Category: Featured

Which universities recruit commuter students?

It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but in general commuter students (whatever definition you are using) tend to be those who lived locally before they became students.

It’s an intersection – if you are recruiting locally (upskilling your local area) you are most likely to be recruiting students who are already living in the local area and will choose something other than the traditional on campus experience.

As institutional recruitment strategies change over the years, so will the makeup of your student body. Policy pressures, and – frankly – the need to reach underserved groups for more pragmatic financial reasons mean that more people are able to consider higher education in some form.

This is going to include stuff like sub-degree qualifications, provision aimed at mature students who want to upskill or re-skill mid-career, and more vocational qualifications that link in to the needs of particular local employers.

State of the data

There’s been various research reports (most notably from the Sutton Trust) that have used custom slices of HESA or UCAS data to identify commuter students. Until now it’s been quite difficult to replicate these analyses with public data, but the invention of HESA student table 62 and some nifty spatial updates from the good people at Tableau allows us to get fairly sophisticated with public data.

Here I’ve allowed you to make your own determination of what constitutes a local student based on the number of miles from your university’s main campus – you can select a provider of interest with the filter at the top, and then zero in on modes and levels of study of interest.

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The map will show you which local authorities are in scope (marked in pink) – the students that hail from those pink areas are shown in the bar chart at the side for each year, and the proportion of all students (at that provider with the level and mode as selected) is marked on the bars.

It’s far from perfect – one particular issue comes with the use of local authorities (as of late 2023, local democracy fans) as the unit of analysis. Because I can’t tell you where in, say, Somerset, a particular student lives we have to use the distance from the central point of the local authority in question. This is fine for your smaller council areas, but for big rural districts it causes problems.

Another issue will be the population of each area. There’s loads of potential students in Birmingham or London, perhaps less in Northumberland or Devon. If your main campus is nearer the former than the latter, your figures are going to be flattered.

If not you then who?

If local students aren’t going to your provider, where are they going? I have a chart for that too – select your local authority district at the top, and the rest of the controls work as normal. In general local students do study locally – but there are exceptions.

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The inevitable ranking

So – which providers have a low proportion of students from their local area? If you look at full time undergraduate recruitments the winners tend to (as above) be London-based or northern civic universities with strong links to the local area. Bath (especially, with two providers represented at the bottom end) and the wider south west are more likely to see students leave the area to study, and specialist providers are less likely to recruit locally than larger providers offering more courses in more areas.

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Though a first thought might see commuter students (and local recruitment) as an issue that doesn’t figure in the plans of our more prestigious providers, the reality is complex and pays no heed to your REF results. There are areas of the country where people tend to study locally – there are providers that are particularly good at recruiting what are likely to be their own recently qualified undergraduates on to masters courses. And large cities like London and Birmingham have their own specific gravity. In other words you almost certainly have students who commute – and thus have a very different experience of higher education to their peers – at your provider. And you need to offer them support.

This blog is part of our series on commuter students. Click here to see the other articles in the series.

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March 12, 2025
Trump administration’s reasons for detaining Mahmoud Khalil threaten free speech

It’s been three days since the government arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. This afternoon, the administration finally stated the basis for its actions. Its explanation threatens the free speech of millions of people.

Yesterday, an administration official told The Free Press, “The allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.” This was confirmed today by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who announced Khalil is being targeted under a law that she characterized as allowing the secretary of state to personally deem individuals “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.”

Leavitt said Khalil “sid[ed] with terrorists,” “organized group protests” that “disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe,” and distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda.” She also said the Department of Homeland Security is trying to track down “other individuals who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity” at Columbia University.

The law Leavitt appears to be citing requires the secretary of state to have “reasonable ground to believe” the person’s “presence or activities in the United States . . . would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

The administration is wielding this standard — deportation for people whose activities could cause “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” — to arrest and detain an individual graduate student. In explaining how he met this standard, the administration did not allege Khalil committed a crime. But it did explicitly cite the content of his speech, characterizing it as “anti-American” and “pro-Hamas.” Protesting government policy is protected by the First Amendment, as is rhetorical support for a terrorist group (if not directly coordinated with it, which the government has not alleged here).

Disrupting college classes and harassing students is not protected expression, to be sure, and Leavitt stated that Khalil organized protests that may have done so. But the administration has not detailed Khalil’s specific actions with respect to those protests, so it remains unclear whether Khalil himself violated any campus rules against discriminatory harassment. Whether any such violation justifies detention and deportation is a separate question. In either adjudication, Khalil must be afforded due process.

There are millions of people lawfully present in the United States without citizenship. The administration’s actions will cause them to self-censor rather than risk government retaliation. Lawful permanent residents and students on visas will fear a knock on the door simply for speaking their minds.

