Several colleges and universities are pausing admissions to some graduate programs, reducing class sizes or rescinding offers to students in an effort to cut costs amid uncertainty in federal funding.
The disruption to graduate school admissions is the latest cost-cutting move for colleges. After the National Institutes of Health proposed cutting reimbursements for costs related to research, several colleges and universities said they would pause hiring and cut spending, Inside Higher Ed previously reported. (A federal judge has blocked the NIH plan from taking effect for now.)
In recent days, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Pennsylvania and several other institutions have stopped doctoral admissions, at least temporarily. Some colleges are pausing admissions to some programs such as in the biomedical sciences, Stat News reported. At others, the pause is universitywide. The University of Southern California and Vanderbilt University temporarily paused graduate student admissions, though both universities later said that they’d ended the pause.
A University of Pittsburgh spokesperson told WESA, a local NPR station, that the university “temporarily paused additional Ph.D. offers of admission until the impacts of that [NIH] cap were better understood … the University is in the process of completing that analysis and expects to be in a position to resume offers soon.”
Meanwhile, the University of Pennsylvania is planning to cut graduate admissions rates, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported, citing an email from the interim dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, Jeffrey Kallberg, who wrote that the cuts were a “necessary cost-saving measure” to adjust to the NIH proposal.
“This is not a step any of us wanted to take,” Kallberg wrote, according to the Daily Penn. “We recognize that graduate students are central to the intellectual life of our school—as researchers, teachers, collaborators, and future scholars. However, we must ensure that we can continue to provide strong support for those students currently in our programs and sustain the school’s core teaching and research activities.”
Tom Kimbis, executive director of the National Postdoctoral Association, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that academic institutions reliant on federal funding “are being forced to make tough decisions to support these researchers in a difficult environment.”
“The decisions in Washington to pause or cease funding for science and research is impacting early-career researchers across a wide range of disciplines,” Kimbis added. “Slowing or stopping their work, on topics from cancer and Alzheimer’s research to social science issues, hurts Americans in all 50 states.”
In the last week, some faculty began tracking the reductions in the biomedical sciences via a shared spreadsheet that includes verified cuts and unverified decisions based on word of mouth and internal emails. Faculty on social media said the cuts will have long-term ramifications for sciences as fewer students enter the field. On TikTok, several students who had applied to grad school shared their dismay at how the funding cuts meant they might have to say goodbye to their career plans and research.
Accepting graduate students, particularly for Ph.D. programs and in the biomedical sciences, requires universities to make a long-term financial commitment, which is more difficult now that the NIH has stopped making new grant awards and is aiming to cut funds. Colleges receive billions from the NIH to support research. If the proposed rate cuts move forward, institutions say they would have to shut down some labs and lay off employees.
“University research and scholarship operate on a time scale of years and decades,” the Rutgers AAUP-AFT chapter wrote in a letter to New Jersey senators Cory Booker and Andy Kim. “Higher education would become impossible in the face of capricious and arbitrary withholding of funding, elimination of entire areas of grant support for critical scientific research, and cancellation of long-held contracts.”
They went on to warn that the threat to funding would diminish the country’s strength as a research superpower. “The best scientists, the best scholars, and the best students will make the rational decision to take their talents elsewhere. Once lost, the historic excellence of United States universities, including world-leading institutions in New Jersey, both public and private, will not be easily regained.”
Kansas lawmakers are considering a bill that would sap tenure of its meaning for faculty at the state’s public colleges and universities.
House Bill 2348, introduced this month in the Kansas Legislature, doesn’t specifically say it would ban tenure. But according to the proposed law, “any special benefits, processes or preferences conferred on a faculty member” by tenure “can be at any time revoked” by a higher education institution or the Kansas Board of Regents, which governs the state’s public universities. It also says tenure wouldn’t “create any entitlement, right or property interest in a faculty member’s current, ongoing or future employment.”
The bill would end such rights not just for future “tenure” earners but for already tenured professors, too. Mallory Bishop, a nontenured instructor at Emporia State University who serves as faculty president, said HB 2348 would “remove the core premise of tenure,” which is “you cannot be fired without cause.”
