Category: Featured

What AI Can’t Read: Ambiguities and Silences (opinion)

A year ago, I saw artificial intelligence as a shortcut to avoid deep thinking. Now, I use it to teach thinking itself.

Like many educators, I initially viewed artificial intelligence as a threat—an easy escape from rigorous analysis. But banning AI outright became a losing battle. This semester, I took a different approach: I brought it into my classroom, not as a crutch, but as an object of study. The results surprised me.

For the first time this spring, my students are not just using AI—they are reflecting on it. AI is not simply a tool; it is a mirror, exposing biases, revealing gaps in knowledge and reshaping students’ interpretive instincts. In the same way a river carves its course through stone—not by force, but by persistence—this deliberate engagement with AI has begun to alter how students approach analysis, nuance and complexity.

Rather than rendering students passive consumers of information, AI—when engaged critically—becomes a tool for sharpening analytical skills. Instead of simply producing answers, it provokes new questions. It exposes biases, forces students to reconsider assumptions and ultimately strengthens their ability to think deeply.

Yet too often, universities are focused on controlling AI rather than understanding it. Policies around AI in higher education often default to detection and enforcement, treating the technology as a problem to be contained. But this framing misses the point. The question in 2025 is not whether to use AI, but how to use it in ways that deepen, rather than dilute, learning.

AI as a Tool for Deep Engagement

This semester I’ve asked students to use AI in my seminar on Holocaust survivor testimony. At first glance, using AI to analyze these deeply human narratives seems contradictory—almost irreverent. Survivor testimony resists coherence. It is shaped by silences, contradictions and emotional truths that defy categorization. How can an AI trained on probabilities and patterns engage with stories shaped by trauma, loss and the fragility of memory?

And yet, that is precisely why I have made AI a central component of the course—not as a shortcut to comprehension, but as a challenge to it. Each week, my students use AI to transcribe, summarize and identify patterns in testimonies. But rather than treating AI’s responses as authoritative, they interrogate them. They see how AI stumbles over inconsistencies, how it misreads hesitation as omission, how it resists the fragmentation that defines survivor accounts. And in observing that resistance, something unexpected happens: students develop a deeper awareness of what it means to listen, to interpret, to bear witness.

AI’s sleek outputs conceal a deeper problem: It is not neutral. Its responses are shaped by the biases embedded in its training data, and by its relentless pursuit of coherence—even at the expense of accuracy. An algorithm will iron out inconsistencies in testimony, not because they are unimportant, but because it is designed to prioritize seamlessness over contradiction, clarity over ambiguity. But testimony is ambiguity. Memory thrives on contradiction. If left unchecked, AI’s tendency to smooth out rough edges risks erasing precisely what makes survivor narratives so powerful: their rawness, their hesitations, their refusal to conform to a clean, digestible version of history.

For educators, the question is not just how to use AI but how to resist its seductions. How do we ensure that students scrutinize AI rather than accept its outputs at face value? How do we teach them to use AI as a lens rather than a crutch? The answer lies in making AI itself an object of inquiry—pushing students to examine its failures, to challenge its confident misreadings. AI does not replace critical thinking; it demands it.

AI as Productive Friction

If AI distorts, misinterprets and overreaches, why use it at all? The easy answer would be to reject it—to bar it from the classroom, to treat it as a contaminant rather than a tool. But that would be a mistake. AI is here to stay, and higher education has a choice: either leave students to navigate its limitations on their own or make those limitations part of their education.

Rather than treating AI’s flaws as a reason for exclusion, I see them as opportunities. In my classroom, AI-generated responses are not definitive answers but objects of critique—imperfect, provisional and open to challenge. By engaging with AI critically, students learn not just from it, but about it. They see how AI struggles with ambiguity, how its summaries can be reductive, how its confidence often exceeds its accuracy. In doing so, they sharpen the very skills AI cannot replicate: skepticism, interpretation and the ability to challenge received knowledge.

This approach aligns with Marc Watkins’s observation that “learning requires friction.” AI can be a force of productive friction in the classroom. Education is not about seamlessness; it is about struggle, revision and resistance.

Teaching history—and especially the history of genocide and mass violence—often feels like standing on a threshold: one foot planted in the past, the other stepping into an uncertain future. In this space, AI does not replace the act of interpretation; it compels us to ask what it means to carry memory forward.

Used thoughtfully, AI does not erode intellectual inquiry—it deepens it. If engaged wisely, it sharpens—rather than replaces—the very skills that make us human.

Jan Burzlaff is a postdoctoral associate in the Jewish Studies program at Cornell University.

