by Estefania Gamarra, Marion Heron, Lewis Baker and Harriet Tenenbaum
Do you remember when you started university, and you were expected to use a whole new language? We don’t just mean new nomenclature such as ‘seminars’ or ‘tutorials’, but language that can help you make a clear argument or disagree politely with a classmate. This language, or educational dialogue, and in particular disagreeing politely, is critical to be an engaged citizen in a healthy democracy, without otherwise descending into unhealthy practices such as ‘cancel culture’ as recently highlighted in the media. In this blog post, we argue that universities have a responsibility not only to teach students how to talk in an academic context, but also for this teaching to be discipline-specific and embedded in the disciplinary study where possible.
There is a long-held misperception that all students who start university are able to talk the talk of the university, that is, they have the language skills, the terminology, and the confidence to articulate their opinions from their first day. This is just simply not true for many undergraduate students. Having English as a first language is also not necessarily an advantage. Bourdieu et al (1994, p8) said, “academic language… is no one’s mother tongue, not even that of children of the cultivated classes”.
What do we mean by language here? We have drawn on the pedagogy and research from compulsory school education, namely the work of scholars at Cambridge University. Their work on educational dialogue has been successfully incorporated into school teaching with impressive results. Educational dialogue here refers to communicative acts such as agreeing, disagreeing, reasoning and expressing ideas. Research in school settings has shown that encouraging such dialogue can boost academic attainment. One study highlighted the relationship between elaborating on ideas and attainment in reading, spelling, punctuation and grammar. Despite this compelling evidence, similar strategies have been underexplored in higher education.
In our university classrooms, we hear students say things such as: ‘I know the answer, but don’t know how to phrase it’ and ‘I need to learn how to express my answer like that’. So, if students are themselves noticing a need for academic language, why are we so behind in the higher education context? And more importantly, what language do these students need? Do they all need the same academic language to confidently talk the talk? This is exemplified by the dialogue below between two engineering students working on answering multiple-choice questions together, an excerpt from our forthcoming research:
Student A: Yeah, listen, we need to be able when we say “force”, to say why.
Student B: Yeah, to flip it.
Student A: Because we were right, like, C is incorrect, but we don’t say why it is not incorrect.
Student B: I don’t know how to word it, you know.
In our current research project, supported by a Nuffield Foundation grant, we explore whether pairs of Foundation Year students across Engineering, Psychology and Bioscience, engaging in discipline-specific multiple-choice questions, can learn to develop these academic language skills and the extent to which they can do this in an academic year-long intervention programme.
Our early findings indicate that while students are capable of using academic language, the forms they adopt vary by discipline. For example, consider one of the most basic interactions in academic discussions – giving and asking for reasons. Typically, the default marker for requesting justification is “why?”. The following extract from a psychology discussion illustrates this:
Student A: Why do you think that is?
Student B: Because, uh, if you got negative emotion, you know, so that is not called positive psychology. Yep, yeah, so I’m thinking about understanding like how to prevent negative emotions.
In contrast, in science courses such as biology or engineering, it was more common to use “how?” rather than “why?” when asking for reasoning. Consider this extract from an engineering discussion:
Student A: Yes. Then the same as D.
Student B: D? How?
Student A: And then it’s…
Student B: Oh.
Student A: And this is…
Student B: So the arrow goes this way…
Student A: So then P goes this way…
Here, Student B not only asks for the reasoning by using “how?”, but the response unfolds as a sequence of steps outlining the reasoning process. This example also highlights another subject-specific difference: while psychology students typically expand on each other’s arguments or examples, engineering students more frequently build on each other’s equations, often with the assistance of pen and paper.
So, based on these snippets of authentic student dialogues, let’s return to the question posed at the beginning. Yes, all students can and do need to learn academic language to talk to each other and develop understanding, but the type of language depends on the discipline. Disciplinary differences can be seen in the way students build on each other’s ideas (eg long turns, short turns) as well as the words and phrases used. The evidence from our project shows this.
We argue that learning to talk the language of higher education should not be considered a prerequisite but instead, should be an essential feature of the higher education curriculum embedded within disciplinary studies.
Why is this important? Integrating academic language training into the curriculum can enhance students’ academic confidence, foster a stronger sense of belonging, and ultimately improve retention rates. In a post‐COVID world, where student engagement is waning, this conversation‐based approach may also help rebuild the social and collaborative fabric of university life.
Moreover, the skills developed through such training are highly transferable beyond academia. Students acquire essential discussion and teamwork abilities that prove invaluable in their future careers. It is important to emphasise that developing these skills requires deliberate training; we must not assume that students will acquire them without practice and guidance.
Although students may already use discipline‐specific language, targeted training helps them become accustomed to engaging in – and, more importantly, listening to – disagreement. These conversational practices become part of their repertoires, enabling them to generalize these skills across various contexts. As noted earlier, we must all learn to engage in constructive disagreement to counteract cancel culture. While the manner of such discourse may vary by discipline, developing these skills is essential for active participation in a healthy, thriving democracy.
Estefania Gamarra Burga is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Surrey. Her research interests include educational dialogue, discourse analysis, gender, and spatial cognition in STEM and higher education.
Marion Heron is Associate Professor of Educational Linguistics in the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey. She supervises doctoral students on topics in the field of applied linguistics and higher education. She researches in the areas of language and education, with a particular interest in classroom discourse, genre and doctoral education.
Lewis Baker is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences and a Chartered Science Teacher. His research interests include teaching pedagogy and science education, often within a foundation year context.
Harriet Tenenbaum is Professor of Social and Developmental Psychology. Her research focuses on social justice in young people, everyday conversations, and teaching and learning across the lifespan.
A language is not merely a collection of words; it is a symphony of memories, a melody that holds the heartbeat of a nation. It is a living chronicle of history, breathed across the ages, inscribed on the rhythms of life and sung by the winds that dance upon the sacred lands.
Picture a serene village cradled among ancient mountains, where elders speak a tongue as timeless as the rocks beneath their feet. Each syllable is a thread, knitted into a rich tapestry of legends, lore and traditions that bind them to the soil they call home.
But what becomes of this language when the land itself starts to crumble? When the waves rise to consume coasts, or parched earth splits under a blistering sun, does the song fall silent? Today, as the planet warms, it is not only ice caps and forests that vanish — but languages, and with them, entire ways of perceiving the world.
Around the globe, ancient languages — the essence of human history — are vanishing. Climate change, a tenacious force reshaping landscapes, frays the delicate cultural threads that root communities to their identity. Rising seas engulf islands where indigenous tongues blossom like rare flowers. Wildfires sweep away more than homes, reducing sacred spaces and oral histories to ash. Each vanished habitat is a stilled voice, an erased library of metaphors, idioms and songs that offered a unique lens on life.
Language extinction
According to a 2021 report by the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, more than 40% of the world’s estimated 7,000 languages are at risk of disappearing. “When a language dies,” said linguist K. David Harrison, “a unique vision of the world is lost.”