“The bill itself seems to remove everything except the name of tenure,” Bishop said.
It’s part of a growing trend among Republican lawmakers in multiple states seeking to weaken or eliminate tenure in public institutions. Ohio’s Senate passed a bill this year that would weaken tenure, though the House hasn’t yet followed suit. So far, no state has fully banned tenure at public institutions.
But the Kansas bill is noteworthy for its origins. The Board of Regents and the state’s two top research universities publicly oppose it. So where did it come from?
Steven Lovett, general counsel for Emporia State University, says he wrote it. And the top of the bill includes one sentence saying a lawmaker requested it on Lovett’s behalf.
The bill materialized after Emporia State suffered a setback in its continued defense against a federal lawsuit filed by 11 tenured professors whom the university decided to lay off in 2022. A judge—rebuffing the university defendants’ request to toss out the suit—allowed the faculty to move forward with their allegations that they weren’t provided sufficient due process. Emporia State officials, including Lovett himself, are among the defendants in the continuing suit.
Those faculty were among 23 tenured professors whom Emporia State laid off, citing financial pressures and other possible reasons. The university’s handling of the situation led the American Association of University Professors to censure the institution. The controversy presaged layoffs over the past two years by other U.S. universities, which also cited financial concerns and didn’t spare tenured faculty. West Virginia University made headlines in 2023 for axing a swath of tenured faculty, followed by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Western Illinois University.
A university spokesperson wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that Emporia State supports tenure and that Lovett’s “submission of this bill comes as a surprise to the university.” But the statement also defended Lovett’s “constitutional right” as “a private citizen” to submit the legislation.
The statement doesn’t say whether the university supports or opposes the bill. Emporia State didn’t provide an interview or respond to written questions about its position on the legislation.
Bishop said she’s asked top university officials for their stance but hasn’t received an answer; she said university president Ken Hush told her in a private conversation that even if the bill were to pass, “tenure still exists.” Lovett—saying he was commenting as a private citizen—has told lawmakers that universities that speak out against the bill are violating state law.
And while the university says it was surprised by Lovett’s submission of the bill, an online video of an earlier legislative hearing shows Hush appearing to urge lawmakers to support similar legislation not long before his top lawyer introduced it.
The university attempted to dismiss the laid-off professors’ lawsuit by arguing that tenure didn’t give them a “property right” to continued employment. “Property right,” or “property interest,” is a legal term, and if tenured professors possess this right, it could mean they should have received due process before being ousted, in accordance with the 14th Amendment.
In December, a U.S. district court judge in Kansas allowed the case to progress, ruling that the professors’ legal complaint sufficiently alleged that the faculty did have so-called property rights to keep their jobs. The case continues.
As the Kansas Reflector previously reported, a Kansas House Higher Education Budget Committee member asked Hush about the suit during a Jan. 31 hearing. According to a video of the proceedings, Hush said the property right ruling “means an entitlement and job forever, until this is settled in some form. Obviously, as a state agency, we’re working with the attorney general on this. And the other option to correct that is via legislation.”
About a week later, House Bill 2348 appeared at the request of Representative Steven K. Howe—who chairs the committee Hush spoke to—on behalf of Lovett. Howe declined to comment for this article.
The bill, however, is currently before the House Judiciary Committee—not Howe’s committee. Lovett advocated for the legislation during a Feb. 11 Judiciary hearing, in which he was introduced as “Mr. Steven Lovett, private citizen.” Lovett told the lawmakers the university didn’t encourage him to write the bill “and had no knowledge of it before I submitted it.”
He said the bill “eliminates the property right of tenure but not tenure itself.” The idea that tenure is a property right “obligates Kansans to a long-term, unfunded fiscal liability,” he said, adding that the due process required to oust tenured faculty “costs even more.” He argued the First Amendment makes tenure and due process unnecessary to protect academic freedom.
“A nontenured faculty member enjoys as much legal protection to pursue academic freedom as a tenured faculty member,” he said. Tenure “primarily results in nothing more than personal gain.”