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May 23, 2025
Calif. Community Colleges Ramp Up Battle Against the Bots

Faced with an ongoing swell of fraudulent applications and enrollments, the California Community College system is hotly debating what to do next to win their battle against bot “students” for good.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the 116-college system has been haunted by ghost students—impostors who enroll online, apply for financial aid and disappear with the funds. System administrators say the issue arose in the last five years, with fraudsters eager to access federal aid made available to students. The growth of online education and spread of AI has exacerbated the problem, making it easier for bots to apply in droves. The issue has put strain on professors and staff who have had to flag and purge thousands of bots from online courses and led to the loss of millions of dollars of student aid.

System leaders brought a proposal before the Board of Governors in a meeting Tuesday, asking them to consider a “nominal” student fee to help pay for artificial intelligence tools and other defenses against the bots. After more than two hours of discussion, board members opted against taking steps to charge a fee. But the board didn’t reject the idea outright; instead they asked system staff to further “explore” it and unanimously voted in favor of other recommendations. Notably, the system now has approval to require an identity-verification process for all applicants and to ramp up use of high-tech and AI tools to combat the issue.

Over the past year alone, the system found 31.4 percent of applications were fraudulent, system officials said. Ghost students have stolen about $10 million in federal financial aid and $3 million in state and local aid in the past year, according to system officials. That’s an escalation from prior years; campus reports obtained by Cal Matters revealed that between September 2021 and January 2024, fraudsters took off with $5 million in federal aid and $1.5 million in state and local aid.

Those figures have alarmed state lawmakers. Last month, nine Republican members of Congress from California sent a letter to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Attorney General Pam Bondi calling for a federal investigation into the fraud issue. State lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, have since demanded a state audit of the system’s fraud challenges.

Chris Ferguson, executive vice chancellor of the California Community College system, told Inside Higher Ed that stolen funds account for “about two-tenths of a percent” of the several billion dollars of aid flowing into the colleges, “well below the threshold that would normally trigger federal investigations of financial aid fraud,” he said. He also emphasized that the system’s current tools for fraud detection capture about 85 percent of false applications.

At the beginning of last year, the system rolled out a new identity verification process as a part of applications, called ID.me. But the process was optional for community college districts until the Board of Governors voted to require it at this week’s meeting.

Ferguson would like to see the share of fraudulent cases caught—and prevented—approach 100 percent, partly by scaling AI tools already in use on some campuses. But advancing those efforts could cost up to $10 million, Ferguson estimated, which is why administrators requested the authority to charge a student fee in “the low tens of dollars.”

The goal of the fee would be to “both support application review costs and deter fraudulent application submissions,” according to the proposal.

James Todd, assistant vice chancellor of the California Community College system, told Inside Higher Ed that the system is trying to prevent fake students from continuing to take away resources from real students. He said campus employees have had to pivot from their day-to-day, student-facing work to focus their attention on identifying bots. Meanwhile, ghost students’ registrations are crowding out actual students from classes they need for their programs.

“Our entire system is based on increasing equitable access for students,” Todd said. “Students who are already on a degree or certificate path are sometimes finding barriers to being able to enroll in a class or a class being canceled because colleges have found that it’s all enrolled with fraudulent students. That is what we’re dealing with on an everyday basis across our campuses.”

But students came out in force at the Board of Governors meeting to express their opposition to the fee. Many students, from campuses across the system, acknowledged the importance of rooting out ghost students but also shared concerns that an additional charge, even if small, could pose a financial barrier for low-income students.

The fee “is someone’s food, is someone’s gas,” Daniela Romo, president of the Associated Students of Delta College at San Joaquin Delta College, told the board. “But it’s also a message to other people that there is some barrier to entry … I think that the beauty of the California Community College system is that it accepts everybody with open arms.”

A National Issue

While California community colleges have a particularly stubborn bot problem, student aid fraud isn’t new or isolated to the system.

The Office of Inspector General at the federal Department of Education has been working for years to raise national awareness about financial aid fraud rings. For example, OIG investigations revealed $10 million worth of student aid fraud in Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina and other states, according to a 2021 report.

Community colleges tend to be the most vulnerable to these types of scams because of their open-access mission, said Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. They intentionally make it easy for students to apply, unlike more selective universities, and they’re low-cost, or even no cost in states with free college programs. That means a fraudulent student who feigned eligibility for the Pell Grant could pay minimal tuition and pocket the rest of the aid money intended for other educational expenses like textbooks and transportation.

“Because of their very nature of being welcoming to all, [community colleges] invite this kind of opportunity for fraud,” Desjean said.

She emphasized that there are guardrails in place to prevent people from exploiting the financial aid system, like the FAFSA verification process, which requires some students to verify information on their financial aid applications. The Department of Education also flags potentially fraudulent behavior, like enrolling and withdrawing multiple times at different nearby institutions.

But there’s a difficult balance to strike between stopping fraudsters and making the financial aid process so burdensome that real students are deterred from applying, she said.

