    • Neurobiologist and optometrist Teresa Puthussery, associate professor in the Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry and Vision Science at the University of California, Berkeley, for exploring how neural circuits of the retina encode visual information for the primate brain.
    • Chemical engineer William Tarpeh, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University, for developing sustainable and practical methods to recover valuable chemical resources from wastewater.
    • Mathematician Lauren K. Williams, the Dwight Parker Robinson Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, for elucidating unexpected connections between algebraic combinatorics and concepts in other areas of math and physics.

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  • Texas Systems Review Course Descriptions, Syllabi

    Texas Systems Review Course Descriptions, Syllabi

    As conservative Texas politicians identify and target faculty who teach about gender identity, officials at six Texas public university systems have ordered reviews of curriculum, syllabi and course descriptions.

    The impetus is clear: Texas A&M University fired a professor, demoted two administrators and pushed out its president after conservative politicians lambasted the institution for a lesson on gender identity in a children’s literature class. Their criticism hinged on the fact that the topic was not reflected in the brief course catalog description for the class. Before he resigned, Texas A&M president Mark Welsh ordered an audit of all courses at the flagship campus, which the system Board of Regents quickly extended to all Texas A&M institutions.

    “The Board has called for immediate and decisive steps to ensure that what happened this week will not be repeated,” the regents wrote in a statement posted on X. “To that end, the Regents have asked the Chancellor to audit every course and ensure full compliance with applicable laws.”

    Other systems soon followed. On Sept. 29, University of North Texas system chancellor Michael Williams instructed the president of each institution to “conduct an expedited review of their academic courses and programs—including a complete syllabus review to ensure compliance with all current applicable state and federal laws, executive orders, and court orders,” he wrote in a letter. The review is due Jan. 1.

    The University of Texas system is reviewing all courses on gender identity to “ensure compliance and alignment with applicable law and state and federal guidance, and to make sure any courses that are taught on a U.T. campus are aligned with the direction and priorities of the Board of Regents,” according to a statement from the system. The review will be discussed at the Board of Regents meeting in November.

    System leaders at several public institutions have cited Texas House Bill 229, President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order and a Jan. 30 letter from Gov. Greg Abbott that said, “All Texas agencies must ensure that agency rules, internal policies, employment practices, and other actions comply with the law and the biological reality that there are only two sexes—male and female.” Yet no current federal or state laws prohibit public university professors from teaching about transgender identity.

    A University of Houston system spokesperson told The Texas Tribune that it is completing a review of general education courses in compliance with Texas Senate Bill 37, which took effect this fall. The law requires public universities to complete a curriculum review every five years, but the first reviews aren’t due until 2027. Texas Woman’s University is also conducting a review of all academic courses and programs, the Tribune reported.

    Texas Tech University ordered its faculty to ensure that course content complies with Texas and U.S. law, as well as the federal and gubernatorial executive orders that declare the existence of only two genders—male and female. The resulting oral policies—which officials are purposely not writing down—severely limit what faculty can teach about gender identity and effectively erase transgender people and topics from the curriculum.

    It’s unclear how each of the six university systems will respond after their reviews are complete, and whether courses will be censored or entirely removed from the catalog.

    “Faculty are highly trained experts in their fields of study. It harms education for faculty to be told what to teach by politicians,” Brian Evans, President of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, told Inside Higher Ed by email. “For example, it is impossible to teach about gender without recognizing that there are countless gender identities and gender expressions across the world, the ideology that there are only two genders being only one of those.”

    The conservative politicians who have gone after institutions and faculty for teaching about gender identity have found professors through syllabi and course information posted online. As the risk of doxing grows, faculty are working to keep their information private, but new technology and Texas law are adding complications.

    Hundreds of American colleges and universities are now requiring their faculty to upload syllabi to Simple Syllabus, a third-party platform that offers uniform syllabus templates and easy editing; it also allows faculty to embed syllabi into campus learning management systems. According to the company’s website, more than 500 colleges and universities currently use the platform. Institutions may limit who can view the syllabi—for example, Clemson University requires users to log in with university credentials.

    But other institutions—including the University of Houston, Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin—allow the general public to view their Simple Syllabus pages. This may be in part due to Texas House Bill 2504, a 15-year-old law that requires public institutions to provide publicly accessible syllabi that include major assignments and exams, required or recommended readings, and a general description of lecture or discussion topics.

    Andrew Joseph Pegoda, a lecturer in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at the University of Houston, experienced the risks of this public access firsthand. In August, a conservative news site published a piece targeting Pegoda for teaching two courses that include queer theory in the curriculum and that, according to the news site, exemplify “indoctrination in women’s and gender studies departments.”