If constitutionally protected speech may render someone deportable by the secretary of state, the administration has free rein to arrest and detain any non-citizen whose speech the government dislikes. The inherent vagueness of the “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” standard does not provide notice as to what speech is or is not prohibited. The administration’s use of it will foster a culture of self-censorship and fear.

This is America. We don’t throw people in detention centers because of their politics. Doing so betrays our national commitment to freedom of speech.

FIRE social media post about the government’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil, March 10, 2025.

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March 11, 2025
HR and the Courts — March 2025

by CUPA-HR | March 11, 2025

Each month, CUPA-HR General Counsel Ira Shepard provides an overview of several labor and employment law cases and regulatory actions with implications for the higher ed workplace. Here’s the latest from Ira.

Federal Judge Orders a Halt to Part of the Trump Administration’s Executive Orders Targeting DEI Plans It Considers Illegal and Discriminatory

A federal district court judge in Baltimore issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily halts enforcement of the Trump administration’s executive orders targeting government contractors’ DEI plans. The judge granted in part the petitioner’s request for an injunction, holding that several provisions of the executive orders are unconstitutionally vague. Other executive order provisions were held to violate the Constitution’s free speech provisions. The lead plaintiff is the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, who was joined by the American Association of University Professors, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and the City of Baltimore (National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, et al v. Trump, et al (D. Md., No. 1:25-cv-00333. 2/21/25)).

The judge concluded that the challengers are likely to prevail on their allegations that the executive orders’ threatened enforcement, including contract termination, is “unconstitutionally vague on their face.” The injunction does not block the attorney general from pursuing investigations into allegedly illegal DEI programs.

Education Department “Dear Colleague” Letter Broadly Interprets the Supreme Court Decision in SFFA v. Harvard to Apply to All Campus Activities

The acting assistant secretary for the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague” letter late Friday, February 14, that broadly interprets the Supreme Court decision outlawing the use of race in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard to apply to all campus policies and activities. The letter warns colleges and universities against using race as a preference in any policy and activity, and encourages anyone believing that an institution has violated civil rights laws to contact the Office for Civil Rights (OCR).

The letter directly criticizes the development of DEI activities on campus and warns that the department will not tolerate overt or covert race discrimination, which, it concluded, has become “widespread at our nation’s educational institutions.” The letter asserts that educational institutions have “toxically indoctrinated” students with the false premise that the U.S. is built upon “systemic and structural racism.” The letter indicates that the department would take appropriate steps to assess compliance with the civil rights laws no later than 14 days after the letter was issued.

On March 1, the Education Department released an FAQ offering further guidance.

Disparate Impact Legal Liability Being Targeted as Unlawful in Anti-DEI Litigation

The disparate impact legal theory of employer liability allows plaintiffs to prevail in discrimination litigation without proving discriminatory intent. Under the disparate impact liability theory, an employer can be held liable for unlawful discrimination if a neutral policy applied to all employees has a statistically adverse impact on a minority group. In such a circumstance, the employer is held liable without the necessity to prove that the employer intended to discriminate against any particular group.

The Supreme Court adopted the disparate impact liability theory in the landmark case Griggs v. Duke Power in 1971. Conservatives have long held that the disparate impact liability theory unfairly punishes employers for unintentional practices and overemphasizes protected traits in HR decision-making. It will take a Supreme Court decision to reverse current precedent. The Trump administration may adopt an enforcement position at the Department of Justice and elsewhere in which they do not prosecute disparate impact cases. Such an enforcement decision, should it be made, would likely be subject to court challenge.

Collegiate Baseball Player Sues NCAA for Anti-Trust Violation Regarding Four-Year Eligibility Restriction

A collegiate baseball player has sued the NCAA, claiming its four-year eligibility restriction on Division I baseball violates anti-trust laws (Sanchez v. NCAA (E.D. Tenn., No. 3:25-cv-00062 Comp Filed 2/12/25)). The plaintiff is seeking to play baseball at the University of Tennessee this spring. He previously played one year at a junior college and then the last three years at the University of North Carolina. Under NCAA rules, he is not allowed to play this spring because his junior college playing year used up one of his four eligibility years.

In response to a similar lawsuit (Pavia v. NCAA), the NCAA granted a limited waiver of the four-year eligibility rule for the 2025-26 season for Division I football. That waiver, however, does not apply to spring sports such as baseball.

Civil Rights Groups Sue Trump Administration to Stop Anti-DEI Initiatives and Elimination of Transgender Protection of Federal Government Employees

A group of civil rights organizations lead by the National Urban League have sued the Trump administration in an attempt to stop the administration’s anti-DEI initiatives and its elimination of protection of transgender federal government employees (National Urban League v. Trump (D.D.C. 1:25-cv-00471, Complaint 2/19/25)). The lawsuit seeks to halt the enforcement of three Trump executive orders: “EO 14151: Ending Radical and Wasteful DEI Programs and Preferencing,” “EO 14168: Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” and “EO 14173: Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.”

