Our long-awaited report shares findings from 91
institutions across 16 states that participated in Hope Impact
Partnerships (HIP) and fielded The Hope Center Student Basic Needs
Survey between Spring 2023 and Summer 2024.
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Author: admin
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Income-driven repayment applications on hold for three months
Student loan borrowers won’t be able to apply for income-driven repayment plans for at least three months, The Washington Post reported.
The Post obtained a memo sent last week from the Department of Education to student loan servicers directing them to stop processing all income-driven repayment and consolidation applications until at least May. The memo offers more clarity on how the department plans to proceed after a federal appeals court blocked the department from implementing a new income-driven repayment option for borrowers put in place by the Biden administration. That injunction also implicated parts of other income-driven repayment plans.
Up until this point, all that student aid experts knew was that the department had disabled new online applications. Now, they know that all existing applications have also been included in the freeze.
The application freeze is a problem for some borrowers who rely on income-driven repayment plans for more affordable payments and to avoid default. Under the plans, borrowers’ monthly payments are based on their disposable income and other factors, and after 20 to 25 years of payment, the remaining balance would be forgiven. But now, millions of borrowers no longer have access to IDR and are left with only the most expensive loan repayment options.
Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance, a trade group for loan servicers, told the Post that “there is a lot to clean up.”
“We will be working for [the Office of Federal Student Aid] to implement that transition once courts clear things up and bring some finality so borrowers can have certainty and confidence in their options now and in the future,” Buchanan said.
The Education Department has said the pause is necessary under the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruling, but paper applications for loan consolidation will be allowed.
“A federal Circuit Court of Appeals issued an injunction preventing the U.S. Department of Education from implementing the SAVE Plan and parts of other income-driven repayment (IDR) plans,” a department spokesperson said. So “The department is reviewing repayment applications to conform with the Eighth Circuit’s ruling.”
But legal experts on federal loans have told Inside Higher Ed taking down the applications entirely is not necessary. As the department noted in its statement, the injunction only declares “parts” of the IDR plans—such as the end-of-program loan forgiveness—illegal. It does not ban the use of lessened monthly payments.
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VMI board rejects extension for superintendent
Virginia Military Institute’s Board of Visitors voted 10 to 6 on Friday against a contract extension for Major General Cedric Wins, a VMI graduate and the first Black leader in the college’s history.
All 10 votes against the extension came from members appointed by Republican governor Glenn Youngkin, though four Youngkin appointees voted to renew the contract, joining two holdovers named to the board by Democratic governors, The Richmond-Times Dispatch reported.
Wins’s contract expires June 30.
The vote will end a contentious tenure for Wins, who joined VMI in 2021. He replaced General J. H. Binford Peay III, who led the college from 2003 to 2020, when he stepped down after an investigation determined systemic racism and sexism went unchecked under his watch.
(Peay was awarded VMI’s highest honor in 2022 despite those findings.)
Wins’s tenure at VMI, where he was tasked with righting the ship amid the fallout from the investigation, has been marked by controversy. He has faced off with alumni, whom he accused of spreading mistruths about VMI’s curricular offerings; clashed with student journalists over alumni involvement in the campus newspaper; and faced accusations that he went too far with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at VMI, which didn’t accept Black students until 1968 and women until 1997.
Alumni have called for his firing and complained about his bonuses in recent years.
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Five strategies for improving campus career centers (opinion)
For decades, work-life balance has been seen as the gold standard of career success. The idea suggests that professionals should allocate time and energy evenly between work and personal life, ensuring equilibrium between competing responsibilities. But in reality, balance is often an illusion—an unattainable tightrope walk that leaves individuals feeling guilty, unfulfilled and stretched too thin.
The workforce of today—and especially the workforce of tomorrow—no longer aspires to a segmented life. Instead, workers seek career and life integration, a holistic approach where career, personal growth and well-being are deeply interconnected. Unlike the concept of work-life balance, which implies a constant trade-off, career and life integration builds synergy between personal and professional aspirations.
Workday’s Global Workforce Report found that employees who perceive their work as meaningful feel 37 percent more accomplished than those who don’t, even when facing workloads they describe as “challenging.” An Inside Higher Ed Career Advice piece written by a University of Michigan administrator explored the importance of integrating values into the career exploration process. Additionally, research highlighted in the Journal of Personality indicates that young adults’ personal values significantly influence their career-related preferences, suggesting a strong desire for roles that reflect their core values.