    “I realized that they got their information from Simple Syllabus,” Pegoda said. The platform allows users to search posted syllabi at an institution using keywords—for example, searching the word “queer” on the Simple Syllabus page for one Texas university returned four different syllabi that included the term.

    The spotlight on Pegoda came and passed quickly, largely because his name wasn’t included in the article’s headline. “I’m glad it wasn’t worse than it was. It could have been more direct or more vicious,” he said.

    Simple Syllabus spokesperson Matthew Compton-Clark said the company has not received any reports of targeting via the platform. “We take data privacy extremely seriously, and are a faculty-first organization,” he wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “We provide multiple privacy features, giving faculty the ability to set not just their entire syllabus private, but individual components as well. This same feature also exists for the institution, allowing the school to set the visibility of the entire syllabus, or individual parts of the document based on their state-specific legislation.”

    The Texas law does not require the public syllabi to include class meeting times or locations, though many professors don’t amend the public versions of their materials to exclude that information. Pegoda said he’s been advised to “put minimum detail in the public Simple Syllabus and then to provide a more regular syllabus to students,” he said.

    But, in the wake of the incident at Texas A&M, that may not work, he said. “Now professors are being encouraged to very specifically detail everything in the syllabus so as to not potentially get fired or have student complaints.”

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  • Transparency Now or Regulation Later

    Transparency Now or Regulation Later

    Doctors predicted Wayne Frederick, the president of Howard University, wouldn’t live past 8. Now he’s 54. Frederick came to the U.S. from Trinidad and Tobago with a dream of finding a cure for his disease, sickle cell anemia, but detoured into higher ed administration.

    At an event hosted by the American Council on Education at Howard University this week, Frederick said CRISPR gene editing, a technology developed in academia, made his dream a reality. Finding cures to debilitating diseases is one of “the intangible things that higher ed does to change lives,” he said.

    Higher ed has changed lives in thousands of other ways; institutions are the largest employers in 10 states; colleges have helped regenerate many of America’s Rust Belt centers. Higher education is undeniably a public good. But as concerns grow about the affordability of college, do Americans care?

    In the ACE event’s discussion about the economic impact of higher ed, Alex Ricci, president of the National Council on Higher Education Resources, pointed out that despite college’s role in local and regional economies, the debate about the value of higher ed comes down to whether one thinks the benefit to the individual is greater than to society as a whole. “Many colleges and universities see themselves as a benefit shared broadly by society. Most Americans—especially those carrying thousands of dollars in student loan debt—see it as a transaction where the individual is the primary beneficiary or victim, depending on the student’s long-term outcomes,” he said.

    Regardless of whether you think higher ed is a public or private good, institutions are losing the value debate. In recorded remarks for the discussion, Representative Burgess Owens, a Utah Republican, chairman of the House subcommittee on higher education and workforce development, said, “Higher education should be about value, not just prestige.” He also presided over the “No More Surprises: Reforming College Pricing for Students and Families” hearing last month where lawmakers examined ways to make college costs more transparent.

    The lack of transparency on the cost of college can be life-altering for students and poses existential risks for colleges. Inside Higher Ed’s 2025 student survey found that three-fourths of the 5,000 respondents encountered some surprises in the cost of their education. These surprises can derail education journeys. One in five students said that an unexpected expense of $500 to $1,000 would threaten their ability to persist. Bad surprises also harm colleges: Students say that the lack of affordability is the biggest driver of declining public trust in higher education.

    College cost transparency has been a government priority since the Obama administration, but never has public trust in higher ed been so low or institutions so vulnerable to government overreach. Republican lawmakers have seized on the problem of college affordability and cost transparency and are looking for bipartisan solutions. In May, Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, introduced the Understanding the True Cost of College Act 2025, which calls for standardization of financial aid offers so students understand in simple terms what the direct costs, indirect costs and net price of college will be. Last month the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions formally requested information from the sector on ways to improve transparency, lower costs and ensure a college degree is valuable to students.

    Some colleges sense the urgency of the moment and are taking action on affordability. More are offering free tuition to households earning as much as $200,000 a year. Last month Whitworth University made a radical decision to stop tuition discounting and decrease its annual sticker price from $54,000 to $26,900. At the same time, a recent study found that tuition discounting is on the rise among public four-year institutions. But tuition discounts create more confusion around the true cost of college.