The lawsuit alleges that the executive orders are unconstitutional because they suppress free speech. The groups allege that the executive orders target specific “content” and “viewpoints” and use “vague and subjective terms.” The plaintiffs argue that this makes them “constitutionally void for vagueness” under past Supreme Court precedent.

OFCCP Is Preparing to Cut Staff by Approximately 90% and Reduce Offices from 55 to 4

The acting director of the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs announced on February 25 in a memo it is preparing to cut employees from 479 to 50 and reduce offices from 55 to four. The OFCCP has already halted audits and investigations of government contractors’ affirmative action plans pursuant to direction from the Trump administration’s executive orders. As a result of these executive orders eliminating much of the OFCCP’s responsibilities, the OFCCP will have statutory authority to enforce only Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Vietnam War Veterans Readjustment Act.

Under the OFCCP reduction plan, the office would eliminate its Division of Enforcement, which is comprised of labor economists and statisticians who worked on enforcement and analysis of systemic cases, which will no longer be part of the OFCCP enforcement responsibilities.

Because of the unprecedented and fast-changing pronouncements of the new presidential administration and the intervening court challenges, the developments contained in this blog post are subject to change. Before acting on the legal issues discussed here, please consult your college or university counsel and, as always, act with caution.

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March 11, 2025
Education Department to reduce staff by nearly half

The Department of Education is expected to lay off nearly half its workforce as of Tuesday.

J. David Ake/Getty Images

The Education Department is moving to lay off nearly 50 percent of its more than 4,100 employees as of Tuesday evening, according to four sources inside the agency who were told about the plans.

It’s not yet clear what specific departments or positions were affected, though officials planned to tell affected employees this evening, sources told Inside Higher Ed. The department previously offered employees buyouts to cut down the workforce. The goal to reduce staff by 50 percent includes prior reductions. Those affected will receive 90 days’ severance and will have 10 days to transfer their job duties to another staffer or political appointee, according to a longtime staffer with inside knowledge of the reduction-in-force details.

The department said in its announcement that the employees will be placed on administrative leave, starting March 21, and that core programs such as distributing student loans and Pell Grants will continue.

“Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement. “This is a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.”

The Washington Post reported that 1,315 employees would lose their jobs, in addition to the roughly 600 who took the buyouts. The reductions will bring the total workforce down to fewer than 2,200.

Earlier on Tuesday, the department told staff that D.C. offices will be closed Wednesday and reopen Thursday for “security reasons,” according to an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed. One staffer said they were told by department officials that the closure was due to the reduction in force.

The email instructed department staff to take their laptops home with them on Tuesday in order to telework Wednesday, and that they would “not be permitted in any ED facility on Wednesday, March 12th, for any reason.”

Some department staff were notified of the impending layoffs during meetings with top department officials—including an acting deputy secretary—on Tuesday afternoon, according to sources inside the department who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on background.

Sheria Smith, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents over 2,800 workers at the Department of Education, pledged to fight the cuts in a statement released Tuesday evening. Smith said that the Trump administration “has no respect for the thousands of workers who have dedicated their careers to serve their fellow Americans.”

“We will not stand idly by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” Smith added. “We will state the facts. Every employee at the U.S. Department of Education lives in your communities—we are your neighbors, your friends, your family. And we have spent our careers supporting services that you rely on.”

The expected cuts are part of a governmentwide strategy to reduce the federal workforce. All federal agency officials were told last month to start preparing for a “large scale reduction in force” and to eliminate all “non-statutorily mandated functions.”

While the government layoffs are far-reaching, President Trump has frequently targeted the Education Department for cuts, even vowing to shut down the agency. That would require congressional action, but Trump and McMahon can make deep cuts to the agency even if they don’t abolish it altogether.

Trump is reportedly planning to sign an executive order directing McMahon to “take all necessary steps” to return authority over education to the states and facilitate closure of the Department of Education “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law,” according to draft text reviewed by Inside Higher Ed.

Higher education groups and advocates have warned that cutting staff and programs at the department would be catastrophic for institutions and students, though critics say the agency is in need of a serious overhaul. State higher education officials, university administrators, nonprofit advocacy groups and students depend on the Education Department to oversee federal student aid, manage the student loan portfolio, investigate civil rights complaints and allocate billions of dollars in institutional aid, among other operations. The department, which has an $80 billion discretionary budget, issues about $100 billion in student loans every year and more than $30 billion in Pell Grants.