If higher ed institutions continue to treat career development as separate from personal well-being, they will fail to meet the evolving needs of students and professionals alike. Career centers must evolve into career and life design labs—hubs of lifelong guidance, personal development and future readiness. This piece outlines five strategic imperatives that institutions must embrace to lead this transformation.
- Moving from work-life balance to career and life integration.
The traditional work-life balance model assumes a strict separation between career and personal life, often emphasizing boundaries rather than synergy. The statistics tell a compelling story:
- A Deloitte study found that 66 percent of employees report feeling chronically overworked or burned out despite efforts to maintain work-life balance.
- Research from Gallup indicates that 76 percent of millennials believe a successful career should seamlessly integrate with personal fulfillment rather than be kept separate.
- A recent Moodle study indicates that job burnout has reached an all-time high of 66 percent in 2025.
Campus career services leaders must reframe their approach. Students need tools to design careers that complement their life aspirations rather than forcing them to choose between professional success and personal fulfillment.
Most students and alumni struggle with clarity—they pursue careers based on external pressures rather than intrinsic motivations. Career centers must facilitate career and life vision workshops to help individuals align their inner purpose with external opportunities. By integrating career and life design principles into career services, institutions empower students to prototype different pathways, develop adaptability and connect their academic and professional lives with personal meaning.
By using a reflective, experiential approach, students learn that career development is not a rigid ladder but a fluid, evolving process.
- Integrating emotional agility into career coaching.
One of the greatest barriers to success is not external—it’s internal. It is not a lack of skills. It is a lack of confidence, clarity and emotional agility. Many students enter the workforce grappling with impostor syndrome, career anxiety and fear of failure. A research study titled “The Impostor Phenomenon,” published in the International Journal of Behavioral Science, shows that over 70 percent of people experience impostor syndrome at some point in their lives.
Institutions must integrate emotional intelligence training into their strategic plans. Students need to learn how to navigate career uncertainty with resilience rather than fear. Instead of merely offering job search strategies, career coaches should incorporate cognitive reframing techniques to help students shift from self-doubt to empowerment. This involves helping students recognize negative thought patterns and replace them with action-oriented mindsets.
For instance, instead of viewing rejection as a failure, students should be encouraged to see it as an iteration in the career and life design process. Career setbacks, industry changes and professional pivots are inevitable.
Practical steps for career centers:
- Train career coaches in cognitive-behavioral coaching techniques to help students recognize and reframe self-limiting narratives.
- Integrate self-awareness exercises that help students identify core fears (of failure, rejection or inadequacy) and develop action plans to overcome them with emotional strength.
- Provide group coaching sessions focused on overcoming impostor syndrome, building confidence and developing a growth mindset.
- Use AI-driven career reflection tools to help students track their confidence growth over time.
- Incorporate mindfulness practices and journaling into safe spaces and welcoming career and life design studios to help students reframe failure as part of their evolving unique narrative.
Emotional agility is a core component of career development. Success today isn’t about having the perfect career path—it’s about navigating uncertainty with emotional agility. Career services must equip students with resilience and adaptability to thrive in ever-changing industries.
- Merging personal, career and professional development.
Career and life design should be deeply personal, shaped by self-awareness, curiosity and personal reflection. We mention “personal” first, because we begin with the person.
Career services has historically focused on résumé reviews, job placement and networking strategies—important elements, but not enough for long-term success. A 2023 report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that students who integrate personal development with career planning—through leadership training, mentorship and values-based exploration—are significantly more career-ready upon graduation. Rather than pushing students toward the highest-paying or most prestigious jobs, career centers should help them define success on their own terms.
Practical steps for career centers:
- Develop integrated mentorship networks that connect students with professionals who exemplify career and life integration.
- Help students build personalized business plans that help them take ownership of the story they are both writing and telling.
- Leverage design thinking principles, encouraging students to experiment with career pathways that embrace uncertainty, adaptability and iterative learning rather than rigid, predetermined plans.
AI can assist in career trajectory mapping, skills assessment and predictive job market insights, while human coaches focus on deep coaching, the power of stories and career and life integration strategies.
- Considering AI-powered hyperpersonalized career coaching.