    A reasonable question to ask is: Why are only 730 colleges members of the College Cost Transparency Initiative? If higher ed stakeholders wanted to win the value debate, they would listen to lawmakers—and students and their families—and act on affordability and cost transparency. Otherwise, policymakers will do it for them. By demonstrating their impact for individual students, colleges can make a compelling case for their broader societal value.

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  • U.S. Continues Decline in THE World University Rankings

    U.S. Continues Decline in THE World University Rankings

    The 2026 rankings overall show that “East Asian nations, led by China, continue to thrive,” said THE’s chief global affairs officer, Phil Baty.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | bingdian, cbarnesphotography and DNY59/iStock/Getty Images

    Even before U.S. universities lost billions of dollars in federal research funding and international students struggled to obtain visas, America’s dominance in research impact and global reputation was waning. According to the latest rankings from Times Higher Education, the U.S. has continued to cede influence to universities in Asia.

    For several years, the rankings from Inside Higher Ed’s parent company have documented a steady decline in the U.S.’s leadership in global higher education. The 2026 World University Rankings reflect that ongoing trend: Just 102 universities from the United States cracked the top 500—the lowest figure on record, down from a high of 125 in 2018. (The rankings started in 2004.)

    The downward trend is less apparent in the overall top 10, where seven U.S. institutions appear. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the highest-ranking American institution, coming in at No. 2, just behind the top-ranked University of Oxford. According to THE, Princeton University recorded an institutional best score to tie for third.

    But institutions farther down the list have slipped. Twenty-five colleges logged their worst-ever scores while 62 dropped in the rankings, which uses 18 measures to judge institutions on five areas including teaching, research quality and international outlook.

    The 2026 rankings of more than 2,100 institutions are based on data collected from 2022 and 2023 and don’t reflect the Trump administration’s push to reshape American higher education. They don’t show what impact cuts to research funding and the crackdown on international students might have on U.S. institutions’ position on the global stage. Those changes could lead to a further decline for U.S. institutions in the rankings, though Ellie Bothwell, THE rankings editor, said what future rankings might show is hard to predict.

    “Any country that cuts research funding, that limits internationalization of higher education, would be in danger of declining in the ranking,” she said. “Those are key things that we measure. Those are important things that universities do. There’s always going to be a risk if you cut those. There’ll be a decline, but it’s all relative, so it does also depend what goes on elsewhere.”

    Looking at the overall 2026 rankings, Bothwell called the decline for the U.S. “striking,” adding that the drop reflects increased global competition. American institutions on average received lower scores on measures related to research, such as citation impact, as well as research strength and reputation.

    Meanwhile, Asian universities continue to climb the rankings. Five universities from China are now in the top 40, and 18 achieved their highest ranks ever, according to THE.

    THE’s chief global affairs officer, Phil Baty, said in a statement that the latest data suggests higher ed is moving toward a new world order with an Eastern center of gravity.

    “This year’s rankings highlight a dramatic and accelerating trend—the shift in the balance of power in research and higher education excellence from the long-established, dominant institutions of the West to rising stars of the East,” Baty said.

    He predicted that U.S. institutions and those in Western Europe would continue to lose ground to their East Asian counterparts in the rankings. “This clear trend is set to persist as research funding and international talent attraction continue to be stymied in the West,” he added.

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  • Coppin State’s Tuition Program Led to Enrollment Boom

    Coppin State’s Tuition Program Led to Enrollment Boom

    A historically Black university in Maryland says efforts to boost enrollment and up its name recognition are paying dividends, allowing it to more than quadruple out-of-state student enrollment over the past two years.

    Coppin State University in Baltimore announced in 2023 that it would begin offering in-state tuition to any student who lived in one of the 41 U.S. states and territories without an HBCU—as well as the District of Columbia, which has two HBCUs—through a program called Expand Eagle Nation. In 2024, the first year of the program, the institution more than doubled the number of students from qualifying states to 195—up from 81 the previous fall. (Coppin’s in-state annual cost of attendance is $27,410, versus $34,474 for out-of-state students.)

    This fall, the numbers increased even more dramatically: 416 of Coppin’s incoming class of 1,000—its largest freshman class in 25 years—come from the qualifying states. Overall, Coppin’s enrollment is up 26 percent this year, including growth on the in-state side, as well. In fact, James Stewart, associate vice president for student development and achievement, said the attention Coppin has received for its Expand Eagle Nation program has raised the university’s profile among local students.

    Still, it’s been a major shift for the institution, which used to attract students primarily from within a 50-mile radius.