While globalisation and modernisation are often blamed for the erosion of ancient languages, environmental destruction plays an even more insidious role, quietly displacing communities and severing their linguistic roots. When climatic disasters scatter people, they do not only lose their home — they lose the vessel of their shared soul. Dispersed and assimilating, their words, their tales, their melodies — once carried across centuries — fade into echoes long forgotten.
Today, nearly half of all languages spoken globally are endangered. According to UNESCO, one language disappears every two weeks — a rhythm of loss as steady as the ticking of a clock. In this tide of vanishing voices, climate change surges as an unrecognised adversary, disrupting the habitats where these languages are rooted.
Consider the small island nations of the Pacific — Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands — where languages are inseparable from the ocean’s ebb and flow. As seas rise up to threaten these vulnerable islands, the inhabitants must depart, and with them, their distinct vision of the world drifts away. Words that once named the tides, the winds, the colour of the sky before monsoon, these vanish as the speakers are displaced.
Likewise, in the Arctic, the Sámi and Inuit communities confront an ugly truth: their languages, like their frozen lands, are melting under the pressure of a warming world. The vocabulary used to describe different types of snow, hunting rituals or the behaviour of migrating herds holds ancestral wisdom. As the landscape changes, the words that once matched its rhythms no longer apply — and are slowly lost.
Worldviews and wisdom
When languages are lost, they take with them entire worldviews and centuries of wisdom encoded in words. The knowledge of forests, of skies, of seas — how to farm to the beat of nature, how to heal using the plants that grow in secret groves — is lost.
For instance, in the Amazon rainforest, indigenous languages such as Kayapo contain the secrets of life-abundant ecosystems. According to Survival International and linguistic researchers, these languages encode unique ecological wisdom that cannot be translated. Each word is a secret to decoding the harmony of nature and each lost language shelves an irreplaceable piece of the puzzle.
In the Philippines, the Agta people hold oral traditions that teach sustainable fishing and forest stewardship. Their language contains knowledge passed down through chants and stories that teach children when to harvest, what to leave behind and how to give back. Without their land, without their rituals, such teachings dissolve.
In Vanuatu, where the rising tide of the ocean promises to wash away land and language, communities are in a mad dash to record their heritage. Elders and linguists collaborate, transcribing words into digital platforms, preserving the poetry of their world for future generations. Stories once passed from mouth to ear around firelight are now finding their way into apps, audio archives and cloud storage — fragile vessels carrying ancient truths.
A fading past and uncertain future
Technology, too, becomes a bridge between the fading past and an uncertain future. Apps like Duolingo and platforms like Google’s Endangered Languages Project breathe new life into ancient words, making them accessible to the young and curious.
Augmented reality and virtual storytelling spaces are beginning to preserve not just the language, but the experience of being immersed in it. But technology alone cannot carry the weight of this preservation. It must be paired with policies that protect the vulnerable — giving displaced communities a voice not only in language preservation but in shaping climate action itself.
Governments must go beyond digitisation and invest in cultural resilience. Language must be taught in schools, inscribed in constitutions, spoken on airwaves and celebrated in ceremonies. We need climate policies that understand that saving ecosystems and saving languages are part of the same struggle. Both are about preserving what makes us human.
In the end, saving a language is an act of defiance against the erasure of identity. It is a way to honour the past while forging a path to a sustainable future. These languages do not merely recount history — they carry the wisdom of living in harmony with the Earth. In their poetry and proverbs, in their songs and silences, they have answers to questions we have not even thought to ask yet.
To preserve these voices, we must become their echoes. We must act before it’s too late. Before the last storytellers fall silent. Before the rivers can no longer remember the songs they once inspired. To save a language is to save a piece of ourselves — the spirit of who we are, where we’ve been and the dreams of where we might go.
When we lose a language, we don’t just lose words — we lose the Earth’s voice itself. If these voices vanish, who will remember the names of the stars? Who will tell us how the mountains mourned or the forests sang? The Earth is listening and its languages are calling.
Let us not forget how to answer.
Questions to consider:
1. Why are languages at risk of extinction due to climate change?
2. How are preservation of language connected to whole cultures?
3. Why might someone want to master a language that is not widely spoken?
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Class of 2025 graduates’ expectations seem to be clashing with reality during their job search, especially when it comes to pay, job preferences and beliefs about the job market, according to an April report from ZipRecruiter.
For instance, some graduates have found that the job search is taking longer than they expected. About 82% of those about to graduate expect to start work within three months of graduation, but only 77% of recent graduates accomplished that, and 5% said they’re still searching for a job.
“Navigating the transition from campus to career can be a challenge for new grads, especially given the unpredictable market this class is stepping into,” Ian Siegel, co-founder and CEO of ZipRecruiter, said in a statement.
In a survey, additional disconnects surfaced. About 42% of recent graduates reported they didn’t secure the pay they wanted. Although soon-to-be graduates said they expected to make six figures — $101,500 on average — the average starting salary for recent graduates was $68,400.
Those about to graduate also said they want flexibility, but recent graduates said that’s harder to achieve than they hoped. About 90% of recent graduates said schedule flexibility is important to them, yet only 29% said they had flexible jobs.
Amid shifting job market conditions, college graduates feel both confident yet cautious about their job prospects and the economy, according to a Monster report. Employers that offer flexibility, purpose and growth opportunities will attract and retain the next generation of top talent, a CareerBuilder + Monster executive said.
Compensation conversations could remain a challenge in 2025, especially as pay transparency feels contentious, according to a report from Payscale. To combat this, employers can listen to employees and lead with fairness through pay transparency, a Payscale executive said.
Despite the challenges, job seekers entered 2025 with optimism, according to an Indeed report. Job seekers’ interest will likely remain steady but face more competition since job availability has remained stagnant in recent months, an Indeed economist said.
The problem with scholarly focus is that it leads where you intend to go. And this is a problem because when you get there, you’re likely to find that your destination isn’t all that interesting. In practice, scholarship is not about effectively carrying out a plan but about exploring a terrain and developing the plan that is warranted by what you discover in that terrain.
This issue with the act of scholarship in particular is really just an extension of what we know about the act of writing in general. Namely, writing is not the process of explaining the argument that is embedded in your outline but instead the process of finding out what that argument should be. If your paper follows your outline from beginning to end, it’s clear that you haven’t learned anything in the course of writing that paper. You found what you were looking for rather than what was actually out there waiting to be found.
This reminds me of a question that my friend David Angus used to ask candidates for faculty positions at the University of Michigan College of Education: “Tell me about a time that your research forced you to give up an idea you really cared about.” If you discover something that upsets your thinking, that’s an indicator that you’re really learning something in the course of carrying out your study. This in turn suggests that the reader is likely to learn something from reading your paper on the subject, instead of just confirming a previous opinion.
Scholars need an intellectual starting place for a piece of research—an established conceptual framework that provides us with a promising angle of approach into a complex intellectual problem space. But the danger is getting trapped within the confines of the conceptual framework in a manner that predetermines the conclusions we reach. Instead, we need to be open to the possibility that our favored framework needs to adapt to the demands of the data we encounter. Perhaps we need to add an additional perspective to this framework or adapt or even discard parts of the framework that don’t seem to be validated by the data at hand. After all, getting things wrong and then correcting them in light of evidence is at the heart of the discipline we call science.