While traditional career advising has relied heavily on in-person interactions, the next evolution of career services will be AI-empowered, data-informed and hyperpersonalized. AI-driven career exploration tools can analyze a student’s experiences to offer real-time, customized career insights. AI agents such as the 24-7 virtual Career and Life Design Lab provide personalized career simulations, self-actualization exercises and self-realization insights to help individuals align their career paths with their purpose.
This mindset shift in career services will blend AI and human coaching. AI can assist in career trajectory mapping, skills assessment and predictive job market insights, while human coaches focus on deep coaching, the power of stories and career and life integration strategies. This synergy allows for scalable yet deeply personalized career services.
Practical steps for career centers:
- Integrate AI-driven solutions and experiential learning methodologies.
- Introduce future-self mapping, where students interview their future selves and map out short- and long-term goals.
- Use reverse-engineering techniques, working backward from the desired impact to identify the necessary skills, experiences and trajectories.
- Implement AI-powered career simulations, allowing students to test and refine career decisions in a risk-free environment that tackles limiting beliefs and impostor syndrome.
- Scaling lifelong learning beyond graduation.
The future of work demands continuous upskilling, reskilling and career agility. Institutions must create a culture of lifelong learning, where students and alumni receive ongoing support throughout their careers. Career services must expand their scope to lifelong learning and helping students and alumni develop not résumés, but portfolios of experiences.
Practical steps for career centers:
- Create career and life integration circles, where alumni engage in peer coaching, mentorship and accountability partnerships.
- Offer subscription-based career services, ensuring alumni have access to coaching, upskilling and career reinvention programs throughout their professional lives.
- Establish annual career and life re-evaluation workshops, helping alumni recalibrate their career and life vision.
Conclusion: The New Paradigm
The future of work is not about balance. It is about integration. By embedding the career and life design theoretical framework into institutional frameworks, universities can better equip students for a rapidly changing world. Colleges and universities that fail to adapt will be left behind, while those that embrace career and life design—leveraging both AI and a holistic approach to personal, career and professional development—will supercharge their teams with scale and empower students to craft lives of purpose, adaptability and lasting impact.
The question is no longer whether career centers should evolve—it is whether they can afford not to.
Does your career center offer group coaching sessions focused on confidence building, growth mindset or related topics? Tell us about it.
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Penn State blocks embattled trustee from re-election
Embattled Pennsylvania State University trustee Barry Fenchak’s time on the board may be nearing an end: A subcommittee voted Wednesday that he was “unqualified and ineligible” to run again.
Fenchak is one of nine trustees on the 36-member board who are elected by alumni. His term is set to expire at the end of June. But Fenchak—who is already locked in litigation with Penn State over what he considers its lack of fiscal transparency—plans to fight the decision.
“This is completely in line with Penn State’s long-standing pattern with regard to trying to maintain their secrecy, and myself and our legal team will be evaluating these recent actions by Penn State and taking the appropriate actions in the court,” Fenchak told Inside Higher Ed.
The outspoken trustee has been at the center of controversy for nearly a year as he has sought to obtain more details on the university’s rising endowment management fees, even filing a lawsuit for that information. Penn State initially refused to provide the financial details that Fenchak, an investment adviser, said he needed to perform his fiduciary duties; he argued that endowment management fees inexplicably climbed from 0.62 percent in 2013–14 to 2.49 percent by 2018–19. Eventually, as a result of his litigation, he was able to obtain the requested documents, he told Inside Higher Ed.
His lawsuit is one of two brought against the university last year by trustees alleging a lack of transparency by the board. A local media outlet has also sued for alleged violations of open meetings laws.
Efforts to Remove Fenchak
Fellow trustees previously tried to boot Fenchak from the board last fall after he made a crude joke to a female staff member. Paraphrasing the PG-rated Tom Hanks movie A League of Their Own, Fenchak—who is bald and had just received a Penn State baseball cap as a gift at a university event—joked that it made him look like “a penis with a hat on,” according to court records.
Fenchak’s remark prompted the board to call a meeting in October in an effort to remove him. However, a judge intervened, halting the board’s attempt to oust Fenchak.
In his opinion granting the preliminary injunction, Centre County Court Judge Brian J. Marshall wrote that while he “is not suggesting that plaintiff should not be sanctioned,” the court had been “presented with credible and, in many instances uncontroverted, evidence that Plaintiff has been subject to ongoing retaliation by Defendants.”
The judge also noted that Fenchak had sued Penn State just three days before the remark that the board used as justification for his removal.