Lovett said Board of Regents members echoed part of his arguments amid the lawsuit filed by the laid-off professors, arguing that any universities that opposed the bill would be violating state law that says the board manages public universities. As of now, though, a judge has dismissed all board members as defendants, leaving only Lovett, Hush and one retired Emporia State official facing the lawsuit.
At the end of his speech, Lovett, who’s also an associate professor of business law and ethics at Emporia State, publicly renounced the tenure the university gave him.
Doug Girod, chancellor of the University of Kansas, followed Lovett at the lectern.
“I don’t believe I’m breaking the law, because I am here with the full knowledge of my board,” Girod said. Eradicating “meaningful tenure” would mean losing “our best faculty, and we will not be able to replace them,” he said.
After Kansas State University’s president spoke against the bill, Blake Flanders, the top administrator at the Board of Regents, told lawmakers the board is also against it, citing similar recruitment and retention concerns. Further, his written testimony suggested he doesn’t buy Lovett’s argument that he’s acting as a private citizen.
He pointed out that Board of Regents policy requires legislative proposals from institutions it governs first be presented to the board for approval “before being submitted to the Legislature.” He wrote, “That policy was not adhered to in the case of this bill.” A board spokesperson didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview or answer written questions about whether the board is pushing for Lovett to be disciplined.
Even if the bill passes, it’s unclear whether it would actually help Emporia State in its current suit or erase the meaning of tenure for other Kansas faculty who have already earned it. J. Phillip Gragson, attorney for the laid-off professors, said in an email that that would be unconstitutional.
“While the state can certainly commit higher education academic and economic suicide by passing a bill that eliminates tenure prospectively only if it wants, the state cannot take away tenure rights from those professors who have already obtained tenure without due process,” he wrote.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis is launching a state initiative to cut spending and optimize efficiency modeled after the Elon Musk’s federal Department of Government Efficiency, which has cut billions in contracts at federal agencies, The Orlando Sentinel reported.
Over the course of a year, Florida’s version of DOGE intends to sunset dozens of state boards and commissions, cut hundreds of jobs, and probe university finances and managerial practices.
“This is the DOGE-ing of our state university system, and I think it’s going to be good for taxpayers, and it’s ultimately going to be good for students as well,” DeSantis said Monday.
He added that the state would leverage artificial intelligence to help with the initiative.
The Republican governor also indicated that the state-level initiative would target what he referred to as “ideological study stuff” in an effort to “make sure that these universities are really serving the classical mission of what a university should be, and that’s not to impose ideology. It’s really to teach students how to think and to prepare them to be citizens of our republic.”
The move comes as the state has already targeted curriculum in recent months, stripping hundreds of courses from the general education offerings of state universities earlier this year. Many of the classes touched on topics such as race, gender, sexuality, and non-Christian religions.
Florida has also hired multiple GOP officials—some sitting, others who previously served—to lead state universities, including several who have no higher education management experience.
In a response to DeSantis, who pressed for the need to eliminate inefficiencies, the Florida Democratic Party noted that Republicans have controlled state politics for nearly 30 years and questioned the outgoing governor’s motivations in launching the state equivalent of DOGE.
A superior court judge in California ruled last week that adjunct faculty in the Long Beach Community College District should be paid for work they do outside the classroom, including lesson prep, grading and holding office hours, EdSource reported.
The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed in April 2022 by two part-time professors who argued that they are only paid for time spent teaching in the classroom, and that “failing to compensate adjuncts for out-of-classroom work is a minimum wage violation,” according to the decision by Judge Stuart Rice.
Rice concurred, noting “a myriad of problems” with the district’s argument that minimum wage rules don’t apply, EdSource reported.
Still, Rice stayed the decision pending further proceedings, so it doesn’t go into effect immediately. A similar lawsuit is under way in Sacramento County, brought by adjuncts against 22 community college districts, as well as the state community college system and its Board of Governors.
Adjunct professor John Martin, who chairs the California Part-time Faculty Association and is a plaintiff in the Sacramento case, celebrated the Long Beach ruling.