The need to open ourselves to perspectives that are beyond the scope of our established conceptual frameworks is what calls for us to deploy our peripheral vision. As I used to tell my students, the book you’re looking for may not be the one you need to read, which may be a few books down on the shelf. In this manner, scholarship becomes a process of continually evolving your conceptual framework over time, as each study nudges you in new directions. This is what can make academic pursuits so stimulating, as you bump into problems your current perspective can’t resolve and construct a new perspective that allows you to move forward in developing an argument. You can’t predict where you’re going to end up, but you’ll know that it’s going to be interesting—both for you and for your reader.
David Labaree is a professor emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Education. He blogs at davidlabaree.com and his recent books include Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life (2023, Kindle Direct Publishing).
First-year composition courses, which are required of incoming students at many colleges and universities, lack cachet. No student gets excited about a comp class, and the faculty who teach these classes usually occupy the low rungs on the academic ladder. And right now, as crisis after crisis batters the country, and the world, first-year composition may seem even less important than usual. But in my 30 years of college teaching, it’s first-year comp classes that give me hope, because they offer the possibility of change.
These small, discussion-based classes give students much-needed practice in how to disagree without disrespect, and—if these classes were embedded more firmly into university curricula—they could radically reshape not only how students learn but how they participate in public life.
My students often come into their comp class with a chip on their shoulder: Why should they have to “learn to write”? They got themselves into college, after all, and if they get stuck on a writing assignment, there’s always ChatGPT. First-year writing is a waste of time, they think; they’re in college to take “real” classes, courses that matter.
I harbor a secret affection for these reluctant students, because I know that their resistance will melt when they discover the immensely practical importance of finding the right words for their ideas—and the accompanying sense of power that comes with being able to express themselves so that others understand them. Universities tell students that comp classes aren’t “content courses,” because writing courses aren’t discipline-specific. But then again, neither is the world we live in: Most of us live, work and think in multiple, overlapping contexts.
For many students, the composition class is the first (and for some, the only) place in college where they experience a seminar-style class that emphasizes process as much as (or more than) product. The paradigm of a composition course involves a reset: It’s not about “the right answer”; it’s about prioritizing curiosity over certainty and about students discovering not only that they have a voice, but that they can use this voice to explore their world. In the 21st-century university, in which faculty are asked for their “course deliverables,” as if learning were an assembly-line widget, comp classes exemplify an alternative to the sludgy tide of university corporatization.
Composition classes encourage questions, welcome mistakes and revisions, and value messiness and curiosity. During peer workshops, which are an integral part of these courses, I remind students that grades aren’t pie: Everyone can, conceivably, get an A in the course, so their workshop task is helping one another create more effective writing, not to tear each other’s drafts to shreds. Their success, in other words, does not depend on someone else’s failure.
There are other disciplines where students work iteratively and collaboratively—computer science, for example. But in composition workshops, students learn to ask the kinds of questions that promote reflection and refinement. They’re quick to pick up on one another’s sweeping generalizations—“throughout history, men and women have always disagreed”—and explain why those sorts of generalizations aren’t effective.
As they talk, they see how their own experiences might be radically different from those of the people reading their work, and they begin to understand how their experiences, consciously or not, have shaped how they see the world. In classroom conversations and workshops, they learn to disagree without rancor and to understand that how they chose to explain (or not explain) an idea has consequences for how they are understood. In a recent essay in The New York Times, Greg Weiner, president of Assumption University, writes that college campuses “are places where dissenting views deserve an elevated degree of respectful and scholarly engagement.” That’s a tall order for U.S. colleges these days, it seems, but it’s one of the underlying principles of composition classrooms.
“How could I say this better?” is a question I hear writers ask, to which their readers reply, “What do you really want to say, and why?” Students ask one another to explain the evidence for their claims, to examine their assumptions and to think about alternative ways of presenting their ideas. Composition courses help people become more effective writers because they help people become better listeners: Students learn to disagree without dismissiveness or disrespect. And as they help one another, they see ways to improve their own work; it’s a feedback loop that helps them find critical distance, which is essential for revision. Quite literally, students have to re-see their ideas and consider the impact of those ideas on their audience.
I remember when a male student from Shanghai read an essay written by a female student from the Persian Gulf about her struggles to be a dutiful daughter. “She totally read my mind,” the Shanghai student proclaimed. “Being a good son, trying to keep my parents happy—it’s exhausting!” His comment prompted a class discussion about the generational struggles they all shared, albeit across wildly divergent cultural experiences. Their differences prompted questions that led to connections; difference became an opportunity for exploration rather than a threat. Students were excited to write the essays that emerged from this conversation; they were invested in examining their own experiences in order to open those experiences to others.
That’s what reading and writing can give us: moments of connection with other people’s lives, which then help us see ourselves in a new light. Connection and distance, empathy and self-reflection: These are the qualitative moves that students practice in composition class. These are the deliverables.
These deliverables, however, don’t translate into status for composition teachers, who are typically not tenure-track or tenured; they are often called lecturers rather than professors, despite having a Ph.D. Most of us are what’s known as contingent faculty because we work on renewable contracts (sometimes semester to semester, sometimes in longer increments).
To be a composition teacher, then, means working in the trenches of the university rather than its ivory towers. I’ve been teaching some version of first-year writing for more than 30 years, and while I might hope otherwise, I know that only one or two semesters of writing instruction isn’t enough to create lasting change, even though the most resistant students admit to feeling like more confident and competent writers by the end of the course.
If universities had the courage to put composition at the center of their missions, however, they could create real change: What if students had expository writing classes every year for four years, regardless of their majors? Four years of slow, reflective, process-based writing about the world outside their specific subjects, with an emphasis on exploration and curiosity, rather than “the right answer”? What if the ability to reflect and reconsider, the twinned abilities at the heart of critical thinking, were the deliverables that mattered?
Imagine those students bringing that training into the public sphere. People who are eager to ask questions and interrogate assumptions (including their own), people who think in terms of process rather than product: These are the basic tenets of almost any composition class and yet, increasingly, these attitudes seem almost radical. People trained in this way could re-shape public discourse so that it becomes conversation rather than a series of point-scoring contests.
First-year comp is a content course. We just need to see that content as valuable.
Deborah Lindsay Williams is a clinical professor in liberal studies at New York University. She is author of The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: American Fiction Since 1940 (Oxford, 2024).
The Department of Education’s demands that University of Pennsylvania “restore” swimming awards and honors that had been “misappropriated” to trans women athletes and apologize to the cisgender women who had lost to them offer a glimpse into how the second Trump administration could use Title IX to force certain changes at colleges, experts and attorneys say.
The demands, issued April 28 in the form of a proposed resolution agreement, would resolve a civil rights investigation that found Penn violated Title IX by “permitting males to compete in women’s intercollegiate athletics and to occupy women-only intimate facilities.” The Office for Civil Rights didn’t offer specifics, but officials were likely referring to trans swimmer Lia Thomas, who competed on the university’s women’s team in the 2021–22 academic year.