Now, months later, the board landed on a new tactic to remove Fenchak: The nine-member nominating subcommittee voted 8 to 1 last week to bar him from running for re-election.
Daniel Delligatti, vice chair of the subcommittee, argued that Fenchak had been warned multiple times about “inappropriate behavior” and that he failed to live up to the board’s code of conduct.
Fenchak’s attempt at humor made staff members feel uncomfortable, Delligatti said, and his candidacy for a second term was not in “alignment with Penn State’s mission and values.”
Trustee Jay Paterno was the sole dissenting vote. He argued that “the process” as he understood it was “outside the scope of our review.”
Fenchak attended the virtual meeting but was denied an opportunity to speak on his own behalf.
Deliberations on blocking Fenchak from running for re-election were largely confined to a closed executive session meeting of the nominating subcommittee, which preceded the deciding vote.
A Legal Fight
Though a judge halted Penn State’s initial efforts to remove Fenchak, the board and the university’s legal team are again trying to oust him. The same day that the nominating subcommittee shot down Fenchak’s re-election bid, the university filed a motion to dissolve the preliminary injunction that allowed Fenchak to remain on the board as his lawsuit proceeded.
Fenchak alleges the motion was filed mere minutes after the subcommittee’s decision, which would prevent him from finishing his current term as well as serving another one.
Penn State officials did not provide a comment on the situation.
In response to a request for an interview with trustees, Shannon Harvey, assistant vice president and secretary for the board, referred Inside Higher Ed to a video of the subcommittee’s virtual meeting.
As of publication, Fenchak had not filed a legal response. But he noted one is coming. Beyond the impact on him personally, he also has broader concerns about the board’s process to bar trustees from re-election, which was adopted over the last year as he pressured the university to release financial documents.
“Forget about my specific situation. This process disenfranchises and essentially steals the vote from our alumni,” Fenchak said. “That’s a right our alumni have had for 150 years, and now we are telling those alumni who they can and who they cannot vote for to represent them on the board. Frankly, that’s unconscionable. As a Penn Stater, it’s heartbreaking.”
Changes to the way alumni trustees are elected have also caught the attention of state lawmakers.
At a Feb. 20 Pennsylvania House Appropriations Committee hearing, Republican representative Marla Brown questioned Penn State president Neeli Bendapudi about the change. Brown said she had fielded complaints from constituents and seemed skeptical about the new processes.
“I can tell you that people are not happy about it, and the optics on it are not good. As I’m sure you’re aware, it looks like a conflict of interest that the board is mainly concerned with picking and choosing the muscle in which the candidates will be serving on the board,” Brown said.
Asked why Penn State made the change, Bendapudi noted it was a board decision.
“Did you support the change?” Brown asked.
“I report to them and I have no say in it one way or the other,” Bendapudi answered.
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One-day event creates institutional goals for student success
Across higher education, identifying stakeholders who are engaging in similar initiatives or working toward mutual student success goals can be a challenge, and this is true at the institutional level as well.
In a 2024 survey of student success professionals conducted by Inside Higher Ed and Hanover, over half (59 percent) of respondents said they believe their institution is very or extremely effective at making student success an institutional priority.
Two administrators at DePaul University in Chicago created a one-day event on campus to unite practitioners and leaders who care about student success to identify common goals and challenges.
“It’s so necessary … to think about the gathering of individuals, because it really elevates what was most important for us, which is student success being everyone’s job,” says Ashley Williams, director of student success initiatives.
Gathering together: The inaugural summit took place Dec. 3, 2024, with 350 staff, faculty members and administrators participating. The event featured outside experts, such as Monica Hall-Porter from the University of Texas at Austin as the keynote speaker, and the university president and provost addressed institutional goals for student success and closing achievement gaps.
The goals for the summit, as outlined by organizers, included defining student success, determining how success is measured, fostering a coordinated culture for student success, charting a road map for enhancing student success and creating awareness of technology, systems and data relevant to student success, as well as sharing of best practices in place at the institution.
The summit was titled Charting Student Success From Orientation Through Graduation, to reflect the student life cycle and how each practitioner contributes to student success. DePaul, as a Catholic institution, also frames student success through St. Vincent DePaul’s mission.
Organizers were intentional about selecting individuals from various areas and disciplines across the university to drive creative and diverse conversations, says Michael Roberts, senior assistant dean for student success.