    “I think our students enjoy the diversity of thought from so many different regions,” said Jinawa McNeil, the university’s director of admissions. “This is really giving opportunity to students, but it’s [also] making Coppin a different environment, where you traditionally were with students that you might have went to high school with, or maybe a high school not far from you, but now you’re talking to students who are literally from states that you’ve never been to.”

    Coppin’s growth comes at a time when many institutions across the country are working to attract new populations of students ahead of the impending demographic cliff—the decline in high school graduates that is expected to begin next year. (The Maryland Higher Education Commission projected earlier this year, however, that Maryland will be one of the few states to buck the trend, projecting an 11 percent increase in high school graduates from 2024 to 2031.)

    Coppin isn’t the only institution looking to out-of-state students to boost enrollment; in an interview earlier this fall, University of Connecticut officials attributed their growth in head count to more out-of-state name recognition due to the institution’s academic programs and popular sports teams, for example.

    “Given the declining number of students in their own state, [colleges] have to chase them elsewhere,” said Gregory Price, a professor of economics at the University of New Orleans who studies the economics of HBCUs. “It’s sort of like an arms race.”

    Coppin is also capitalizing on the current popularity of HBCUs, which saw significant increases in applications and enrollments following the Supreme Court’s 2023 ban on affirmative action in admissions.

    “Everything that’s been going on politically, from affirmative action to DEI, sends a message to Black students that they don’t belong,” Henry Williams, president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, a nonprofit that advocates for public HBCUs, told Inside Higher Ed regarding the trend last year. “At an HBCU, you’re never going to have that question, and all of the support, resources and scholarship money being taken away elsewhere are already built into the structure [at HBCUs] … there’s value in a sense of belonging.”

    Price noted that HBCUs are also often cheaper than other institutions—as is the case at Coppin, which says it’s the least expensive institution in Maryland. That’s because historically, HBCUs haven’t had large research enterprises, which saves the institutions many costs, he said; they can also attract faculty without paying salaries above market rate.

    “To the extent HBCUs have a distinct value proposition for Black students, that could be good because there aren’t many HBCUs … and that value proposition is high returns in the labor market relative to the cost of attendance,” he said. “If you can reduce the costs, you could probably stay ahead of that demographic cliff longer than other colleges can.”

    Bolstering Recruitment

    Along with offering in-state tuition to out-of-state students, Coppin officials took a slew of steps to increase their presence in the states from which they hoped to attract students. That included visiting high schools—and plastering advertisements on buses and billboards in those cities ahead of their visits, so students would hopefully already recognize the Coppin brand by the time they met an admissions official.

    The university formed transfer partnerships with community college systems in Colorado and California, and the admissions team reached out to regional organizations that help students in the college search process to ensure their staffs were aware of Coppin.

    Increasing the university’s name recognition was an important goal of the Expand Eagle Nation program, McNeil said.

    “It [used to be] a much harder recruitment sale, for lack of a better term,” she said. “We were beginning with who were as an institution, rather than saying, ‘Oh, you’ve heard about us, so let’s help you learn more.’”

    Stewart also noted that the university was prepared for the enrollment boost, having met with academic affairs staff over the past year to ensure there would be enough courses and faculty to meet the needs of all students. To house the influx, Coppin is currently constructing a new dorm, slated to open next fall; it also has six off-campus apartment facilities that Stewart said include resident assistants, just like on-campus housing, and regular shuttle access to campus.

    “We’re going to end up with a good mix where we increase our housing on campus, especially, to meet our new students, but we have options for our [upperclassmen] off campus that give them this blending of what real-life living in an urban environment is,” he said.

    One unexpected challenge that has come with implementing Expand Eagle Nation? Convincing prospective students that the offer is real.

    “They [don’t] believe it,” McNeil said. “Like, ‘What’s the trick, what’s the catch?’ They just don’t believe an institution was willing to invest that deeply, because students understand, and definitely parents of students, specifically parents that have been to college and might have some college debt. They just did not believe that this was an opportunity, because they don’t see too many opportunities like this.”

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  • What over 5,000 transnational education students and staff told us about their digital experiences

    What over 5,000 transnational education students and staff told us about their digital experiences

    This guest blog was kindly authored by Dr Tabetha Newman, CEO and Senior Researcher at Timmus Research and Elizabeth Newall, Senior Sector Specialist at Jisc.

    Transnational education (TNE) is the delivery of UK higher education qualifications in countries other than the UK, allowing students to study for a UK degree without relocating to the UK. It can take various forms, including distance learning, overseas branch campuses, joint degrees, and partnerships with local institutions.