Today is the deadline for Penn to either agree to the proposed demands or potentially face consequences. Department officials said they would refer to the case to the Justice Department for possible enforcement—a process that could end with the university losing access to federal funding—if Penn didn’t comply. (Penn has already lost $175 million in federal funding over this issue, though White House officials said that decision was separate from the Office for Civil Rights inquiry.)
Penn is among several colleges and K-12 schools, including San José State University, facing investigations over policies related to trans athletes, but Penn is the first college to be the target of such public demands. Experts say the speed of the investigation, OCR’s unusual demands and the fact that Penn was in compliance with Title IX at the time Thomas competed there reflect a shift toward a more aggressive use of Title IX to further President Donald Trump’s anti-trans agenda.
The crazy part of all of this is they may be asking Penn to discriminate in doing so, because the Trump administration has its interpretation, but that’s not definitive.”
—Brett Sokolow, former president of the Association of Title IX Administrators
Opposing Interpretations
The administration’s forceful attack on institutions that have been home to high-profile trans women athletes fits with its overall playbook, which includes using any tools at its disposal to advance Trump’s agenda.
In the case of trans athletes’ participation in athletics, the weapon of choice is Title IX, the 52-year-old law passed to guarantee women equal opportunity to education, which has since been interpreted as a broad tool to address sex-based discrimination and harassment on campus.
In recent years, though, the relationship between trans students’ rights and Title IX has become complicated. Those on the left argue that the nature of Title IX is to protect students from gender-based discrimination, and that includes discrimination against trans and nonbinary individuals. (Such protections were included in the Biden administration’s short-lived Title IX regulations.) But those on the right argue that allowing trans women to participate women’s sports and to use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms violates the rights of their cisgender teammates—a perspective the Trump administration squarely aligns with.
“The previous administration trampled the rights of American women and girls—and ignored the indignities to which they were subjected in bathrooms and locker rooms—to promote a radical transgender ideology,” Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement when the Penn investigation was first announced.
For those in the former camp, Trump’s demands of Penn are just another example of the president using any means possible to erode trans people’s rights.
“The news out of Penn, to me, was just another example of the way they are, unfortunately, using [Title IX] as a battering ram to beat down safe and inclusive school environments for trans students,” said Emma Grasso Levine, senior manager of Title IX policy and programs at Advocates for Youth, a youth sexual health and LGBTQ+ equality advocacy organization.
Conservative organizations, though, have applauded the proposed resolution agreement, with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal group that has repeatedly sued to prevent trans women from playing on women’s sports teams and using women’s locker rooms and bathrooms, calling it “another step in the right direction to restore fairness and safety in women’s sports.”
An Aggressive Tack
Since taking office in January, Trump has rolled back trans students’ rights, including signing an executive order banning trans student athletes from playing on the teams that align with their gender. That order prompted the Penn investigation, but at the time that Thomas was competing, trans women who met certain requirements related to hormone therapy—as Thomas did—were permitted by the NCAA and governmental regulations to compete on women’s teams.
The NCAA has since changed that rule. But despite the NCAA’s stance and the executive order, current Title IX regulations do not disallow trans women from playing women’s sports. In fact, the regulations are the exact same set of rules, passed by the first Trump administration in 2020, that were in place when Thomas swam for Penn. This raises the question, experts say, of whether Penn should be penalized under Title IX despite the fact that the institution was following those regulations to the best of its ability.
“That’s the interesting challenge, and probably where Penn will hang its hat if it fights this: ‘There was an interpretation of Title IX in place at the time that Penn followed. And there’s an interpretation of Title IX that’s different now. How is it fair to impose today’s interpretation of Title IX on a previous time period?’” said Brett Sokolow, former president of the Association of Title IX Administrators and chair of the crisis management consulting and law firm TNG Consulting.
This is just one element of the aggressive tack the Trump administration appears to be taking against institutions that allowed trans women to play women’s sports. Multiple experts also pointed out the quick, almost dizzying timeline of OCR’s investigation into Penn.
Timeline of Penn Investigation
Feb. 5: Trump signs executive order prohibiting trans athletes from playing on teams that match their gender identity.
Feb. 6: Trump launches investigation into Penn. NCAA ends policy allowing trans athletes to play on teams that match their gender identity.
March 19: Trump administration pauses $175 million in federal funds to Penn.
April 28: OCR says Penn violated Title IX and must “restore” swimming honors given to trans women.
Ordinarily, investigations can take years to conclude—something that has often been a pain point for victims’ rights advocates, who argue that those timelines can seriously impede victims’ ability to complete their studies.
But OCR launched this investigation within a month of Trump entering office—and just two days after he signed the EO related to trans athletes—and resolved it less than three months later.
It’s also unusual for OCR to target a specific student with a resolution agreement, Sokolow said; most such agreements are stripped of names and identifying details. Although Thomas is not named in the department’s press release, it does call out her sport, swimming, and there have been no other out trans athletes at Penn.
“It’s very indicative of this administration—and concerning—that they’re targeting one person and demonizing them,” he said.
Experts also say the demands marks a sharp contrast from how OCR has resolved such cases in the past. Levine said that the requirements in resolution agreements are meant to “meaningfully impact a culture of sex-based harassment,” but she feels that OCR’s demands wouldn’t do that—if such a culture even exists at Penn.
Title IX ‘Pendulum Swing’
If Penn fights the demands, the case could put the war between those who seek to protect trans athletes from discrimination and those who want to see them excised from their sports teams to the test. And until courts settle the question, students and institutions will be in limbo.
“The crazy part of all of this is they may be asking Penn to discriminate in doing so, because the Trump administration has its interpretation, but that’s not definitive,” Sokolow said. “It does not have the force of law. If a court were to rule on this that Lia Thomas had rightfully won whatever competition the Trump administration is concerned about, any move to force to Penn to remove those victories could be discriminatory against a person who’s trans.”
Lia Thomas, a swimmer at University of Pennsylvania, left, and Riley Gaines of the University of Kentucky tied for fifth place in the 200 freestyle at the NCAA swimming championships in March 2022.
Icon Sportswire/Contributor/Getty Images
Patricia Hamill, co-chair of the Title IX and campus discipline practice at Clark Hill, a Washington law firm, told Inside Higher Ed via email that the case “highlights the pendulum swing of Title IX in its enforcement and interpretation as well as in the government priorities over the last decade. Institutions are continuously being challenged on how to best to handle these very difficult situations on ground that continues to shift both because of Administration changes but also because of societal changes.”
Penn had not publicly commented on the proposed resolution agreement as of Wednesday evening. When news broke that the government was suspending its federal funds, Penn officials stressed in a statement that its “athletic programs have always operated within the framework provided by the federal government, the NCAA and our conference.”
Title IX experts expect that if the university does challenge the proposed agreement in court, it will focus on that very argument—that when Thomas was competing on Penn’s swim team, the university was, in fact, complying with NCAA rules and the department’s guidance.
On Wednesday, the Illinois Institute of Technology announced it had reached an agreement with India’s University Grants Commission to establish a branch campus in Mumbai, opening to students in fall 2026. It will be the first degree-granting U.S. institution on Indian soil and Illinois Tech’s first international branch campus.