DePaul’s summit united diverse professionals from a variety of areas and disciplines on campus.
“I think folks can get … tunnel vision in trying to solve their problems and [trying] to cultivate expertise within their immediate or closest community,” Williams says. “We know there’s a lot of knowledge and strengths that exist across in the institution and in places you may not necessarily [be] thinking about in your day-to-day.”
Unsiloing the institution and breaking organizational barriers allows for sharing resources, strengths, ideas and innovation through collaboration, Williams says.
Putting it together: When creating the summit, Roberts and Williams prioritized institutional buy-in and ensuring their work was collaborative and not in competition with the work of others who engaged in student success spaces.
The organizers engaged with others who were leaders in student success to contribute to planning and guide decision-making to ensure the event could execute goals in the ways they intended, Williams says.
Partnerships also included identifying internal and external groups that could contribute resources and serve as sponsors to finance and run the event.
One facet that was important to Roberts was not having the summit be a pep rally to gather enthusiasm, but something that could apply to faculty or staff members’ work directly. “Like, ‘this event is going to matter to me, and I’m going to be able to take something away from this and actually make use of it,’” he says.
Looking ahead: The inaugural summit had a goal of 50 attendees, so reaching over 300 was a happy surprise, Roberts says. Attendees were a mix of faculty and staff, and feedback was overwhelmingly positive, Williams shares.
Anecdotally, organizers heard that having a space to discuss topics and be exposed to other work happening across campus was valuable to attendees, as was building community with peers.
“People felt informed; they walked away enlightened and kind of motivated, inspired to think about how they could lead, how they could pivot some of their work to better fit within a standard model of student success,” Williams says.
In the future, organizers are looking to implement more programming that allows practitioners to participate in hands-on activities that allow them to engage in work directly.
What’s being done at your institution to ensure administrators and practitioners in various areas are aware of and using data relevant to student success? Tell us about it.
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International Student Aspirations Increasingly Align With The Skills Needed To Propel UK Growth, ApplyBoard’s Internal Data Shows
- Justin Wood is Director, UK at ApplyBoard.
Millions of international students have used the ApplyBoard platform to search for international study opportunities.[1] For many of these students, searching for courses in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States is one of the first steps in their study abroad journey. This proprietary search data reveals a leading indicator of changing student preferences.
What UK Fields of Study did International Students Search for in 2024?
After the Sunak Government announced the tightening rules on international student dependants and a review into the graduate route, the UK saw a significant contraction in interest from international students in 2024—applications declined by 14% year-over-year, while dependant applications dropped by 84%. The good news for a struggling sector is that early signs point to positive momentum in 2025, with higher enrolments for many of the institutions that offer a January intake. Enroly data suggests a 23% increase in January 2025 compared to January 2024, and ApplyBoard has experienced growth at three times this rate.
ApplyBoard’s search trends reinforce these early signs: interest in UK courses jumped 25% in 2024 vs. 2023. With search behaviour often signaling future application trends, this surge suggests the UK’s positive momentum in early 2025 could continue throughout the year. Beyond this overall growth, shifting field-of-study preferences highlight how international applicants are adapting to the UK’s changing landscape:
Health fields saw the largest proportional increase among UK searches, climbing nearly four percentage points to 12.8% of all searches. This growing interest aligns with the UK’s expanding healthcare sector, which is projected to add 349,000 jobs by 2035, growing 7% from 2025. Likewise, the information technology sector is expected to grow 8% over the next decade, which aligns with shifting student preferences—ApplyBoard platform data shows Engineering and Technology accounted for 17% of searches in 2024, up two percentage points year-over-year.
Interest in the Sciences also expanded, rising from 13% in 2023 to 16% in 2024. Alongside the gains in Health and Engineering and Technology, this shift underscores how international student priorities are increasingly aligning with long-term global workforce demands.
How International Students are Navigating UK Study Fields
This alignment comes at a time when interest in UK courses is rising. Interest in UK courses grew significantly among several key student populations in 2024, with searches from students in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Ghana, and Saudi Arabia doubling year-over-year. Meanwhile, student searches from Nigeria and Pakistan saw substantial gains, rising 66% and 40%, respectively. However, searches from Nepalese students experienced the most dramatic increase, with searches tripling compared to 2023.