“It’s spot-on with what we have been saying,” he told EdSource. “We’re not getting paid for outside [the classroom] work. This has been a long time coming.”
It was interesting to read Jo Johnson’s 28 January HEPI blog about the OfS’s suspension of new applications to the Register and for Degree Awarding Powers (The Office for Students needs to walk and chew gum, by Jo Johnson). The OfS, apparently, is ‘failing to support the innovation vital to our success as a knowledge economy’. It is ‘abandoning its statutory duties to support innovation and choice’. By telling the world it is ‘snowed under with handling institutional failure’, it is sending bad messages to international students. I doubt that the recent OfS announcement of proposed new conditions for applications will have defused these criticisms.
As one of the main architects of the legislation that created OfS, Jo is certainly well-placed to assess how well it is delivering his vision of the future (and he is duly appreciative that OfS appears to be sticking with his particular love, the Teaching Excellence Framework.) He still believes in his policies. All credit to him.
Others, however, may ask whether that is because those policies have demonstrably worked for the public good, or because Jo does not want to question them.
Harsh though it is to place Jo Johnson alongside die-hard Brexiteers, there is something of the same conviction that the vision was glorious, but it was never properly implemented and has been sabotaged by the unbelievers. If the vision had been fully realised, English Higher Education should now be going through a period of unprecedented innovation, backed by massive entrepreneurial private investment, creating the best time ever to be a student and the best ever generation of students. If it isn’t, then those reliable whipping boys, Bureaucracy and Regulation, can be sent to the pillory. It cannot be that the vision was naïve, or even plain wrong in parts.
Perhaps we are indeed on the way to that golden age. After all, there are now more than 400 higher education providers on the OfS Register, which is a lot more than were there in the old HEFCE days. This means more institutions are competing for students, and students have more institutions to choose between. Jo quotes the innovative examples of the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering, the London Interdisciplinary School and The Engineering & Design Institute: London as the tip of the innovation iceberg. They are the first fruits of the harvest that should now be blossoming even more bountifully, but for OfS’s narrow-mindedness.
And perhaps we aren’t. Mike Ratcliffe, whose MoreMeansBetter blogs shine a valuable light on the parts of the English higher education sector that most people haven’t heard of, commented under Jo’s article that ‘his list doesn’t include the providers who have recruited large cohorts… The four great providers, with their distinctive offerings, need to be put alongside a raft of business management, performing arts and theology providers. He instances the Applied Business Academy, currently being wound up. This institution, which went from 420 students in 2020/21 to 2,360 in 2022/23, has, on Mike’s estimates, in the most recent year, ‘had twice as many students as the four providers have had in their entire existence combined’.
The Applied Business Academy is just as much the result of Jo Johnson’s vision as the Dyson Institute.
Which takes us back to the vision itself.
It was rooted in the post-2012 settlement and the new possibilities it opened up. It was a bold and imaginative experiment, and I would certainly not want to assert it has failed. I don’t have definitive evidence either way. But an experiment it was, and it should be recognised as such. It now deserves to be evaluated, seriously and dispassionately, with no preconceptions. A new government, due to publish its own vision for higher education later this year, has the chance to commission such an evaluation.
We got here because of the raising of the fee cap in 2012. This made it possible, for the first time, for serious profits to be made from providing higher education in England, with these profits underwritten by the public purse.
Both before and after 2012, the State has been the largest financial contributor to English higher education institutions – either directly, through grants, or indirectly via the student loan guarantee. However, before 2012 the State’s contribution to teaching was split fairly evenly between grants and loans. The maximum loan was around £3,500; the residual costs of providing a course were met by grants, paid by the Funding Council, HEFCE, according to the perceived costs of teaching different subjects (just over £6,000 per student was considered the minimum cost for a “classroom-based” subject like Law).
To control grant expenditure, there were also broad “targets” for each institution for the number of students they would take each year. This limited an individual institution’s room to grow. It also limited the number of new institutions that would be accommodated in the whole HE system.