    In July, we asked a simple but pressing question in a HEPI blog: Who’s listening to the TNE student experience? With rising UK TNE student numbers and an increasingly competitive global education landscape, the quality of the TNE experience is central to the success of UK higher education abroad.

    Over the past three years, Jisc has been listening. Our research has focused on better understanding the digital experience of both international students (those travelling to the UK to study), and TNE students (those who study for a UK Higher Education award overseas), along with the staff who teach them. What we’ve found challenges assumptions and highlights the complexity of delivering equitable learning experiences across digital borders.

    The known challenges

    In July, Jisc published its first TNE report, drawing on HESA’s most recent international and TNE student data, and describing four digital challenges to global education delivery that UK providers and sector leaders already recognise:

    1. Connectivity and access to devices and technology.
    2. Access to digital resources such as online platforms, software, e-books and e-journals.
    3. Cultural differences in how digital is used to support teaching and learning.
    4. The digital skills of students and staff.

    These challenges are not new, but what’s been missing is a deeper understanding of how they present in real life, across different countries, contexts, and modes of delivery.

    Listening to lived experience

    This month Jisc launches its second TNE report, based on the feedback gathered in partnership with 19 UK higher education providers of over 5,000 students and staff in 51 instances of TNE in over 30 countries. Insights were gathered from all forms of teaching delivery, from fully online to classroom-based.

    The report provides the sector with vital detail on lived experiences of students and staff in relation to the four known digital challenges listed above. They reveal not just the presence of digital challenges, but the nuances of how they’re experienced, and how they shape access and engagement. The feedback also identified:

    • Differences in connectivity and access by country and global region.
    • How digital is used to support teaching and learning in different learning course contexts.
    • Digital challenges as identified by fly-in, remote and host country staff, and what additional support and training is required
    • Feedback in relation to themes such as internationalising and localising curricula, assessment, and use of GenAI.

    Rethinking Delivery

    These insights prompt a difficult but necessary question: are global learners accessing UK TNE as intended?

    The answer in many cases is no. UK qualifications retain global recognition, yet Jisc’s findings challenge us to rethink delivery: high-quality education loses impact if TNE students and staff are unable to access or engage with it as planned.

    Key issues identified include:

    • Connectivity and availability of equipment: TNE students’ ability to study online is shaped, not just by when they want to learn, but when they can connect. Access to a reliable electricity supply; availability of free Wi-Fi; small versus large screen device use; and reliance on cellular data (at personal cost) varies significantly between countries and global areas.
    • Access to digital resources and learning materials: Global digital resource access is heavily influenced by publisher and software licensing restrictions, national regulations and infrastructure gaps which vary from country to country.  Students frequently cite difficulties using online resources, and express frustration with time-limited access and high data costs.
    • Cultural differences in digital educational practice: Teaching practice differs between countries and cultures, notably in relation to expectations of independent study, feedback and collaboration. Students’ prior experience and expectations related to digital learning can vary as a result.  
    • Digital skills and capabilities: Confidence in digital skills varies by learning mode, with online or distance learners receiving the least guidance. Unclear or conflicting guidance around the use of digital tools such as AI is identified as a concern for both students and staff.

    What needs to change?

    The report doesn’t just give voice to lived experiences, it provides practical recommendations for HE providers and policymakers. These are broken into topics including:

    • Digital resource planning with global access in mind.
    • Curriculum design and delivery for diverse learning contexts.
    • Communicating clearly with TNE students.
    • Staff training and support.
    • Digital capabilities development across all modes of delivery.

    Importantly, the report responds to recent calls for greater transparency in TNE student experience data by providing a publicly accessible source of student voice – inviting the sector to engage, reflect, and act.

    Sector voices

    The response from sector leaders has been enthusiastic and deeply thoughtful.

    Griff Ryan, Head of TNE at Universities UK International, welcomed the report, commenting:

    Recent years have seen significant progress in understanding the experiences of TNE students, and this report continues that trend… With findings broken down by global region and mode of delivery, the report offers valuable guidance for universities and policymakers alike… This report is a timely and practical resource for institutions looking to strengthen their TNE offer. I’d like to thank Jisc and the 19 contributing universities for their work, and I look forward to the conversations and actions it will help to shape.

    Professor Dibyesh Anand, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Global Engagement and Employability), University of Westminster reminds us that:

    Transnational education is meant to spread the benefits and cultures of internationalised education, and to an extent, ‘democratise’ it, around the world. Yet, this important report is a sobering reminder that inequities prevent a uniform experience with TNE. Therefore, universities need to be mindful about having understanding, resources, and processes to challenge inequities, provide consistency while accepting healthy differences, and encourage an inclusive education.