For decades, a complicated legal and tax system prevented U.S. institutions from opening campuses in India. Then, in 2020, the Indian government issued a new National Education Policy paving the way, officials promised, for a much easier pathway to fruitful academic partnerships.
India is a major growth market for U.S. higher education; this year the country surpassed China for the first time as the top origin country for international students in the U.S. Establishing a beachhead in India could help institutions carve out a dominant space for themselves in the lucrative international recruitment market, especially since the vast majority of Indian international students come to the U.S. for postgraduate study.
Illinois Tech is not a globally renowned university; it’s not even one of the better-known institutions in Chicago. Its undergraduate population numbers only around 3,000 students, and the postgraduate population isn’t much larger. So how did it get ahead of name-brand research universities that have been dipping their toes in the Indian market, like Johns Hopkins and Rice?
Philip Altbach, professor emeritus at the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College and a longtime expert on academic internationalization, said American institutions have been hesitant even in recent years to invest in Indian branch campuses due to a mix of bureaucratic complications and uncertain financial returns.
“There hasn’t exactly been a rush to the gates in India from American institutions, and I don’t think there’s going to be anytime soon,” Altbach said. “The challenges of doing business there are still pretty high, and that puts a lot of foreign universities off.”
Illinois Tech president Raj Echambadi said his university is taking the long view. As the spending power of India’s burgeoning middle class grows along with demand for highly trained workers—especially in engineering and technology—he sees the Mumbai campus as an early investment in a partnership that will become central to American institutions’ global strategies in the years to come. His institution has already begun to see the importance of Indian students to their bottom line: The share of Indian master’s students has risen by nearly 75 percent over the past five years.
“The potential upside is huge, which means if you get in early the ride is going to be phenomenal,” he said. “In the next 25 years, we’re going to be catching that elephant’s tail.”
Illinois Tech had a head start on the competition: The institution has been active in the Indian education market since 1996, during a period of rapid technological innovation.
When demand for skilled workers in exploding fields like communications technology skyrocketed in the mid-1990s, Illinois Tech offered an early version of distance learning, shipping VHS-tape lessons to engineers in Bangalore who wanted to earn credentials that the Indian higher education system had yet to develop.
Now, Echambadi says, Illinois Tech is meeting new demands in a changing Indian economy; its Mumbai campus will offer 10 degree programs in growth fields like semiconductor engineering. It even has some built-in brand recognition: It’s known as IIT in Chicago, the same acronym as India’s main university system, the Indian Institutes of Technology.
“India can’t build universities fast enough to meet the growing demand,” Echambadi said. “That’s where we come in.”
Colleges Hang Back
Many colleges that wanted to explore opening a campus in India simply may have struggled to navigate the complex application system, even after the NEP was issued. Rajika Bhandari, a longtime international education strategist and the founder of the South Asia International Education Network, said the 2020 NEP took years to translate into practice.
“U.S. institutions have been trying to enter the Indian market for years, well before the NEP. But the Indian bureaucracy and strict regulations have always been a challenge,” she wrote in an email. “Even with the NEP, it has likely taken a while to implement aspects of the policy and actually get things going.”
Having a 30-year presence in India, Echambadi said, helped ease the process. He added that it helped that both he and Mallik Sundharam—Illinois Tech’s vice president for enrollment management and student affairs, who led the Mumbai project—are of Indian origin; both attended college there before moving to the U.S. for their graduate degrees. They said their understanding of their home country’s byzantine bureaucracy helped them navigate the system quicker than their competition.
Sundharam said there’s also a much more receptive attitude in India toward foreign universities and a simpler system. They applied to establish the Mumbai campus earlier this year, and the entire process, from submission to acceptance, took two months. More than 50 foreign institutions have applied to set up a campus in India this year.
“The Indian government has come a long way,” he said.
Altbach said U.S. colleges are more likely to establish joint degree programs with Indian universities than full branch campuses. Virginia Tech established the first of these in 2023, also in Mumbai. Other institutions, including Johns Hopkins and Purdue University, have stuck to research partnerships and exchanges. Rice, which was an early proponent of Indian-American higher ed collaboration, established a research center in Kanpur in early 2020, months before the new NEP was introduced. Altbach said he thinks branch campuses will remain the territory of “low- to midlevel research institutions” seeking to boost enrollment.
But Bhandari, an Indian immigrant and a close observer of the country’s booming education market, said Illinois Tech may be on the vanguard of a new push in academic internationalization.
As international enrollment in the U.S. staggers from President Trump’s policies to deport student visa holders and crack down on global academic partnerships, Bhandari said physical programs in growth countries like India will become increasingly important. There’s already evidence that Indian student mobility to the U.S. is on the decline: F-1 visa applications from India are down 34 percent from this time last year, according to a recent analysis by Chris Glass, a professor at Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education.
“Other universities are operating under the assumption that international markets will stay the same, but they won’t,” Sundharam said. “Students may not want to be mobile in five to 10 years. They will want quality higher education at their doorstep.”
By Stephanie Marshall, Vice Principal (Education), Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of the forthcoming Strategic Leadership of Change in Higher Education (3rd edition, Routledge).
Warner Bros., Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Disney, Deloitte, Amazon, and Google – these are just some of the companies that have scaled back their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives or changed their language around such programs since Trump’s inauguration. This list, as we know, continues to grow more than three months into his administration. Meanwhile, universities around the world have anxiously watched the US Department of Education threaten to withdraw funding from institutions that consider race in their decision-making, with institutions like Columbia University under the axe.
Universities in the UK are not immune to the ideological shifts across the Atlantic. The Daily Mail, for example, has already drawn attention to DEI spending in UK higher education, with attention-grabbing headlines such as: ‘Spending on university campus diversity staff skyrockets to massive £28 million a year – with one boss on an eye-watering six-figure sum’.
Advocates of DEI have argued against such sentiments, emphasising that ethnic minorities are not the only ones to benefit from equitable and fair workplace policies and practices. The advantages of inclusion spread to first-generation learners, individuals with disabilities and others from underrepresented backgrounds. Proponents also remind us that social justice has a compelling business case. Yet even where a business case for DEI exists, it appears that ideological pressures are beginning to outweigh even commercial logic, let alone basic fairness.
The bigger picture
This pushback against DEI does not occur in isolation. It is part of a broader challenge to the values of openness, inclusion and global cooperation that have long underpinned and defined higher education. And as we have seen in the last few years in the UK, international students have become part of this debate.
The pressing question for university leadership is whether these trends will gain further traction in the UK. If so, what implications will they hold for the future of UK higher education – a sector that has prided itself on the collective efforts and advances made towards a more representative, inclusive offer?
‘The UK is not the US. That is a critical starting point for any approach we have’, Professor Tim Soutphommasane, Chief Diversity Officer at the University of Oxford, recently pointed out at a seminar hosted by the Higher Education Policy Institute.
This distinction is important, yet ongoing political developments suggest that the UK remains susceptible to US influence while facing similar pressures against openness from within its own borders. So, what are some of the risks and opportunities?
On the one hand, growing anti-DEI and anti-immigration sentiment poses a shared risk to universities worldwide.