The massive personnel cuts—the largest in the department’s history—will likely impact most agencies and offices in the department, including the Office of Federal Student Aid, sources say. Within FSA, the cuts will be most severe among teams that work directly on policy and higher education oversight, including the Ombudsman Office, which investigates complaints into student loan practices and financial aid.

Staffers at the Education Department have been anticipating the reduction in force for the past week. Last Tuesday, department leaders called a meeting to discuss the impending layoffs but canceled at the last minute. Meanwhile, staff have been awaiting the executive order from Trump to close down the department since last Wednesday.

“Everyone’s ready,” one exhausted staffer told Inside Higher Ed.

Other federal agencies have started to lay off thousands of employees via a planned reduction in force, a process that should give them 60 days’ notice. At the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump expects 65 percent of the workforce to go, according to Government Executive, a trade publication tracking the layoffs. Last week, the Veterans Affairs Department said it was laying off 80,000 people.

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March 11, 2025
Higher Education Inquirer surpasses half-million views. Recent quarter numbers exceed 130,000.

The Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) continues to show growth by appealing to students, consumers, and workers with interests in the higher education business. Our latest quarter shows approximately 132,000 views. The Higher Education Inquirer’s largest day for viewership was January 6, 2025, marking the fourth anniversary of Donald Trump’s failed attempted to overthrow the US government. While most of our views come from the US, HEI has an increasingly international reach.

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March 11, 2025
College campus counseling center usage and staffing

Counseling services are a key element of student retention in higher education due to elevated numbers of students reporting mental health conditions, but creating a sustainable practice that addresses students and staff needs remains a challenge, according to survey data from the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD).

The association’s annual report, published Feb. 25, highlights a tapering off of the increased demand for mental health services from students, but continued pressure to support clinician and nonclinical staff members through challenging work conditions.

Methodology

The survey includes responses from 367 counseling center directors from the U.S. and its territories and 14 from other countries. The majority of respondents work at four-year institutions and urban campuses. The reporting period ranges from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024.

Student engagement: While students continue to report high levels of mental health concerns, some counseling centers are seeing a decline in student demand.

The majority of respondents at four-year institutions reported a decline or no change in the number of unique clients seen (68 percent) and the number of appointments provided (58 percent). Among two-year colleges, 33 percent reported a decrease in the number of unique clients seen and 43 percent reported a decrease in overall appointments provided.

One in four counseling center directors (24 percent) indicated their centers did not have trouble meeting demand for services.

Around 11 percent of students at four-year institutions accessed counseling services, and just under 5 percent of students at community colleges received counseling center support. “Centers at smaller schools served, on average, much larger proportions (8 to 19 percent) of their enrolled populations than centers at larger schools (7 to 8 percent),” according to the report.

Student data indicated a correlation between student success and counseling center usage: 73 percent of clients reported that counseling services positively impacted their academic performance, and 71 percent said it helped them stay in school.

Staffing: The four-year college had 9.2 full-time-equivalent clinical employees, while the average for community colleges was 4.5 employees. Around 2 percent of centers were staffed by only one person, but this was a decline compared to the year prior, when 3.5 percent of directors indicated they were a one-person center.

Diversity of directors who completed the survey continues to rise, with 30 percent of respondents identifying as a person of color, up from 16 percent in the 2012–13 survey.

Staff turnover remains a concern for college counseling centers, with 12 percent of all nontrainee clinical positions and 10 percent of all nontrainee positions turning over in the past fiscal year. The top reasons staff left their roles were low salary (48 percent) and work conditions (32 percent), though fewer staff cited leaving the field as a reason for departure this year, compared to prior surveys.

Embedded counseling services remain limited, with around 30 percent of institutions utilizing counselors assigned to work within other departments. Athletics was the most frequently reported area where embedded clinicians work, followed by a specific school, student affairs office and residence life.

Services: Most clinical sessions were delivered in person (81 percent), followed by video (15 percent) and phone (3 percent). This mirrors the Center for Collegiate Mental Health’s data, published earlier this year, which found 64 percent of clients received exclusively in-person counseling and 13 percent received video-only care.

While a slight majority of centers do not have formal session limits (55 percent), 43 percent of institutions limit the number sessions a student can access by year, with some flexibility in the model. Only 0.6 percent of respondents indicated their campus has a hard session limit with no exceptions.

Teletherapy continues to be a popular offering among institutions, with 53 percent of four-year institutions and 35 percent of community colleges employing a third-party vendor to provide services. Use by students varies widely, even among similarly sized institutions, but the average number of participating students was 453.

“Overall, regardless of the type of service provided by a third-party vendor, the majority of directors reported utilization was less than hoped for or met their expectations,” according to the report.