    Professor David Carter, Dean of Teaching and Leaning at the University of Reading, and author of the November 2024 HEPI report The student experience of transnational education, highlights the importance of challenging our assumptions:

    This is one of the largest and most comprehensive pieces of research into the student experience of UK transnational education. Behind the responses and the insights lies a huge variety of student and staff experience. The report brings several issues into much sharper focus. For UK providers, often the biggest challenge comes with our own assumptions. Things that we take for granted in the UK can be points of difference when it comes to TNE students. This includes everything, from how students access higher education to their attitudes to learning. A core skill for academic and professional staff who work in transnational education, therefore, is adaptability combined with respect for cultural differences. The recommendations in this report provide a useful toolkit for providers to use as they seek to expand TNE provision. It shows that there are clear gains to be made if UK providers work together to address common challenges.

    What’s next?

    Jisc’s TNE digital experience research is ongoing. We’ll continue working with providers to support more equitable digital learning and teaching, and we invite you to be part of that journey.

    To stay informed, sign up to the mailing list: ji.sc/stay-informed-isdx

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  • A TNE policy primer for anyone seeking new funding streams

    A TNE policy primer for anyone seeking new funding streams

    Keir Starmer’s trade mission to India this week sees the Prime Minister accompanied by 14 vice chancellors and other university representatives.

    They have joined the delegation, according to Number 10,

    in recognition of the explosion in demand for higher education in India – with 70 million places needed by 2035, which has created a huge opportunity for UK universities seeking new funding streams.

    The last couple of years have seen a loosening of restrictions on overseas campuses in India and a corresponding piling in from universities in the UK, US, Australia and elsewhere, in particular within the new Edu City development in Navi Mumbai. On the UK side, Southampton, Surrey, York, Aberdeen, Bristol and Liverpool have either opened a new campus or received the go-ahead from India’s University Grants Commission to move forward with plans for one, whether in the new education hub area or elsewhere.

    The government seems keen to trumpet UK higher education’s growing overseas presence as an economic win for the country and the institutions involved. It has also shrewdly observed that some UK universities are indeed “seeking new funding streams.” The future looks bright for TNE then – right?

    Overdue refreshments

    There’s a school of thought which says the government’s long-delayed international education strategy refresh will lean into transnational education, although exactly what this would entail is unclear – probably more trade delegations and better intertwining of the sector’s efforts with wider diplomatic work, rather than anything as flashy as a student number target.

    Jacqui Smith suggested this would be the case in remarks to the House of Lords back in December – admittedly this was when the updated strategy was due to arrive in “early spring”:

    If we look, for example, at the value of transnational education, where UK universities have sites in or relationships with other countries, we see a growing sector, and these are all areas that we will want to look at in the international education strategy.

    This way of thinking is perhaps stimulated by the unlikelihood of Labour’s vision for the strategy being particularly bullish in any other area. A new international student number target is surely off the cards, and while there may be aspirations around overall education export totals, such a large slice of this comes from international students’ fees and living expenses that it’s tricky to be realistic about increases if numbers don’t return to growth.

    About the only thing we do know at this point about the new strategy is that it will be co-led by the Foreign Office as well as DfE and the Department for Business and Trade (the Home Office still doesn’t seem to be closely involved with the strategy – history suggests that it will suddenly have thoughts at a later date).

    And while the UK trade strategy, launched just before the summer, made only passing reference to education, more recently the business department has continued funding for the QAA to address “regulatory barriers to the growth of UK higher education in priority nations.”

    Doing things leanly

    The future regulatory environment has begun to look more promising too, with new Office for Students chair Edward Peck telling the education committee back in March that increased scrutiny of TNE would not be a priority:

    I think there may be ways of doing things more leanly, which is why I want to explore the legal framework, as I noted. There may be some things that at the moment just are not a priority. The one that has been raised with me by the sector is the interest in more regulatory activity around transnational education. I would want to explore with the OfS why that was thought to be a priority at this moment, given everything else that is going on.

    The regulator’s draft free speech guidance had left the territorial extent of the new requirements somewhat vague, leading to some pointed consultation responses from sector representatives as to why they should very much not apply elsewhere in the world. But the finalised guidance in June 2025 put it bluntly:

    HERA does not require providers or constituent institutions to take steps to secure freedom of speech in respect of their activities outside England.