Adu Love, a student member of the Board of Governors, raised similar concerns about the community college system’s verification process, now required for all applicants. She told the board she worries extra steps could make applying more difficult for homeless, incarcerated or undocumented students, who might lack some of the necessary documentation. She herself drove five hours to Moorpark College to verify her identity because she was unable to use ID.me, she said.

“Our responsibility is not just to stop fraud, but it’s also to maintain the access we have as a system while we do it,” she told board members.

Using AI to Fight AI?

Earlier in the Board of Governors meeting, some community college leaders detailed the stress fraudulent applications have put on their campuses and the steps they’ve taken to resolve the issue.

Jeannie G. Kim, president of Santiago Canyon College, told the board that her institution identified about 10,000 fraudulent students by employing various verification methods, including making phone calls to individual students.

“We had to actually take them out of our system, and when we did that, of course, our enrollment numbers … dropped tremendously,” Kim said. “But we needed to do it, because we needed to bring our real students in. That saved the day for our students … Our students were clamoring for these classes that they could not gain access to.”

Clearing out the false students made room for about 8,000 actual students to enroll.

Jory Hadsell, vice chancellor of technology for the Foothill–De Anza Community College District, told the Board of Governors that “waves” of fraudulent applications last year left admissions and financial aid personnel “overwhelmed and exhausted” as they sifted through thousands of suspect applications.

“Internal fraud tools were no longer keeping up with the speed and the sophistication of the threat that we were facing,” he said.

Now the Foothill–De Anza district and Santiago Canyon are part of a group of 48 colleges that have turned to artificial intelligence to flag potentially fraudulent applications—and they say it’s working.

Kim told board members that AI has been a game changer, helping her college catch bots at the application stage and keep them out of enrollments and wait lists.

The AI model reviews each application and gives it a “fraud score” indicating how likely it is to be fraudulent, along with an explanation of what factors triggered its suspicions. For example, the AI can detect whether lots of applications are coming from the same IP address.

The fraud problem “is controllable,” Kim said. “We have a 99 percent efficacy rate with the implementation that we have done” for a cost of less than $100,000.

Kiran Kodithala, CEO of N2N Services, which offers LightleapAI, the tool colleges are using, said at the meeting that the company processed roughly three million applications in the last eight months and prevented about 360,000 fraudsters “from defrauding taxpayers, stealing classes from students” and worrying campus leaders, helping them avoid “waking up in the middle of the night” fretting over whether they can trust their enrollment numbers.

These are the kinds of tools Ferguson wants to see expanded to more institutions.

“The more we can stop [fraud] at the application phase, the less you have to do on the enrollment front and … the less you have to do on the financial aid front,” he said.

Kim told the board that not every institution can use the same AI tools, because the bots used for fraud are too “smart”—they’ll quickly adapt if colleges aren’t using a diverse set of defenses. But she believes the entire system should be required to use some form of AI as part of their antifraud strategy, especially lower-resourced institutions that may not have the money or staffing to flag a swell of suspect applications on their own.

“We have a lot of small rural colleges, and those colleges cannot handle the kind of attack that we endured last fall,” she said. “If that happens to them, they are going to be in jeopardy.”

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May 23, 2025
Four Things to Know About the House Budget Plan

After much back-and-forth and late-night dealing, House Republicans have passed a sweeping budget plan to cut spending and taxes that is moving on to the Senate—a significant milestone for legislation that seemed dead in the water a week ago amid concerns that the bill didn’t include deeper cuts.

The plan, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, narrowly advanced Thursday morning by a one-vote margin. All Democrats opposed the legislation, arguing that the spending cuts would hurt the working class and vulnerable populations while raising the deficit and giving tax breaks to wealthy individuals.

Among other changes, the legislation would levy new taxes on colleges, require institutions to pay millions to the federal government, change how students pay for college and limit eligibility for the Pell Grant. In the lead-up to Thursday’s vote, higher education leaders warned that the proposal would make trying to attend and pay for college much more complicated and raise costs for those who do enroll. The bill does include some wins for colleges, institutional lobbyists say, but those don’t outweigh the negatives.

Republicans, who say the cuts are necessary, are using a legislative procedure known as reconciliation to advance the bill. That process allows lawmakers to fast-track the legislation and pass it with a simple majority of votes in both chambers. (Typically, the Senate requires 60 votes to cut off debate for a bill.)

“It’s time we stopped asking a factory worker in Michigan or a rancher in Texas to subsidize the student debt of a lawyer in Manhattan so colleges can continue to spike their tuition to whatever they want,” said Rep. Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, in a statement. “By capping loan amounts and giving some financial responsibility to schools, this legislation addresses the root cause of high college costs and provides schools an incentive to deliver real value for students and taxpayers.”

With the measure now in the Senate’s hands and lawmakers eyeing a July 4 deadline, here’s what else you should know about the legislation that could reshape American higher education.