Further supporting the possibility that the UK’s positive momentum in January 2025 will continue throughout the year, searches from most key student demographics reached an all-time monthly high in either December 2024 or January 2025.
The graphic below illustrates how major student populations explored different fields of study in the UK on the ApplyBoard platform last year:
Student interest in Health fields was strongest among Ghanaian (22%), Nigerian (20%), and Saudi Arabian students (16%). Compared to the previous year, the share of searches for this field rose by six percentage points among Ghanaian students and five percentage points among Nigerian students. Additionally, the proportion of Health searches among Sri Lankan students doubled over this period.
By comparison, the Sciences were a priority across all nine student populations, making up at least 14% of UK course searches. Students from Pakistan (18%), Saudi Arabia (18%), and Bangladesh (16%) had the highest proportion of Science-related searches. Notably, seven of the nine key student populations devoted a greater share of their searches to the Sciences in 2024 than in the previous year.
Engineering and Technology also accounted for at least 14% of searches among these major student populations, although Sri Lankan (29%), Saudi Arabian (26%), and Chinese (23%) students showed the highest engagement in this field. Additionally, eight of the nine key student populations allocated a larger share of their searches to Engineering and Technology in 2024. As student interest in UK courses continues to grow, institutions can strengthen their appeal by aligning their portfolio with evolving student priorities and workforce needs.
The UK’s Edge: Where Student Interest Outpaces Canada and the US
Understanding where the UK sees higher proportional interest in key fields of study compared to Canada and the US can reveal important competitive advantages for institutions and better inform strategic recruitment strategies. This interactive visualization allows you to explore student interest by field and destination, filterable by top student populations:
Health-related fields accounted for 25% of searches for UK institutions among Filipino students—three percentage points higher than their searches for Canada and the US. Likewise, 22% of Ghanaian students were interested in UK-based Health courses, outpacing the interest shown for both Canadian (21%) and American (20%) options.
In Engineering and Technology, 29% of Sri Lankan students’ searches for UK courses were in this field—matching their interest in US study but well surpassing their searches for Canada (24%).
Social-related fields like Law, Social Sciences, and Teaching captured 10% of Pakistani searches for the UK, outpacing that for Canada (6%) and the US (7%). A similar trend occurred among Bangladeshi students, with 10% of their UK-based searches occurring for social-related fields compared to 7% of Canada and 6% for the US.
Leveraging Search Trends to Shape Future Recruitment
Search trends serve as a leading indicator of shifting student interest, often signaling future application patterns. The surge in searches for UK courses—particularly in high-demand fields like health, engineering, and sciences—suggests a growing alignment between student priorities and workforce needs. By analysing these trends, institutions can proactively refine course offerings and recruitment strategies to attract top international talent. As demand continues to evolve, leveraging real-time search insights enables institutions to stay ahead of market shifts, ensuring they meet student expectations while strengthening their global competitiveness. Understanding where the UK holds a competitive edge will be key to optimizing outreach and course development in 2025 and beyond.
[1] In the past, ApplyBoard platform search data was generated based on button clicks on a page, while the new search data is generated by any changes made to the page’s filters (destination, field of study, etc.) As a result, the new search count, if tallied using the previous search data approach, would be significantly inflated compared to the original search count. To make the search counts more comparable, we changed our methodology as of August 2024 to use unique entries per user within each hour.
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How R&D creates new skills and can jump start the economy
Skills England, the government’s new-ish arms length body exists to coordinate the work of employers, educators, and civic leaders to meet the skills needs of the country over the next decade. As the Secretary of State for Education states in the opening of Skill’s England’s inaugural report
The first mission of this government is economic growth. Central to this mission is a skills system fit for the future. We need to harness the talents of all our people to unlock growth and break down the barriers to opportunity. Each and every young person and adult in the country must be able to learn the skills they need to seize opportunity. Businesses need a highly skilled workforce to draw on if they are to drive economic growth and expand opportunity in our communities.
On the face of it the argument is compelling. The mission is to have a bigger economy. The method is to increase economic output in key industries. The means is to have people to deliver those outputs. And the result is a more productive economy and a rise in living standards.
One of the challenges the government faces is that it has a limited set of tools. It can set incentives and regulation but in mass swathes of the economy it cannot set wages, tell businesses what to do, and for more than a decade no government has made the country significantly more productive.