The settlement reached after the 2010 Election very deliberately and fundamentally changed this system, as Nick Hillman has recently described:
That – entirely intentionally – included for-profit institutions.
The regulatory environment that has been created incentivises institutions to recruit as many students as they can, while delivering courses as cheaply as they can. That applies to all providers, but is especially helpful to new for-profit providers, entering the market unencumbered by arrangements made under the previous system.
Some would simply call this efficiency. They would have a fair point. All institutions have to cover their costs and make sufficient surpluses to finance their futures. But there are some differences.
To illustrate, my own institution (University of Cumbria) is required by its governing documents to operate as a charity for the benefit of education in Cumbria. That is why we were created. When surpluses are made (and we are making surpluses!), they go towards that goal. Neither I, nor any of my Board, nor any external investor, benefits financially. We are an institution that is devoted, however imperfectly, to the public good.
In a for-profit institution, naturally, the picture is different. Very sensibly, they will locate themselves wherever they think offers the best prospects (usually big cities). If they are not prospering there, they will leave without a backward glance. If they are prospering, the profits may well leave too; they are not in business to invest in places. And a look through Mike Ratcliffe’s blogs gives a sense of some of the profits that are being made; in some cases, more than 25%, and tens of millions of pounds. The beneficiaries are the investors and the owners, wherever they may be, and the funds have come from the British taxpayer.
I am not trying to imply that there is anything wrong or unethical going on here. Any institution is entitled to operate within the regulatory system as it exists, and this is what these institutions have done. Of course they should be trying to minimise costs; they are for-profit institutions.
But I am saying that it is reasonable for the government, on behalf of the taxpayer and the citizen, to ask itself whether this demonstrates a higher education regulatory regime that is operating in the public interest.
That is a genuinely open question. I don’t have the information to do a cost-benefit analysis. Some of this boils down to gut reactions anyway. Offering good quality educational opportunities is a public benefit, whoever does it. If an agile, low-cost, slimmed-down provider can attract lots of students onto Business Studies courses in Birmingham or Manchester, and some of those students therefore don’t go to universities like mine, so what? Students are presumably exercising choice, and that is a good thing. Making money from providing a service is not against the public interest.
On the other hand, the current regulatory regime actively incentivises institutions like the Applied Business Academy to enter the market. It is an unusual market, because there is no need to compete on price; the taxpayer obligingly provides students with the money to pay an institution’s fees. This underpins the profits that can be made and pocketed by private investors anywhere in the world. Some people would feel this wasn’t the right use of taxpayer money. And if – it is a genuine if – the presence of a lot of ABAs were sucking some students away from the ‘public interest’ providers, and thereby destabilising them financially, the State, and the taxpayer, may find themselves with a further set of headaches. The fate of the University of Remoteshire, the largest employer in its area and the recipient of considerable public funding over the decades, is a matter of legitimate public concern.
The new government should be asking itself, and OfS, about the system it has inherited. It should not automatically trash the work of its predecessors, but should also apply some common-sense scepticism to claims from those who have an obvious vested interest in preserving the status quo (which means the system created after 2012). It should seek an honest assessment of the costs and benefits in the round, recognising that there are both. And ultimately, it should decide for itself whether the new marks that are becoming visible on the face of English higher education are predominantly charming freckles, that add to the attractiveness of the whole, or something less benign.
Imagine this: a business student managing a virtual company makes a poor decision, leading to a simulated bankruptcy. Across campus, a medical student adjusts a treatment in a patient simulation and observes improvements in the virtual patient’s condition.
When students practice in a simulated real-world environment they have access to a rich set of feedback information, including consequential feedback. Consequential feedback provides vital information about the consequences of students’ actions and decisions. Typically, though, in the perennial NSS-driven hand-wringing about improving feedback in higher education, we are thinking only about evaluative feedback information – when educators or peers critique students’ work and suggest improvements.
There’s no doubt evaluative feedback, especially corrective feedback, is important. But if we’re only talking about evaluative feedback, we are missing whole swathes of invaluable feedback information crucial to preparing graduates for professional roles.