1. Students Set to Lose Pell Money

Many House committees had a hand in the legislation, but the proposals that will have the biggest impact on colleges are from the Committee on Education and the Workforce. The 103-page Student Success and Taxpayer Savings Plan, which is part of the broader reconciliation bill, would reduce spending by nearly $350 billion over the next 10 years.

Most of those savings stem from rolling back a Biden-era student loan repayment plan that never fully took effect and from capping how much students can borrow. But lawmakers are also planning to increase spending on Pell Grants by $2.8 billion as they aim to address a looming shortfall and open up the program to short-term workforce-training classes.

To make the math work, Republicans are changing who qualifies for a Pell Grant, proposing that students would have to take at least 15 credits a semester in order to receive the full award. They’ll also have to take at least 7.5 credits to get any money. Currently, the Pell Grant is prorated based on how many credits students take, and there’s no floor.

Changing the full-time-award definition would save $7.1 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which estimated that more than half of students currently enrolled would see their Pell Grant reduced.

The CBO also estimated that cutting off Pell for part-time students would save about $687 million over the next 10 years. Currently, about 10 percent of Pell Grant recipients enroll less than half-time. Of those students, the CBO predicts that one-third of students who stand to lose their grant under this change would enroll in more classes. Presumably, the other two-thirds would either stop out or pay for their education with loans or their own money. (The CBO report was based on a minimum of six credits, but that threshold has since increased to 7.5, so the number of students affected could be higher.)

Over all, about 700,000 students would no longer be eligible for the Pell Grant after all the changes take effect. The changes are currently set to take effect in summer 2026.

2. Colleges on the Hook for Unpaid Student Loans

In addition to the Pell Grant cuts, college leaders are particularly worried about a provision known as risk-sharing, which would require institutions to pay a financial penalty based on students’ unpaid loans. How much colleges would have to pay is unclear, but the CBO estimates that by 2034, payments would total $1.3 billion and then continue to increase each year. Risk-sharing is expected to save the government $5.3 billion over the next 10 years.

Because of risk-sharing and other changes in the bill aimed at limiting student borrowing, the CBO predicts that the volume of student loans would drop by about 20 percent.

College leaders and lobbyists argue that the formula that would determine institutions’ payments is untested, and without more information, they can’t accurately gauge the ramifications. One lobbyist said the proposal represented “an astonishing level of federal overreach.” Critics of the plan also worry that underresourced and minority-serving institutions would be hit the hardest.

“The risk is not equal among colleges,” Tuskegee University president Mark Brown told senators this week.

Risk-sharing is just one of several proposed changes that would upend the student loan system. House Republicans also want to end Grad PLUS loans along with subsidized loans, restrict Parent PLUS loans and tie how much students can borrow to the median cost of a program. Some consumer protection advocates argued that these changes would drive students to private lenders, which often charge higher interest rates.

3. More Taxes and Medicaid Cuts Threaten Colleges’ Bottom Lines

Other proposals in the bill from the Ways and Means Committee would levy a host of new or expanded taxes against universities.

First, the committee created new brackets to tax wealthy universities’ endowments. Currently, private universities with endowments that are worth more than $500,000 per student pay a 1.4 percent tax. But under the plan, some could see their endowments taxed at 21 percent.

Institutions with endowments valued at $750,000 to $1.25 million per student would be hit with a 7 percent tax. That rate would climb to 14 percent for colleges with endowments worth $1.25 million to $2 million per student, while colleges with endowments of $2 million or more per student would pay 21 percent. Colleges also can’t include international students in their tally of students, which could subject more institutions to the tax.

In addition to the endowment tax, the proposal also taxes a college’s intellectual property by stating that the endowment tax should include all forms of investment income. This means that any royalties from a private university’s intellectual property, including patents and copyrights, would be taxable. Additionally, the legislation removes colleges’ exemption from the unrelated business income tax so that all institutions, public and private, would be taxed for royalties from licensing their name and logo.

House Republicans in other committees also proposed cuts to the Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance programs, which critics say would hurt students and states’ budgets. And if states do take a hit financially, public colleges might see their budgets cut.

“If federal Medicaid funding is reduced in a new federal tax law, no public college or university will be immune from future state budget reductions and the austerity that will result. Public higher education must be prepared,” two professors wrote in an Inside Higher Ed op-ed earlier this year.

4. Warnings From Higher Ed Pile Up

Higher education groups warned before and after the vote of damaging consequences if the legislation becomes law.

American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten called it a “big, ugly betrayal,” while Kara D. Freeman, president and CEO of the National Association of College and University Business Officers, said in a statement that “the implications for student access, research, and innovation could be far-reaching.”

Freeman said the endowment tax is especially concerning and cited NACUBO data that shows colleges and universities spent $30 billion from their endowments in fiscal year 2024—nearly half of which funded student financial aid.

“This scholarship tax takes funds away from students and makes it less possible for colleges to support them,” she said.