Leading study destinations such as the US, Canada, the UK and Australia often have an interdependent, shared approach to international student policy. To elaborate, in 2021 – four years ago – fears over declining international student numbers led the UK and Canada to implement measures that attracted more applicants, ultimately allowing them to surpass pre-pandemic enrolment figures. Meanwhile, Australia struggled and lagged behind until it lifted its cap on working hours, offered visa refunds and extended post-study work permits. (I discuss these trends and their implications in greater detail in my forthcoming book, Strategic Leadership of Change in Higher Education, 3rd edition, Taylor & Francis.)
Roll forward four years, and we can see that restrictive policies in one country create lucrative opportunities for others.
With Australia now tightening visa rules, Canada reducing student permits, and the US signalling an ‘immigration crackdown’, the UK government has a unique opportunity – perhaps even a responsibility – to assert its stance on cross-border education and research while strengthening its position as a preferred destination. The British Council’s Annual Five Trends to Watch 2025 report highlights how Trump’s first term (2017-21) saw consecutive declines in international student enrolment in US universities, and it would come as no surprise to anyone if enrolment were to drop again during his second term in office.
Way forward
As global uncertainties persist, it is more important than ever for the UK to demonstrate its commitment to diversity and inclusivity, both domestically and internationally. From an economic perspective, and contrary to popular rhetoric, it is worth remembering, as Dr. Gavan Conlon of London School of Economics stated:,
International students contribute nearly ten times more to the economy than they take out, boosting both local and national economic well-being.
Education is indeed one of the UK’s greatest exports.
But continuing to attract international students is not just a pragmatic move for financial sustainability – it is also a powerful statement of the values of collaboration, inclusivity, and global engagement that define UK higher education. Moreover, if there are financial gains brought by international students, they must be utilised to strengthen our ability to protect institutional autonomy and uphold our principles in these difficult times. As culture wars intensify, UK universities must stand firm as internationally highly respected centres of partnership and exchange.
U.S. universities have long relied on international students, and the big tuition checks they bring, to hit enrollment goals and keep the lights on. But now, just as the number of American college-aged students begins to fall — the trend that higher education experts call the “demographic cliff”— global tensions are making international students think twice about coming to the United States for college.
In this episode, hosts Kirk Carapezza and Jon Marcus take you inside the world of international admissions. With student visa revocations on the rise and a growing number of detentions tied to student activism, some international families say they are rethinking their U.S. college plans. And that has college leaders sounding the alarm.
In fact, international student interest was already falling. Now, as the Trump administration ramps up immigration crackdowns on campuses across the country, many worry the U.S. could lose its status as the top destination for global talent. So what happens if international enrollment drops just as domestic numbers dry up?
The stakes are high, not just for international students and colleges but for what everybody else pays — and for the whole U.S. economy.
[Kirk] That’s Xiaofeng Wan, making his pitch in Mandarin to Chinese students and parents at a high school in Shanghai. Wan used to be an admissions officer at Amherst College in western Massachusetts. Now he’s a private college consultant, guiding Chinese students through the maze that is college admissions in the U.S.
[Xiaofeng Wan] So I’ll walk them through the initial high school years before they apply. And then by the time of their college applications, I’ll help them go through the process as well.
[Kirk] This is big business for colleges. Like most international students, Chinese families do not qualify for financial aid, and often they pay the full cost. Wan also trains guidance counselors across China, showing them how to support students heading abroad. So he’s got a front-row seat to what Chinese families are thinking right now.
[Xiaofeng Wan] They see the United States as a primary study-abroad destination.
[Kirk] But Wan says that might be starting to shift.
[Xiaofeng Wan] America has an image problem right now, so we will definitely start to see reluctance from families.
[Kirk] I caught up with him while he was in Ningbo, a port city known for manufacturing, on the same morning President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods took effect.
[sound of news anchor] Across the globe this weekend, world leaders are trying to figure out how to respond to President Trump’s attempt to reshape the global economy by imposing steep tariffs. …
[Kirk] Just hours later, the Chinese government warned the more than 270,000 Chinese students already studying in the U.S. to think twice about staying. Wan says that kind of message stokes fear that’s been building. House Republicans sent letters to six universities saying America’s student visa system has become a Trojan horse for Beijing, and a lot of Chinese parents worry the U S government doesn’t want their kids.
[Xiaofeng Wan] That’s what they’ve been hearing from President Trump, his rhetoric toward Chinese students. And now they’re seeing news about how international student visas are being revoked.
[Kirk] This is College Uncovered, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News …
[Jon] … and I’m Jon Marcus with The Hechinger Report. Colleges don’t want you to know how they operate, so GBH …
[Kirk] … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to show you.
This season, we’re staring down the demographic cliff.
[Jon] If you’re just joining us, a quick refresher here: The demographic cliff is a steep drop in the number of 18-year-olds. That’s because many Americans stopped having children after the Great Recession of 2008. And now, 18 years later, colleges are feeling the pinch.
[Kirk] Yeah, and just when many of them thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, international students are under threat. During President Donald Trump’s first term, we saw visa restrictions and travel bans contribute to a 12 percent drop in new international enrollment. So we’ll ask, could that happen again, just as schools are scrambling to fill empty seats?
[Jon] And we’ll explain what all of this means for you, whether you’re an international student or a domestic one, and why you should care.
Today on the show: The Student Trade Wars.
[Kirk] Since Trump’s return to power, his administration has yanked more than 1,000 student visas, often without explanation. Some students have been detained and faced deportation, fulfilling a pledge he often made on the campaign trail.
[Donald Trump] If you come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or antisemitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you. You’ll be out of that school.
[Kirk] In just a few months, that hardline rhetoric has become policy, putting campuses on edge. ICE agents have detained pro-Palestinian student activists, including Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia and Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts.
[sound from arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk]
[Kirk] This video of her arrest has shaken the international campus community and sparked protests across the country.
[sound of protesters] Free Rumeysa, free her now! We want justice, you say how? Free Rumeysa, free her now!
[Kirk] And now many international students won’t even go on the record, too scared the federal government will target them, or that they’ll be doxxed and ostracized online.
[Frank Zhao] The biggest difficulty for us is building trust.
[Kirk] At Harvard, student journalist Frank Zhao has seen that fear firsthand. He hosts the weekly news podcast for the student newspaper.
[sound of podcast] From The Harvard Crimson, I’m Frank Zhao. This is ‘News Talk.’
[Kirk] Zhao isn’t an international student himself, but the Chinese-American junior from Dallas is plugged into the campus, where a quarter of students are international.
How would you describe the current climate for international students?
[Frank Zhao] The overwhelming sentiment is anxiety. There are so many international student group chats where students were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, there are ICE agents on campus.’ And so it’s quite the Armageddon scenario.
[Kirk] The Trump administration has demanded Harvard turn over detailed records of all foreign students’ — quote — illegal and violent activities, or lose the right to enroll any international students. Harvard says it has complied but won’t publicly disclose details.
The university is suing the administration over this and other demands, but some faculty and students question how hard Harvard is really pushing back. Conservatives, though, defend increased immigration enforcement.