    Plus earlier this year OfS (and Medr) announced that providers would not be required to submit individualised TNE learner data to the HESA student record “until further notice”, backtracking on earlier plans intended to provide a better understanding of the quality and standards of TNE provision and thus assist the regulator to “more effectively protect the interests of these students.” The regulatory outlook for TNE looks light-touch for the foreseeable future.

    The Industry and Regulators Committee inquiry into OfS was told that the regulator’s falling-out with the QAA was putting at risk future transnational education partnerships involving English providers. But the recent glut of new campuses and programmes seems to bely these fears.

    Sovereign glut

    To pick out a few recent examples, the last year or so has seen new overseas campuses (opening or announced) involving Exeter in Egypt, Lancaster in Indonesia, Keele and York in Greece, and all the ones in India mentioned above. There is plenty more action besides – and plenty of TNE which doesn’t follow the more eye-catching branch campus model.

    Around 20 per cent of UG and PGT students registered for a higher education award are now based overseas in one form or another of TNE. We’re rapidly approaching the inflection point where there are more TNE students in UK higher education than there are international students travelling over here (in fact we may have already passed this important moment, we just don’t have timely enough data to tell us).

    Despite the occasional fears that there are reputational skeletons lurking in the overseas activities of UK universities, the media spotlight is rarely turned their way. We get the occasional scare story when the Telegraph is told the student numbers involved, or occasional deeper digging when an overseas partner becomes too involved in geopolitics – but these are relatively few and far between, as opposed to the incessant drumbeat of negative coverage for many other higher education issues.

    At the risk of breaking the unwritten Wonkhe rule of not writing up imagined HE futures for the second time in a week, you can see a world 20 years hence in which transnational higher education has gone from strength to strength, with UK universities having continued to grow their overseas offer, and the proportion of higher education students whose awards come from institutions outside their country of study ticking ever upwards.

    The UK can benefit from its huge pool of expertise in getting programmes off the ground – and plenty of experience in what can go wrong, if it’s able to learn from it. If the government leans in, the regulators stay largely unengaged, and the press generally continues to ignore the detail of what happens elsewhere in the world – it feels plausible.

    Rescue me

    But there are clearly challenges. Jisc’s new survey of staff and student digital experiences in TNE is a rare window into actual teaching and learning environments at a decent scale (more than 5,000 responses from a wide variety of countries and provision types).

    Staff and students alike reported fairly widespread problems logging into university systems, accessing e-books, journals and software, and restrictions to certain apps or websites. One-third of teaching staff said that unreliable wifi negatively affects student learning – a “significant proportion” of TNE students were found to be paying cellular data costs to access learning resources via smartphones. Of the teaching staff surveyed, only 32 per cent said that most or all students had an understanding of acceptable use of generative AI.

    It’s not all directly about tech either. Students highlighted unclear marking criteria, especially for those learning online, and some mentioned a lack of feedback. The report has two examples (both in China) of students being placed in “potential danger” from the government due to political content of their past or present assignments. There’s an example of synchronous content from the UK being packaged up as an asynchronous programme for learners abroad in a way that hardly screams high quality.

    Some of the issues that emerge are simply around the challenges of delivering university study which is ever more designed around access to tech in places which suffer from moderate to high digital poverty. But others – and it’s these you’d be interested in if prognosticating about future trends in TNE – revolve more around the extent to which the world is becoming more or less technologically, and intellectually, open. You wouldn’t want to bet the farm on models of learning which suppose that internet access internationally is going to become more open, or that the same countries’ companies will continue to enjoy the same access to developing markets that they have over the last decade or so.

    The problems aren’t all insurmountable – the Jisc report emphasises the opportunities of transnational licensing agreements and the importance of the sector setting up publisher agreements in a way that doesn’t forget that it has thousands of students in different domiciles.

    If regulators began to take a closer interest in TNE student experience (and other topics such as assessment and feedback, or academic freedom), the report spells out some areas where there would be a greater impetus for action. Though many of these issues have not really been effectively tackled for UK-based students either.

    Travelling long haul

    Practicalities of staff and student experiences aside, there are plenty of sensible reasons why TNE isn’t a policy solution to the UK higher education sector’s wider funding challenges, a claim the government seems to be flirting with in its trade deal boosterism.

    The chance to relitigate the question of how much it costs to deliver higher education, and at what fee, to students studying in their home country is an enticing one, given how the various UK governments have boxed universities in from doing so here. There may be more margin available in some instances – but there are certainly plenty of examples of institutions losing more than they put in, even if they are not public-spirited enough to fess up and enhance everyone else’s understanding of what not to do.