Meanwhile, the American Council on Education took issue with the use of the reconciliation process to advance sweeping changes, along with the provisions in the bill.

“The totality of the funding cuts, policy changes, and tax increases included in this reconciliation package will have a historic and negative impact on the ability of current and future students to access postsecondary education, as well as on colleges and universities striving to carry out their vital educational and research missions,” ACE wrote in a letter to the House.

So far, senators have said little about the higher ed provisions in the bill, so it’s not yet clear whether they’ll agree with the House plan. Generally, while the House prefers risk-sharing, the Senate is expected to back a measure that judges programs by their students’ employment rates and income levels after graduation.

But, with President Donald Trump backing the legislation and a fragile majority in the House, senators have few options if they want to change the legislation.

“This is arguably the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Now, it’s time for our friends in the United States Senate to get to work, and send this Bill to my desk AS SOON AS POSSIBLE! There is no time to waste.”

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May 23, 2025
Senate Committee Approves Education Under Secretary Nominee

The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions voted to approve Nicholas Kent as under secretary of education, the top job in the country for higher education policy and oversight, by a narrow 12-to-11 vote. The Senate will hold a final confirmation vote at a later date.

Kent, a former Virginia deputy secretary of education, is a vocal critic of the Biden administration and a former lobbyist for for-profit colleges and trade schools.

His nomination earned a mix of support and concern from higher education associations and advocates, some of whom viewed it as a worrying harbinger of the Trump administration’s plans to reduce federal regulation and oversight of for-profit colleges and credential programs.

Kent was advanced to a full vote with a tranche of six other cabinet nominees. A few organizations, including the American Federation of Teachers and the Institute for College Access and Success, expressed concern that there was no public hearing about Kent’s ties to for-profit institutions. In 2015 Kent’s then-employer, Education Affiliates, a company that operates dozens of for-profit colleges nationwide, settled a False Claims Act case brought by the Department of Justice for $2 million.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, voted no on Kent’s nomination Thursday morning, saying, “We should not be confirming a former lobbyist who represented for-profit colleges to oversee higher education.”

Other organizations say Kent could shake up a regulatory framework they believe has stifled innovation. The American Association of Community Colleges wrote a letter supporting Kent, saying it believes he is committed to “ensuring statutory compliance and program integrity while decreasing administrative burdens and supporting innovation.”

If confirmed, Kent will replace acting under secretary James Bergeron as the No. 2 education policy official in the country.

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May 23, 2025
Making Fourth Generation Universities intentional: sounds good but what does it mean?
- By Lucy Haire, Director of Partnerships at HEPI.
At a recent roundtable discussion of university leaders convened by HEPI with Elsevier, the focus was the concept of the Fourth Generation University. If first-generation universities focused on teaching, second-generation universities on research, third-generation universities on knowledge exchange, then fourth-generation universities combine all those things for the express purpose of addressing real-world challenges. Rather than universities beavering away and occasionally ‘throwing something out there,’ commented one roundtable guest, the idea is to link university delivery to specific goals in partnerships with other agencies.

‘It is tempting in a time of financial crisis in the UK university sector to withdraw into core activities’ continued the discussion contributor, ‘when in fact the opposite is needed – bold steps into more explicit civic engagement.’ One former head of a medical school said that he had never been asked what society needed of his institution. Fourth Generation Universities, conversely, link their work to health priorities and any number of other pressing public concerns. They respond head-on to the UK Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Philipson’s Five Priorities for Universities outlined in her letter to vice-chancellors in autumn 2024, especially number two about economic growth and number three about civic roles. In addition, the Government has stated that it will be publishing a document this summer setting out some plans for higher education reform.

Elsevier is at the heart of developments, establishing a Fourth Generation University global community and a basket of metrics to analyse progress. Eindhoven University of Technology is a trailblazer in the field, and early adopters in the UK include the Universities of Newcastle, Swansea, Aston and Strathclyde, among others. Robert Jan-Smits, recently retired president of the executive board of Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE), and also former Director General of Research and Innovation at the European Commission, offers his reflections on the initiative which, he states, might not suit every institution.

One HEPI and Elsevier roundtable participant who has analysed and encouraged university civic engagement across the UK explained that the three components for success were strong leadership, strong relationships and a strong sense of intentionality. He cautioned that the country is divided in terms of public engagement: swaths of the country never or seldom set foot on a university campus, nor have knowledge of higher education’s work and impact. A chorus of university leaders at the discussion acknowledged their need to do more in terms of better serving and communicating with such groups. University-speak and the dreaded sector acronyms should be banned!