The number of unique students who attended a crisis appointment averaged across centers was 125, and the average number of crisis appointments was 166. A majority (65 percent) offered psychiatric services within the counseling center, elsewhere on campus or in both locations.

In addition, a majority of respondents indicated their center provides formal or informal consultation services to the community.

Looking ahead: While the report focuses on the previous fiscal year, there remains a need to continue to provide accessible and high-quality counseling services, says Cindy M. Bruns, survey coordinator for AUCCCD. “By fostering a supportive campus culture and ensuring that mental health resources are available, colleges can help students navigate political and social environments while promoting resilience and well-being.”

Some counseling directors have noticed students are experiencing “elevated levels of anxiety, uncertainty, threats to their sense of safety and belonging on campus” due to federal action under the second Trump administration, Bruns says, which could prompt an increase in the number of students seeking services.

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March 11, 2025
How standardized tests became part of the DEI debate

In the Education Department’s sweeping Dear Colleague letter last month, acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor wrote that colleges must eliminate all race-conscious programs and policies, from scholarships and admissions practices to campus cultural groups and DEI training.

One surprising mention: standardized testing policies.

Trainor wrote that test-optional policies could be “proxies for race” to help colleges “give preference” to certain groups.

“That is true whether the proxies are used to grant preferences on an individual basis or a systematic one,” he wrote. “It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”

Higher education leaders and researchers have long debated the pros and cons of standardized testing in admissions: Some believe they’re a meritocratic predictor of academic success, while others say they’re more aligned with family wealth. In recent years, those debates have become entangled with discussions of systemic racism in the American education system.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the vast majority of colleges waived test requirements for applicants. Five years later, most have retained their test-optional policies—though a year ago some selective institutions began returning to score requirements, reigniting a charged debate about the role of standardized tests in admissions.

After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 2023, experts said test-optional policies could serve as race-neutral measures to help colleges maintain diversity in their applicant pools. They cited research showing that colleges with test-optional policies enrolled 10 to 12 percent more students from underrepresented racial backgrounds; other studies found that doing away with test requirements simplified the application process and thus removed barriers for first-generation and other underserved students. The Biden administration even included test-optional policies in its guidance for colleges adjusting to the court ruling.

If colleges cited such research in keeping their test-optional policies, Trainor’s letter implied it could be grounds for a civil rights investigation.

In a Frequently Asked Questions document meant to clarify the broad scope of the Dear Colleague letter, OCR made no mention of testing policies. But in response to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed about how the department views test-optional policies, Trainor left the door open to federal scrutiny.

“This isn’t complicated,” he wrote. “When in doubt, every school should consult the [Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard] legal test contained in the [Dear Colleague letter]: ‘If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law.’”

Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest and an outspoken critic of standardized testing, said assessments like the SAT have long been embroiled in debates about racial equity in education, but the discourse grew more prominent as attacks on DEI and affirmative action intensified.

“The SAT has racial bias baked into it from its origins as an early IQ test to keep out the riffraff,” he said. “What Republicans are now saying is, that’s an objective measure of merit, and if white and Asian kids do better on them over all, then colleges not considering those scores is a form DEI run amok.”

John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University, has published numerous influential studies on the effects of standardized testing policies, including those cited by the majority of Ivy League institutions that decided to return to test requirements. He said he understands where the Education Department’s skepticism comes from.

“Schools might be tempted to continue test-optional policies to make it easier to maintain diverse classes, even if that makes it harder to assess students’ academic preparation,’” Friedman said. “I think that’s where some of the angst comes from, as part of a larger concern about higher education moving away from the traditional sense of meritocracy.”

At the same time, he said the department should consider how institutions use test scores in admissions, which can vary widely.

“The point is not that you can’t go test-optional. It’s that you shouldn’t if your goal is an end run around the SFFA decision,” Friedman said. “It would be bad to force institutions that decided thoughtfully that test requirements are not best for them to adopt those policies anyway.”

Dominique Baker, associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, said she doesn’t believe it should matter whether colleges are considering racial diversity in deciding on their testing policies. The truth, she said, is that research on how testing policies affect applicant diversity is murky, and many of the colleges where the policies could have a demonstrable impact have already returned to requiring scores.

For her, the mention of testing policies alongside other DEI initiatives is “head-scratching.”

“The places the administration cares about have largely already returned to testing, or are certainly poised to do so soon. So who is this for?” Baker said. “It’s bananas that testing is even in here.”

Reversing the Test-Optional Tide?

So far, the letter hasn’t had any effect on institutions’ testing policies. But colleges are starting to respond to the Dear Colleague letter’s guidance in other ways, changing the names of student service offices, scrubbing mentions of race and equity from their websites, eliminating race-conscious programs, and canceling affinity group events.