    The long-term stability of programmes is unclear too. The risk of big geopolitical upheaval changing the landscape in one fell swoop is fairly well-trodden ground at this point (even if it still gets ignored in planning) but smaller policy changes – take Malaysia’s recently instituted tax on international students as but one example – can also make the difference between viability and non-viability. Another clear direction of travel in global TNE is competition: countries who have typically been hosts pivoting into setting up their own initiatives. Transnational education might be ubiquitous in global HE in 2050, but this doesn’t translate to UK institutions necessarily enjoying an ever-upward trajectory.

    The other point that gets largely overlooked is what this hypothetical boom in TNE looks like across the sector – it’s surely unrealistic to see all, or even most, universities with mature transnational offers a couple of decades hence, in the same way that other export industries don’t have a plethora of successful UK actors on the world stage. A more compelling prediction would be a relatively modest number of institutions getting TNE “right” for the longer-term, leaving the others to focus on all that stuff the government wants but doesn’t fund: more civic and local focus, the (re)building of links to local economies and businesses, an ever more ambitious role in enabling opportunity in the UK on a shoestring.

    So TNE might well be an enormous part of UK higher education’s future – but you’d have to predict that for many individual universities it will certainly not be, however much the government might want to trumpet its potential role as a new funding stream. This complicates any efforts to use it as a policy plug for a sector taking on water.

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  • Trump’s higher ed compact draws condemnation from faculty and college unions

    Trump’s higher ed compact draws condemnation from faculty and college unions

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    Faculty groups and employee unions are urging universities to reject a proposed compact from the Trump administration that would trade control over their policies for preferential access to federal research funding.

    Of the nine colleges that received the offer, at least two faculty senates — the University of Virginia and the University of Arizona — voted to oppose the deal and pushed their institution’s leadership to reject it. Other instructors and employee groups have also decried the compact. 

    Leaders at the colleges have thus far issued mostly noncommittal responses, with none publicly announcing they would decline the deal as of Wednesday afternoon. 

    Along with UVA and the University of Arizona, the Trump administration sent the compact to Brown University, Dartmouth College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University. It gave the institutions until Oct. 20 to respond with feedback and up to Nov. 21 to sign.

    Faculty groups weigh in

    At a Monday meeting, the University of Arizona’s faculty senate approved a resolution opposing the compact in a 40-8 vote, with one member abstaining.

    The resolution called the compact a danger to “the independence, excellence, and integrity” of the institution and the constitutional rights of the campus community.

    “Others wiser than I have called it recently a trap, a poisoned apple,” Faculty Chair Leila Hudson said before the vote. “Federal funds are not a drug that we need a quick fix of to be forever extortable.”

    Hundreds of miles east, faculty at the University of Virginia similarly rebuked the Trump administration’s proposal.

    The UVA faculty senate on Friday, in a 60-2 vote with 4 abstentions, approved a resolution whose preamble called the compact a danger to the university that runs antithetical to its mission and traditions. It also said the deal “likely violates state and federal law.”

    At least one law firm, Ropes & Gray, has said the compact raises legal questions, adding that it “does not explain the statutory or other basis that authorizes the Administration to give preferential access to federal programs.”

    The law firm also said the compact used vague and broad language and doesn’t explain key elements of the proposal. For instance, it threatens to strip federal funding from institutions that sign and then violate its terms — but it doesn’t explain which dollars could be revoked.

    “Would all federal benefits — research dollars and beyond — be affected by an instance of non-compliance, or would only those additional or new federal benefits that have accrued as a result of the institution having signed onto this Compact (the scope of which is unclear as well) be affected?” it posited in a Wednesday analysis.

    A second round of deals?

    Two of the institutions that received the offer — Penn and Brown — have previously struck deals with the Trump administration.

    Penn President J. Larry Jameson said Sunday that he would seek input on the compact from the campus community, including Penn’s trustees and faculty senate.

    “The long-standing partnership with the federal government in both education and research has yielded tremendous benefits for our nation. Penn seeks no special consideration,” he said in a statement.

    Jameson added that he would keep five factors front of mind: “freedom of inquiry and thought, free expression, non-discrimination, adherence to American laws and the Constitution of the United States, and our own governance.”

    In March, the Trump administration suspended $175 million of Penn’s research funding over its prior policy permitting transgender women to compete in women’s sports. The U.S. Department of Education formally alleged in April that the university’s policies had violated Title IX, a law banning sex-based discrimination at federally funded institutions.

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