There are plenty of success stories of universities acting as anchor institutions in their regions. Many boast start-up business support, science and innovation parks and strategic collaboration with regional authorities. Others address skills shortages, health inequalities, local transport deficits and low university participation rates. They are all important employers and many serve local, national and global communities simultaneously. Cybersecurity and defence projects which bring together industry and academia, often from multiple institutions, are in ever-increasing demand. One discussion participant reminded the group that some higher education institutions, such as Coventry University, had been set up with civic goals in mind, while another said that resource and planning were needed to develop the right ecosystems and infrastructure in which Fourth Generation Universities can thrive.

While there could be pockets of resistance, most academics can be persuaded that if their students’ job prospects are improved and their own research sharpened, the aims of Fourth Generation Universities are worthwhile. Fully integrating the student voice was key, with a special mention for Arts and Humanities graduates whose storytelling capabilities should be deployed to showcase the positive impact of Fourth Generation initiatives.

One roundtable contributor advised that the UK should take note of what is happening in American universities in terms of heated anti-intellectual rhetoric and huge funding cuts since the start of Donald Trump’s second administration. People need to see the ‘tangible impact’ of universities and understand the connections between their lives and the Academy as a bulwark against aggression.

Attention around the table turned to the recent UK local elections in which a relative political newcomer, Reform, made huge strides. Those universities working in partnership with councils now controlled by Reform reported positive early engagement and an understanding among new councillors of the importance of the success of their local universities. Meanwhile, when it comes to national politics, higher education policy is not seen as a vote-winner.

Perhaps if universities could make their impact on the economy better known, the sector could garner more strategic attention from the government, not least to support the growth agenda. One guest suggested posing a counterfactual: ‘What if there were no, or far fewer, universities? What would the impact be on the economy?’ Another speaker referenced the trend in Australia of universities reporting outcomes like how much growth and employment they had delivered. UK funding systems such as Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) could be developed to better incentivise Fourth-Generation initiatives. The gathered group also remembered that developing more rigorous and consistent methods to measure both the private and public benefits of universities, including social and civic outcomes, was a key priority in Universities UK 2024 Opportunity, Growth and Partnership: a blueprint for change. The metric frameworks being developed by the Fourth Generation University global community could provide a basis on which to start.

From publican to professor, fishmonger to founder, cabbie to the cabinet, Fourth Generation Universities need to make sense, deliver outcomes and foster a sense of shared endeavour in a turbulent world.
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May 23, 2025
Only connect: why investing in relational infrastructure is critical for universities
Today on the HEPI blog, we explore the discussions at a recent HEPI roundtable with Elsevier on the topic of the Fourth Generation University – which combines teaching, research and knowledge exchange.

You can read a full write-up of the roundtable, by HEPI’s own Director of Partnerships, Lucy Haire, at this link – or read on for a discussion of relational infrastructure by Sarah Chaytor.
- Sarah Chaytor is Director of Strategy & Policy and Joint Chief of Staff to the UCL Vice-Provost, Research, Innovation & Global Engagement.
At a recent HEPI roundtable dinner with Elsevier to discuss how universities could strengthen their regional and civic contributions, there was a rather sobering discussion of the ‘low stock’ of universities amongst both government and the public.

This was in the context of an ongoing, international discussion about the concept of ‘fourth generation’ universities. These are defined as ‘global universities that are fully integrated in their local innovation ecosystem with the aim of tackling worldwide societal challenges and driving regional economic growth.’

We are well-versed in our sector on the economic benefits of universities and well-practiced in trumpeting these to ourselves and to government. Yet at the same time, there is a growing evidence base on the disconnect between the British public and universities. Reports from UPP/HEPI and from Public First suggest a significant lack of awareness amongst many citizens of how universities positively affect their daily lives or contribute to the places they live. As someone working in university research, I am particularly concerned by public attitudes to research and development (R&D) – important work done by CaSE on public perceptions of R&D has found that a significant majority of people think that that ‘R&D doesn’t benefit people like them’ or feel neutral or unsure about R&D’s impacts.

I’m not sure that, as a sector, we have fully grasped how serious this is. It cannot be a state of affairs that we simply shrug our shoulders at. As CaSE has observed: ‘This is a precarious position for a sector that receives substantial public investment.’ We risk undermining the ‘social compact’ that exists between universities and the public – that is, the basis on which we receive public funding (especially for R&D) is our ability to make a broader contribution.

I conclude from this that the focus over the past 20 years or so on universities’ economic contribution doesn’t cut through to those citizens who feel that the economy simply doesn’t work for them. Making universities part of an abstract and disconnected concept of economic growth is of no interest to people worried about access to housing, cost of living or the state of their local high street. It also overlooks the multifaceted ways in which universities are contributing to places across the UK, from providing jobs to sports facilities to cultural institutions to working with community groups to undertaking the research that can save lives or tackle pressing challenges.