As the National Centre Institute of Economic and and Social Research argues one of the reasons the UK’s productivity is stuck is because the uneven distribution of skills also leads to the uneven distribution of clusters that can spin up economic activity. Plainly, if the country keeps producing similar graduates with similar skills the economy will end up in a similar place. It might not be just that we are training the wrong skills but that we’re thinking about graduate skills entirely wrongly.
Supply and demand
It is quite hard to work out what skills will free the country from its productivity trap.
For example, the Department for Education provides a bulletin on occupations in demand and it makes for mixed reading for universities.
82.5 per cent of the occupations which the Department believes are in critical demand do not require a degree level education. Critical demand is a composite measure which assesses outliers against seven indicators which “include the number of visa applications, online job adverts and annual wage growth.” The most critically in demand occupation is care work, followed by sales accounts and business development managers, and then metal working production and maintenance fitters.
To be clear, this is a different analysis on whether those occupations benefit from someone having a degree in them. If you take a profession like childcare there are zero barriers to entry, zero licensing requirements, and in the informal childcare sector zero need for background checks. All things being equal, having nannies trained somewhere like Norland which produces highly qualified nannies is a net good for children and the economy.
The professions that are the highest in demand do not require a university degree. Therefore, there is an argument that reducing the number of people with a university degree would not harm the economy overall. A version of this narrative is played out in the too many people go to university debate and the UK needs more apprentices debate. Whether either of these things are true, having more apprentices would seem to be a good thing, they don’t always consider how universities themselves create demand for new skills in the workforce.
To put it plainly, universities don’t just supply skills, they create demand for them.
Alignment
This is because universities carry out research and one of the core purposes of research is to create products and services that can be adopted into the real economy.
The social and political implications of the contraceptive pill, the media campaigns to reduce smoking, and the innovation in materials arising from the motorway signs developed at the Royal School of Art, demonstrate R&D from UK universities shapes the skills society needs in an unexpected way.
This is a different kind of shaping of the skills landscape than the government. The government’s approach is top down: putting in place incentives, regulations, and investment, to create a different kind of labour market. Universities work from the bottom up by pursuing things that are interesting, turning ideas into reality, and then creating new kinds of work. This work then has to be serviced by new skills and new combinations of existing skills.
Kate Black, the co-founder of University of Liverpool spin-out Meta Additive, couches her work in similar terms:
It is amazing to be able to take my research which started life in a laboratory at the University and then translate it into the real-world, helping to create jobs and providing industry with smart manufacturing solutions.
There are new skills and new kinds of work needed because of the work of universities. Clearly, it’s harder to predict the industries that are yet to emerge.
Narratives
Student fees cross subsidise research but this does not mean there is a good relationship between which students universities recruit and what research they should fund. This has led to the current arrangements where incentives encourage a broad programme mix, in turn encouraging a growth in student numbers, therefore requiring academics to teach students, and in part creating research across a broad portfolio. The incentives for funding research works against specialisation for the majority of institutions.
This leads to a skills system that is led by student demand for places not the skills an economy needs. In turn, this limits the kind of research that takes place, which in turn limits the creation of new demand for skills.
For example, Labour’s industrial strategy requires a workforce skilled in core sciences. The university recruitment landscape is working against having more people taking up those roles. The more numbers decline, the less likely universities are to provide those courses, and the more the UK’s R&D base will suffer, which will limit the creation of new jobs and demand for skills to fulfill them.
This leaves an enormous policy conundrum. One option would be to designate programmes of critical importance which are allowed a permanent funding settlement to support R&D and skills development. This could be an increase in the teaching grant or additional hypothecated funding through the research councils. This would help the stability of the R&D and skills pipeline but it would be massively unpopular for some institutions, hasten the closure of non critical research fields, and it does not solve the problem that skills and research needs are unpredictable.
The other solution is a more stable research funding settlement for universities that nudges toward de-coupling research funding from student recruitment. This would mean either more research funding to maintain the current system or fewer better funded projects. Again, not easy or cheap.
Universities will respond to the incentives in front of them but the narrative is theirs to shape. Instead of talking about research, graduate jobs, and a graduate skills gap, the opportunity is to talk about how the economy really works. The current arrangement incentivises universities to continually tack their programmes, research, and offer to the funding in front of them. An alternative narrative is the investment in broad based curricula and research is the best insurance against an economy which is unpredictable, and the only opportunity to jump start an economy which is comatose. This requires long-term and predictable funding.
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