[Simon Hankinson] If a student is studying and minding their own business and obeying the rules of the college and of the United States and the state that they live in, they have nothing to worry about. This is a very small number of people that is being looked at for fraud.
[Kirk] Simon Hankinson is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He says visa vetting on and off campus is essential for national security after a year of disruptive campus protests.
[Simon Hankinson] Maybe your parents are shelling out a lot of money for you to go, or you’re getting a scholarship. Get your education. Make that the priority. Sure, go out and hold a placard if you want to, and do your thing, light a candle, but if your primary focus is protest and vandalism, I think you’re on the wrong type of visa, and we don’t have a visa for that.
[Jon] Higher education is now a global marketplace, and international students have emerged as a key part of the university funding equation. They’re fully baked into the business model as full-pay customers for colleges who subsidize the cost for domestic students.
[Kirk] And even before the demographic cliff, the competition for international students was fierce.
[Gerardo Blanco] It always has been and sometimes it is intended to be that way, but this is just making it like the Hunger Games
[Kirk] That’s Gerardo Blanco, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. He warns tht Trump’s America First approach, combined with federal funding cuts, is putting U.S. colleges at risk of losing a generation of global talent.
Is that hyperbole?
[Gerardo Blanco] I don’t think it’s hyperbole in any way.
[Kirk] Why not?
[Gerardo Blanco] The system has been built on the assumption that there wouldn’t be decreases in a dramatic scale to the funding dedicated to research. And therefore they have made some decisions that are somewhat risky.
[Kirk] What’s your biggest concern when it comes to international students?
[Gerardo Blanco] It’s just the generalized sense of uncertainty. I think there are so many balls up in the air and I think it’s really difficult to even focus our attention.
[Kirk] Take the reduction of research funding, for example. It’s affecting many graduate students, especially those who are international and can’t find work in labs. Some schools like Iowa State University, Penn, and West Virginia University are rescinding graduate admissions offers.
[Gerardo Blanco] So that’s one squeeze. We also are looking at just the general rhetoric that tends to be negative.
[Kirk] And Blanco says that rhetoric matters. One survey at the start of Trump’s second term found that nearly 60 percent of European students were less interested in coming to the U.S. Blanco said, considering the demographic cliff, the timing for all of this uncertainty couldn’t be worse for colleges.
[Gerardo Blanco] The clock is ticking and nobody really knows what’s happening.
[Kirk] Okay, so, Jon, why should American students and citizens care about all of this?
[Jon] Well, international students bring different perspectives and experiences to the classroom. And as we said earlier, they also tend to pay full tuition. So they subsidize tuition that American students pay.
But a drop in international student numbers isn’t just a college cash-flow problem. It’s a broader economic one. International students infuse $44 billion into the U.S. economy each year.
Here’s Barnet Sherman, a business professor at Boston University. It’s New England’s largest private university, and one in five students there are international.
[Barnet Sherman] Look, I just teach business and finance. So if one of my top 10 customers comes to me with $44 billion to spend and creates a lot of American jobs, over 375,000 American jobs, I don’t know about you, but I’m opening up the door and giving them the best treatment I possibly can.
[Jon] Here in Massachusetts alone, there are about 80,000 international students contributing $4 billion to the state’s economy each year. That puts the state fourth in the U.S., after California, Texas and New York. So, yeah, this matters.
But Sherman says the impact goes far beyond big cities like Boston, New York, and L.A. Take the tiny town of Mankato, Minnesota, for example — population, 45,000.
[Barnet Sherman] And they’ve got about 1,700 international students there contributing to the local economy. They’re bringing in literally over $25 million to, you know, a perfectly nice burg.
[Jon] In addition to tuition dollars, these students contribute to businesses and local communities that are losing population.
[Kirk] And, Jon, if fewer international and domestic students are coming through the pipeline to fill jobs that require college educations, it puts the U.S. at a serious disadvantage, just as other countries are actively recruiting talent and increasing the number of their citizens with degrees. More and more countries are recruiting international students, including Canada, France, Japan, South Korea and Spain, but also countries that hadn’t recruited before, like Poland and Kazakhstan.
Right before Trump’s first term, I went to Germany, where the government was offering free language classes to attract international students and scholars, including Americans. Because just like the U.S., Germany is losing population. A demographic cliff has already hit Europe, so it needs immigrants and international students, too. Think of it like this: It’s a global talent draft. All of these students, they’re the trading cards. The collectors are the countries. And the more talent you attract, the more ideas, innovation and business growth you get.
[Dorothea Ruland] If you look at Germany, the only resource we do have are human resources, actually.
[Kirk] Dorothea Ruland is the former secretary general of the German Academic Exchange Service, which is in charge of Germany’s international push. When I visited Bonn, we had coffee at her headquarters.
[Dorothea Ruland] We depend on innovation, on inventions, of course, and where do they come from? From institutions of higher education or from research institutions.
[Kirk] Ruland told me nearly half of foreign students earning degrees in Germany stick around. And not just for the short-term. About half of them stay for at least a decade. In the U.S., most international graduates leave and take their talent back home, often because of scarce visas available for skilled workers.
Do you see Germany competing with American universities?
[Dorothea Ruland] Yes, I would say so. You know, we are doing marketing worldwide because we are part of this world and we cannot neglect these trends going on. So of course we are competitors.
[Kirk] But she also made it clear the student trade war isn’t just about competition. It’s about collaboration.
[Dorothea Ruland] If you look at the global challenges everybody’s talking about, questions of climate change, energy, water, high tech, whatever, this cannot be solved by one institution or one country. So you have to have big international networks.
[Kirk] Since my visit, though, isolationism has been creeping in, not only in Germany, but Hungary and Russia, and obviously here in the U.S., too. Some professors and students have pointed to recent issues with visas and detainments without due process and accused the Trump administration of taking an authoritarian approach.
[sound of protest]
[Kirk] Outside Harvard’s Memorial Church in Cambridge, more than 100 students and faculty recently held signs and waved American flags, cheering the university for standing up to the White House and calling on Harvard to do more to protect their civil rights. Among other things, they spoke out about visa revocations. It is incredibly scary here.
Leo Gerdén is a senior from Sweden. He says the administration is trying to divide the campus community.
[Leo Gerdén] At first I was very anxious about speaking up. They want us to point fingers to each other and say, you know, deport them, don’t deport us. And you know, it’s classic authoritarian playbook.
[Jon] Trump supporters? Well, they see it very differently.
[Simon Hankinson] I would call that ridiculous. I mean, that’s an insane argument to make.
[Jon] Simon Hankinson is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Border Security and Immigration. We heard from him at the top of this episode, and we should also add he’s a career foreign service officer.
[Simon Hankinson] So I’ve certainly interviewed tens of thousands of these applicants, including thousands of students.
[Jon] Hankinson acknowledges the uptick in visa revocations lately, but says it’s still a tiny number compared to the one million international students in the U.S.
[Simon Hankinson] But just looking at the scale of it all, it is more than we’ve seen in the past, because, generally speaking, this wasn’t something that the government devoted a lot of resources to. But it was always a power that they had.