“It would be naïve to believe that certain institutions wouldn’t, at the very least, strongly consider changing their testing policies in order to fly under the radar with the administration,” Baker said.

Some colleges are pushing ahead with their test-optional policies regardless. Last Thursday the University of Vermont announced that its test-optional policy, put in place during the pandemic, would become permanent.

Jay Jacobs, vice president for enrollment management at Vermont, told Inside Higher Ed the decision was based on years of research that found that removing test requirements not only had little effect on students’ academic performance and persistence, but also helped UVM achieve its goal of enrolling more local and first-generation students.

He said the university did not take racial diversity into account when measuring the policy’s enrollment impact—“we didn’t want that to be construed as the reason,” he explained—but said that whatever the rationale, he doesn’t believe the Education Department’s guidance should have any influence.

“No external party should have a say in dictating institutional policy,” Jacobs said.

Meanwhile, leaders in the assessment industry have remained largely silent about the Trump administration’s promotion of their exams as part of the war on DEI.

The College Board, which owns and administers the SAT, did not release a public statement about the letter, nor did ACT, Educational Testing Services or any other major assessment organization.

College Board communications director Holly Stepp wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the organization believes testing can promote college access, but it does not usually comment on policy matters.

“College Board provides access and opportunity to millions of students from every background through programs that are mission-driven, evidence-based, and nonpartisan,” Stepp wrote. “We do not set policies around how our exam is used by higher education institutions and scholarship providers.”

Juan Elizondo, ACT’s strategic communications director for government and public relations, told Inside Higher Ed that the company stands behind institutions’ freedom to set their own testing policies.

“ACT respects the authority of our higher education partners to decide the admission standards that are right for their institutions,” he wrote.

Failing the Logic Test

As colleges like Yale, Harvard and MIT returned to test requirements last year, many cited the same new research: a study from Opportunity Insights that found that test-optional policies made it more difficult for selective institutions to admit students who could succeed academically—and to find qualified applicants from diverse racial and economic backgrounds. Statements from both Yale and Dartmouth said that test scores could “help expand access” for underrepresented groups, including students of color.

So if both test-optional and test-mandatory policies can promote racial diversity depending on the institution, how will the Trump administration enforce its guidance?

When asked this question, Trainor did not respond directly but implied that any institution using racial diversity as a justification for any policy, or even citing it as a potential benefit, could be in violation of the current Education Department’s views on civil rights law.

Friedman, one of the researchers who produced the Opportunity Insights study, said his research showed that for some highly selective colleges, requiring test scores could help “a little bit” with diversity in the selection process. The argument is that by providing a standardized measure of academic preparedness, selective colleges can find a “diamond in the rough”—applicants from underresourced high schools who would struggle to stand out otherwise.

“For some schools, going back to requiring testing may help improve diversity, but my sense is that improving diversity is not the primary motivation behind this policy change,” he said.

Feder agreed but had a different prediction.

“If I’m at the OCR and an Ivy League college is saying, ‘We went back to test requirements because it’s good for diversity,’ even if that’s not really the case, I’d go investigate them,” he said. “By their own logic, they’d have to.”

Baker said there hasn’t been enough research to determine whether test-optional policies make a huge difference in promoting diversity. Many of the colleges that have kept them in place, she said, have also made more holistic changes to their admissions process that could account for diversity gains. But she believes ending the experiment early by government coercion would be a major step backward.

“Researchers in the field are doing some real deep dives to better understand the effects of test-optional policies themselves. The people writing the [Dear Colleague] letter have no clue about any of that; they just read about how these policies are part of an anti-white war on meritocracy,” she said. “They’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall.”

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March 11, 2025
Higher ed must be proactive

Sonny Ramaswamy retired from his role as president of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities in February, concluding an almost seven-year run at the accrediting body.

His retirement comes after a lengthy career in higher education, which included stints at Cornell University, Mississippi State University, Kansas State University, Purdue University and Oregon State University before former president Barack Obama appointed him as director of the National Institute for Food and Agriculture in 2012. Ramaswamy also served for roughly 18 months during Donald Trump’s first presidential term before returning to higher education as the head of NWCCU, a post he held from July 2018 until earlier this year, when he stepped down.

In his retirement, he plans to continue serving on nonprofit boards, particularly those in the world of food and agriculture, an area where much of his career was focused. Ramaswamy also plans to write, starting with an illustrated book of poetry to help children learn about the environment.

Ramaswamy spoke with Inside Higher Ed about his retirement plans, his experience as an accreditor, the challenges facing the sector and the need for a robust defense of higher education.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: First, tell me about your retirement. What prompted you to step down early?