I think we need to focus more on how universities can make human connections and articulate their research benefit in human terms. To draw from Peter Kyle’s framing of innovation, we need to show how universities are putting their considerable assets and resources to use for the public good. From a research perspective, this requires us to think about the purpose of knowledge and how we connect knowledge to communities across the country. In particular, we need to work much better to build trusted relationships that enable us to understand the needs of communities and citizens around the country and ensure that we are demonstrably meeting these.

For me, that starts with taking much more seriously the need to invest in the ‘relational infrastructure’ that can support those connections. Put simply, relational infrastructure is the people, structures and processes that support universities to connect with other parts of society. At its core are people – people who build and maintain relationships, who manage processes and structures for engagement, who keep connections going between specific projects and funding periods.

In my own world of academic-policy engagement, this relational infrastructure is the crucial ‘glue’ which underpins a whole host of interactions, projects, and exchange of ideas. It supports ways of working with policymakers that are about long-term partnership and collaboration rather than one-off transactions. (More on this in the final report from the Capabilities in Academic Policy Engagement project.)

We know that universities can tell a powerful story about their civic contribution – as the Civic University Commission noted, universities are ‘hugely important to the economic, social, cultural and environmental wellbeing of the places in which they are located’. This concept is echoed in the idea of the ‘fourth generation’ university. But perhaps we have focused too much on shiny projects and initiatives, and not enough on the simple relational approaches which underpin successful and long-term engagement and meaningful partnerships.

Relational infrastructure is all too easy to overlook or to take for granted. It rarely appears in business cases or exciting new project proposals. But it is one of our most precious assets and should be actively cultivated. This requires institutions to acknowledge the need for long-term investment and to recognise that, whilst it will deliver dividends for universities, these will not necessarily arise a short time-frame or via our ‘usual’ metrics. What relational infrastructure will deliver is deep and meaningful connections with other parts of society, which enable universities to put their research (and other) assets to public good use.

It’s time to take our responsibility to develop and maintain relational infrastructure seriously – it is the route to rebuilding our relationship with wider society.
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May 23, 2025
The future of HTQs requires commitment and certainty from the government

The Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) – formerly the Institute for Apprenticeships – has been central to reforms aimed at increasing standardisation and quality in technical education at all levels in England since 2017.

As it slips into the shadows from where Skills England is about to emerge, we wanted to explore how IfATE’s work establishing a quality assurance process for level 4 and 5 technical education – launched in 2020 – could be built upon and improved.

Since IfATE introduced the process of approving level 4 and 5 qualifications as Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQs), more than 80 FE colleges, universities and awarding organisations have successfully submitted their qualifications. We decided that their experiences – and their views on the future – were a good place to start.

We interviewed 46 individuals from 17 organisations to explore their motivations for being “early adopters” of HTQs, their feedback on the approval process itself, and their recommendations for making it better. Ultimately we were keen to find out what would encourage and enable more organisations to apply for HTQ status for their qualifications, and in this way help address the “missing middle” of England’s workforce skills. The full report can be read here.

Managing a heavy burden

Unsurprisingly, a strong recommendation was to make the approvals process less burdensome. There was widespread appreciation of the support provided by IfATE, and evidence of their responsiveness to early adopters’ feedback across all five cycles of HTQ approvals. This said, respondents noted that mapping qualifications – particularly those with multiple pathways – to the knowledge, skills and behaviours of occupational standards remained complex and time consuming.

It was clear that the level of resource and responsiveness shown by IfATE needs to be maintained by Skills England, particularly as occupational standards continue to evolve, and new awarding bodies come into the fold. However, our respondents also noted that manageability could be improved if the approvals process became more integrated with extant internal and external quality assurance and approvals processes, including professional body accreditations.

Gaining traction, but slowly

Reassuringly, many of our respondents reported that one positive outcome of getting their qualifications ready for HTQ approval was the stimulation of renewed engagement with employers – with benefits that went beyond simply endorsing the qualification at hand.

Similarly, for some respondents the decision about whether to put forward a qualification for approval had acted as a catalyst for the further engagement and support of senior leaders in their organisation with higher technical education (HTE) – as part of their widening participation commitments and/or their portfolio diversification and growth.

Yet alongside this positivity, respondents reported that awareness of the HTQ quality mark, and what it represents, remains low among prospective students and employers. A key reason for this was seen to be a lack of commitment from the Department for Education (DfE) to widespread and visible brand backing.

DfE did make funding available to successful applicants via the HTE Growth Fund in 2021, and two further rounds of HTE Skills Injection Funds (including funding for localised marketing) – but the potential clawback of these funds should recruitment not meet projected numbers led to some uncertainty about the benefits of applying for short term and unconfirmed funding streams.

If even those organisations who have already been successful in getting HTQ approval are feeling dubious about the future, then clearly much more needs to be done to encourage those who have not yet entered the field.