[Jon] And he’s not buying the narrative that these changes and the crackdowns on visas will scare off students from coming to the U.S.
[Simon Hankinson] Are people not going to go to Harvard because, you know, they’re afraid that they’re going to get hassled. No. Try going to Russia or China and speaking your mind. Good luck with that.
[Jon] Hankinson also argues some universities — especially ones with a high percentage of international students, like Columbia, NYU, Northeastern, and Boston University — they have a financial incentive for complaining.
[Simon Hankinson] It’s a strong constituency that they want to keep happy and they want to keep the money flowing. So they want to make this as big an issue as possible. They want to cry panic.
[Jon] So, Kirk, colleges signal all the time that they’re open to international students. Just listen to some of these welcome videos.
[sound of international recruiting videos]
[Jon] But parents like Claire from Beijing don’t feel like their kids are welcome.
[Claire] I think the government is really hostile right now.
[Jon] Claire asked us to withhold her full name, worried it could affect her son, who’s already studying here. She also has a daughter in high school who was thinking about college in the U.S., but now they’re rethinking her plans and looking at schools in the UK, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong.
[Claire] You know, we have to consider all the possibilities, obviously in a trade war, you know, like, because next year, when my child has to go to college, you know, Trump is still the president.
[Kirk] Claire says she still believes in the power of an American education, so it’s really hard for her to just write it off completely.
[Jon] Okay. So, Kirk, we’ve tackled a lot in this episode. Bottom line, do you think American colleges will still be able to recruit and enroll enough international students to help offset this looming shortage we’ve been talking about in the number of 18-year-olds?
[Kirk] Well, it’s not looking great for colleges. International enrollment, as we said, dropped 12 percent during Trump’s first term, and now we’re heading toward a 15 percent drop in the number of 18-year-olds by 2039. That’s a big gap to fill, and the reality is the current climate would have to shift dramatically and quickly for the U.S. to stay competitive.
International students are essential for filling seats and making budgets, especially in regions like New England and the Midwest, where the demographic cliff isn’t coming — it’s already here. A college consultant once told me, if your campus isn’t near an international airport, the clock is ticking on your institution. And that was before America developed this reputation as an unwelcoming place.
[Jon] So what do you think you’ll be watching as we continue to cover this issue?
[Kirk] Yeah, for me, one of the biggest questions is how colleges handle what I see as a major communication and messaging problem. Administrators and faculty haven’t done a great job telling the full story of what U.S. universities actually do, or why international mobility benefits the country as a whole.
[Jon] This is College Uncovered. I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report …
[Kirk] … and I’m Kirk Carapezza from GBH News.
[Jon] This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …
[Kirk] … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jonathan A. Davis.
Our executive editor is Jenifer McKim.
Our fact checker is Ryan Alderman.
GBH’s Robert Goulston contributed reporting to this episode.
[Jon] Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.
All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT.
Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.
[Kirk] College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation. It’s a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and distributed by PRX.
Thanks so much for listening.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The first day of September 2025 sees an important chunk of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act come into force.
And if you are involved in academic partnerships or the use of agents, you might want to pay heed.
Receiving Royal Assent in 2023, the Act was initially promoted as tidying up some of the very curious practices around submitting information to Companies House.
The Act also introduces a range of new offences that can lead to fines, disqualification, and even imprisonment – and higher education providers are among those carefully considering the September start date for offence of “failure to prevent fraud”. And, almost inevitably – the issue comes down to franchising and academic partnership.
Quick definitions
Simply put, fraud is the act of gaining a dishonest advantage over another person. In most cases this is a financial advantage.
To give some sector focused examples – we’ve recently seen cases where student maintenance loans and student fee loans have been paid out to students who have no intention of actually studying. We’ve seen evidence that some providers (and some higher education agents) may have been knowingly registering students for financial rather than educational benefit, and that franchise and partnership agreements – where incentives may be set around income maximisation rather than educational benefit – might have played a role in some of these instances.
Fraud, obviously, is a criminal offence. Those who commit fraud face consequences, but before the Act it has been harder to ensure that the companies involved do.
The “failure to prevent fraud” offence, in the words of the government’s guidance, means that:
an organisation may be criminally liable where an employee, agent, subsidiary, or other “associated person”, commits a fraud intending to benefit the organisation and the organisation did not have reasonable fraud prevention procedures in place. In certain circumstances, the offence will also apply where the fraud offence is committed with the intention of benefitting a client of the organisation. It does not need to be demonstrated that directors or senior managers ordered or knew about the fraud.
This applies specifically to “large incorporated organisations” (one of: more than 250 employees, more than £36m turnover, more than £18m in total assets). This can apply to an entire organisation, or “a subsidiary or franchise” of an organisation.
Behind the sofa
It’s not difficult to imagine that a cash-strapped provider of higher education may not always be motivated to check up on the activities carried out in its name by agents and partners. When dubious recruitment practices are revealed in the press, the usual response by “lead providers” is alarm followed by a decision to withdraw from the partnership. Neither the OfS, Department for Education, or Student Loans Company really has the regulatory tools to deal with stuff on anything other than a whack-a-mole basis – and every time the music stops it turns out nobody realised how bad things really are. Withdraw, regroup – and very often enter into a similar partnership with another organisation.
The new “failure to prevent fraud” offence means that the onus will be on universities and other providers to prove that they had “reasonable prevention procedures” – and whether they did is a matter for the courts rather than a checklist.
Things in scope include the public law offence of cheating the public revenue alongside expected parts of the Fraud Act and Theft Act in England and Wales. The law is slightly different in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
As well as the person who committed the “base fraud” facing consequences, this new rule means that if they are a “person associated” with a relevant body – and are acting in the capacity of that body or providing services on behalf of that body as they commit the fraud – the body itself (the lead partner in our example) will also be on the hook. It is worth remembering that a small organisation can be an “associated person” for these purposes, and although there may be a formal contractual relationship there doesn’t need to be a contract in place.
Higher education, specifically
If you scroll through the guidance, you might start breathing normally when you spot that there is an exemption for some “franchisees” – these are seen as connected to the main company by contract only, rather than undertaking business for the parent company. If you think about models of franchising in other sectors, this makes sense – a franchisee basically pays for the rights to use a name and a set of products.
However, this is not the meaning of the word “franchising” in higher education – and there are specifics in the guidance dealing with the sector.
Academic franchises may be associated persons for the purposes of the offence depending on the details of the contract. Universities or other degree awarding bodies should take legal advice.
There’s a line drawn between “validation” franchises (university accredits awards) and “delivery” franchises (university subcontracts delivery of a programme), but there’s no easy line to draw as to whether either is an “associated person” or not. It all comes down to the nature of the individual relationship and what is in the contact or agreement.
Doing time
If you are involved in academic partnerships, relationships with agents, or anything similar it feels very much like now should be the moment to get on top of what is in each agreement and what “reasonable preventative measures” might be. How are you monitoring what people are doing on your behalf? How much control do you genuinely have?
In the main, franchising is done well by higher education institutions. But if corners are being cut, or inconvenient questions not being asked, for the less rigorous few the stakes just got even higher.