A: I came on board in 2018 and had a five-year agreement. June 2023 is when the agreement would have ended, and then our commissioners pleaded with me, saying, “You’ve got to stay on with all the uncertainties with the impending elections next year, etc., etc.” Plus we were going through our [National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity] recognition process. Well, another year comes and goes and they asked if I could stay for some more time, past the elections. We were all expecting the elections to go in a certain way, but who would have thought that the Democrats would self-destruct? But that’s another story.

I reluctantly said OK. We had talked about staying on the whole year, but they left it to me to make the determination of when I would step out. Then the 2024 elections happened and we started seeing the handwriting on the wall, and it concerned me tremendously. I thought, “I can do a lot more being outside of the system as a spokesperson for education.”

Q: What initially interested you in the NWCCU job?

A: This was not something on my radar. My life has been about food and agriculture. I’m an entomologist. My passion is hunger, being that I was hungry growing up in India at a time when India could not feed itself. And my path was through academics, food and agricultural sciences.

I was headhunted [while director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture] and went through some interviews with a couple of land-grant universities for the presidency. I was all set to become president of a land-grant university, then I was headhunted by the Northwest Commission, and [their recruiter] said, “You’ve got to do this—you bring exquisite leadership skills, and that’s what they’re looking for. I said, “But I’ve not done anything related to accreditation,” and she said, “That’s not the point—what they want is somebody that can be a leader.” What they were looking for was somebody to set the ship in the right direction and create a compelling vision.

Q: What was the hardest part about the job?

A: The hard part was the complaints that we would receive about our colleges and universities. On some of those, there’s egregiousness on the part of the institutions, ignoring their own policies and things like that. We also got complaints that basically were frivolous. We created, I think, an excellent way to handle the complaints with the processes and procedures that we put together. But the hardest part was to see policies and procedures being ignored. I don’t know if those were ignored purposefully and wantonly, or it was just that some institutions are so huge, and that the bureaucracy is so huge that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

Q: What was the most rewarding aspect of the job?

A: What surprised me the most was how archaic the system was [at NWCCU]. It was thousands of pages of documentation being printed. I thought, “We need to come up with a way to use data to inform decisions, to look at how institutions are making progress and hold them accountable based on evidence and data, and not just the fact that they write these hundreds of pages of narrative.” It’s like the old adage that if you can’t bedazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. So I worked with our commissioners and our staff and went around America, listening to what needs to be done [to revise] our standards. My gosh, we had eight standards and 142 substandards, and the word “student” was invoked in the very last standard. It was pathetic.

So I said, “We have to focus on the students.” We did listening sessions and people gave us an earful [including think tanks], so we brought that back and went through the listening sessions and surveys, and we went from eight standards and 142 substandards to two standards. No. 1: Students, that’s where they’re supposed to be. And No. 2 is all the other stuff about compliance and governance and other issues. We changed all of that to focus on students.

The most rewarding piece was to see those changes take place.

Q: There seems to be a changing of the guard at accrediting bodies, with turnover at the top. What advice do you have for anyone stepping into that job in the current political climate?

A: Go into it thinking, “What is the value proposition we want to demonstrate?” I’m paraphrasing Pogo: I have seen the enemy and he is us. Accreditors are as much to blame as the institutions in that we have never been able to provide that compelling value proposition. To be accused by various individuals that there’s an accreditation cartel, that everything is done behind closed doors like the Wizard of Oz, that we impose diversity, equity and inclusion on these institutions—it’s all a false narrative. None of us have imposed critical race theory on our institutions. It’s a false narrative that has been grabbed by [anti-DEI activists] like Chris Rufo and Scott Yenor.

We pat ourselves on the back, saying, “We’re holding universities accountable.” But when a bit more than one out of every two students graduate, there’s something wrong with that picture.

Use your critical thinking and problem-solving skills and put the students at the core of your mission and demonstrate that value proposition, demonstrate why education is critically important for America, and the accountability piece of it that the accreditors bring to the effort.

Q: What do you think the near future holds for accreditation? Do you expect any big changes?

A: I’m reading the tea leaves, and it’s like our investment advisers tell us: Past results have no bearing on future returns. I worked in the Trump administration for a year and a half, and I saw a lot of things in there. But it means nothing, because now they’ve come in with a much better thought-out process, a blueprint. Hope springs eternal, but there’s going to be some changes.

But before whatever it is that’s coming down the pike, let us as educators, let us as accreditors demonstrate that value proposition [and] tell the story. Don’t wait. Get college presidents, students and alumni to speak to the value of higher education. All these companies—the people that are hiring our graduates—should be extolling America’s higher education system, which is why people like me came to this country from overseas. There has to be a concerted effort by everybody. The accreditors have a secondary role, since the primary role is going to be institutional leadership and alumni and board members and others to speak to why the accountability system that we have is important. Be proactive, don’t be reactive, don’t wait for the winter or fall to go to work.