In a recently published, open access paper in Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, we make the case for educators to design for and support students in noticing, interpreting and learning from consequential feedback information.
Consequential feedback involves noticing the connection between actions and their outcomes (consequences). For example, if we touch a hot stove, we get burned. In this example, noticing the burn is both immediate and obvious. Connecting it to the action of touching the stove is also easy – little interpretation needs to be made. However, there are many cause-effect (action-consequence) sequences embedded in professional practice that are not so easy to connect. Students may need help in noticing the linkages, interpreting them and making corrections to their actions to lead to better consequences in the future.
For instance, the business student above might decide on a pricing strategy and observe its effect on market share. The simulation speeds up time so students can observe the effects of price change on sales and market share. In real life, observing the consequences of a pricing change might take weeks or months. Through the simulation, learners can experiment with different pricing strategies, making different assumptions about the market, and observing the effects, to build their understanding of how these two variables are linked under different conditions. Critically, they learn the importance of this linkage so they can monitor in the messier, delayed real life situations they might face as a marketing professional.
Consequential feedback isn’t just theoretical. It is already making an impact in diverse educational fields such as healthcare, business, mathematics and the arts. But the disparate literature we reviewed almost never names this information as consequential feedback. To improve feedback in higher education, we need to be able to talk to educators and students explicitly about this rich font of feedback information. We need a language for it so we can explore how it is distinct from and complementary to evaluative feedback. Naming it allows us to deliberately practice different ways of enhancing it and build evidence about how to teach students to use it well.
Attending to consequential feedback shifts the focus from external judgments of quality to an internalised understanding of cause and effect. It enables students to experience the results of their decisions and use these insights to refine their practice. Thus, it forms the grist for reflective thinking and a host of twenty-first century skills needed to solve the world’s most pressing problems.
In “real-life” after university, graduates are unlikely to have a mentor or teacher standing over them offering the kind of evaluative feedback that dominates discussion of feedback in higher education. Instead, they need to be able to learn independently from the consequential feedback readily available in the workplace and beyond. Drawing on consequential feedback information, professionals can continuously learn and adapt their practice to changing contexts. Thus, educators need to design opportunities that simulate professional practices, paying explicit attention to helping students learn from the consequential feedback afforded by these instructional designs.
While consequential feedback is powerful, capitalising on it during higher education requires careful design. Here are some strategies for educators to try in their practice:
Use simulations, role-plays, and projects: Simulations provide a controlled environment where students can explore the outcomes of their actions. For example, in a healthcare setting, students might use patient mannequins or virtual reality tools to practice diagnostic and treatment skills. In a human resources course, students might engage in mediation role plays. In an engineering course, students could design and test products like model bridges or rockets.
Design for realism: Whenever possible, feedback opportunities should replicate real-world conditions. For instance, a law student participating in a moot court can see how their arguments hold up under cross-examination or a comedy student can see how a real audience responds to their show.
Encourage reflection: Consequential feedback is most effective when paired with reflection. Educators can prompt students to consider questions such as: What did you do? Why? What happened when you did x? Was y what you expected or wanted? How do these results compare to professional standards? Why did you get that result? What could you change to get the results you want?
Pair with evaluative feedback: Students may see that they didn’t get the result they wanted but not know how to correct their actions. Consequential feedback doesn’t replace evaluative feedback; it complements it. For example, after a business simulation, an instructor might provide additional guidance on interpreting KPIs or suggest strategies for improvement. This pairing helps students connect outcomes with actionable next steps.
Focusing on consequential feedback represents a shift in how we think about assessment, feedback, and learning itself. By designing learning experiences that allow students to act and observe the natural outcomes of their actions, we create opportunities for deeper, more meaningful engagement in the learning process. As students study the impact of their actions, they learn to take responsibility for their choices. This approach fosters the problem-solving, adaptability, independence, and professional and social responsibility they’ll need throughout their lives.
A key question educators should be asking is: how can I help students recognise and learn from the outcomes of their actions? The answer lies in designing for and highlighting consequential feedback.