And if we don’t do it, shame on us and we deserve what we get.

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March 11, 2025
How do care-experienced students view their time in higher education?
Last Thursday 6^th March, TASO shared its report on Pathways into and through higher education for young people with experience of children’s social care. It found that young people with experience of care are four times less likely to attend higher education by age 22 and more than twice as likely to drop out as their peers without experience of care.

It builds on a growing body of literature in this area, including analysis by the Unite Foundation and evaluations of its own scholarships with Jisc.

Through the annual Student Academic Experience Survey (SAES), HEPI and Advance HE collect data on the experiences and attitudes of care-experienced students. We are in a constant process of iterating and improving the SAES, and in 2024, a close reading of our data from previous years suggested a higher number of respondents than expected were saying they had experience of care. To make sure we were capturing the right students, we refined the question as follows:
Have you been in care? Select yes if you’ve ever lived in public care or as a looked-after child, including:

with foster carers under local authority care

in a residential children’s home

being ‘looked after at home’ under a supervision order

living with friends or relatives in kinship care

Note: This does not refer to time spent in boarding schools, working in a care or healthcare setting, or if you are a carer yourself.
In 2024, nearly 900 of the roughly 10,300 respondents to the SAES – still quite a high number, but significantly fewer than the previous year – said they had experience of care. What do the data say about their experiences in higher education? (Note that the margin of error for any subset will be higher than the margin for the whole survey sample, which is around 1%.)

On subject choices, care-experienced students in the SAES were somewhat more likely to be studying Medicine and Dentistry and subjects allied to Medicine, which is consistent with sector-level data. They were also more likely to be studying Engineering and less likely to be studying Business, Social Studies and creative subjects.

In addition to the challenges faced by having experienced care, these students were also less likely to come from the highest quintiles of participation in higher education (POLAR) than other students and more likely to have a disability (45%, compared to 30% of other students) but less often described themselves as first in family (25%, compared to 32% of other students).

This probably informs many of their responses throughout the survey. For example, like other students taking courses like these, care-experienced students have more contact hours and do more hours of independent work (a total of 41.5 hours) than students without experience of care (36 hours on average). Likewise, more than half of care-experienced students use AI at least once a week, compared with less than a third (30%) of other students. This is as expected, given that saving time is a primary reason students use AI tools.

Perhaps surprisingly, care-experienced students report higher scores on wellbeing measures, like happiness and life satisfaction. (For example, they average 7.08 out of 10 for whether the things they do are worthwhile, compared to 6.74 for other students.) However, they also report higher rates of anxiety and loneliness than students without experience of care, averaging 5.29 out of 10 for feeling anxious compared with 4.48 for other students.

Care-experienced students are more likely to have considered withdrawing: 38% compared with 24% of all students. When asked for their main reason why, they cite mental health as the primary challenge, but at a lower rate than students without experience of care. Instead, they were more likely to mention workload – either a higher or lower volume than expected – or their physical health.

These data also suggest that care-experienced students face an altogether more challenging context. Some 58% of care-experienced students say they travel 10 miles or more to get to university, compared with only 31% without experience of care travelling the same distance. This may be because the benefits some care-experienced students get can be contingent on living within a particular local authority. Care-experienced students reported living alone or with family at higher rates than other students.

Additionally, care-experienced students may need to remain at home to provide for family members at higher rates. Almost all care-experienced students (80%) do some paid work during term-time, compared with 55% of other students. This is most often to supplement their income. But more than one-third of care-experienced students (35%) work to support friends or family financially.

A third (33%) say the cost-of-living crisis has affected them ‘a lot’, compared with 27% of other students. Care-experienced students are also nearly twice as likely to depend on scholarships or bursaries to cover their costs, which could also show that such funds are being effectively targeted towards students who need them.

In summary, care-experienced students are more likely to take certain Health and Science subjects, live further from their institution, are more likely to be working to support their families and are affected more by cost-of-living difficulties. These challenging findings help to explain why care-experienced students withdraw from higher education at higher rates.

Clearly there is more that institutions and government can do to support this group of students. The TASO report recommends, for example, working closely with local authorities to ensure care-experienced students have reliable access to accommodation, both during and outside of term-time. And as Paige Mackenzie wrote for us in 2022, the holidays can be a ‘really lonely time’ for care-experienced and estranged students and it helps when staff reach out.
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March 11, 2025
Trump doesn’t rule out recession as tariffs roil market (ABC News)

Higher Education Inquirer : Trump doesn’t rule out recession as tariffs roil market (ABC News)

Trump doesn’t rule out recession as tariffs roil market (ABC News)

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March 11, 2025