Let’s not forget the missing middle

There is no reason to doubt that the current government cares about addressing the skills gap known as the “missing middle”, as ignoring it may pose serious risks to growth and opportunity missions. So we – and the many organisations that have invested in HTQs and wish to see them flourish and thrive – have a couple of hopes.

First, that Skills England maintains strong and continuous engagement with current and future HTQ providers – providing good labour market data on what qualifications are needed, offering personalised support during the approval process, and engaging with the wider sector in order to improve the process.

But also, we hope that DfE can quickly resolve funding uncertainties for HTQs – including their potential for funding under the growth and skills levy and their primacy in the rollout of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement – and that the department showcases this commitment through a national marketing campaign. This could include building an HTQ ambassadors network, and an annual HTQ celebratory week (similar to those currently supported for T levels and apprenticeships).

The latest data from DfE shows that in 2022–23 numbers of entrants for Level 4 and 5 education increased after a long period of decline. The contribution of HTQs to this increase may well be small but the strong focus on HTE since 2017, from which HTQ approval arose, will have contributed. We’ve made a great start – let’s not lose momentum now.

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May 22, 2025
The case for playful leadership

Of course: UK higher education is in a perilous state, with ever-tightening institutional budgets, thousands of staff at risk of redundancy, institutions on the verge of closure, and the threat of AI causing a rush back to closed-book exams.

In this context, a call to play might seem mis-timed and perhaps a little tone-deaf.

Please bear with us. Play is about more than games and goofiness and is far from frivolous. It endorses a philosophy that supports openness, creativity, and bravery: qualities that the sector really needs from its leaders right now.

Risk aversion

In times of difficulty there is a temptation for institutions to revert to traditional values and avoid risks. This might manifest in removing small, specialist, or contentious courses in favour of large popular subjects, in stifling academic freedom and discussion, or in a reluctance to explore new ideas or research. As pressures grow from government and popular media, leaders may become increasingly leery of making decisions that make their institution stand out.

This culture of inertia, pressure, and performativity sucks the joy and creativity from academia, hampers change and makes it difficult for institutions to make the efficiencies necessary to be financially sustainable without shedding staff and closing courses on an endless repeat cycle.

And this environment is exhausting and unsustainable. In a world where change is the only constant, we need to embrace new possibilities and prepare staff and students to manage and embrace uncertainty. We must all be resilient, creative, and engaged, and play can facilitate this at all levels.

Playful learning

The use of playful learning approaches across the sector has increased in the last decade. Play pedagogies are finally being taken seriously: membership of the Playful Learning Association has grown to over 600 over the last fifteen years and the annual conference regularly sells out.

In research too, play is often the key that unlocks the greatest discoveries (Nobel prize physicists attest to it): having space to experiment, be creative and mess around with ideas, data or materials is essential for ground-breaking contributions to knowledge. The ESRC has recently funded a significant three-year multi-institution research project led by Northumbria university that will evidence what forms of playful learning work and why.

But it is past time for play to be taken seriously by leadership. Higher education leaders could benefit from a philosophy of play: being willing to change and try new ideas, embracing open leadership, and being brave enough to endorse new approaches that set them apart for the sector. The ability to fail well is crucial and having the vulnerability to publicly accept that leaders do not always know the answers allows institutions to learn from mistakes openly and collegiately.

Vulnerability and humanity

There are examples of sector leaders who demonstrate these values. It has been refreshing to see vice chancellors show their humanity and honest vulnerability on social media and platforms like Wonkhe. For example, recently vice chancellors at Middlesex University, Buckinghamshire New University, and Plymouth Marjon University have offered honest reflections on what it means to be the leader of a modern university, giving very different, more personal and playful lenses on senior leadership than the usual corporate statements and press releases.

At Northumbria University, leadership has driven a strategic push for experiential learning across all programmes, embracing active and authentic learning to provide students with the real-life skills and experiences they will need to thrive beyond university. This has been achieved through open discussion with staff communities of practice and led from the bottom up as well as the top down; staff are encouraged to be creative and experiment. It is not a cheap or easy option, but it differentiates the university and comes from a belief that this approach is best for our students.

At Anglia Ruskin University, open and empathetic leadership has been key to navigating the institution through challenging times, with senior leaders holding honest community events and talking openly about vulnerability. When trying to understand institutional belonging, leaders facilitated playful thinking through Lego workshops to develop shared principles. Play also influenced a strategic development for student experience, using techniques from video games to create an engaging introduction to the university for all incoming students.

Open to possibilities

There are already examples of successful playful leadership in the sector, and we believe that it is those leaders who are not afraid to be open – both to new ideas and to making mistakes – that will have the best chance for success in our increasingly hostile and uncertain climate. Institutions face difficult choices on how to differentiate and survive; higher education cannot continue as it is.

The next few years will be challenging, and leaders will need to be more open to possibilities, creative in their approaches, and willing to embrace and learn from their mistakes as the sector reshapes into something sustainable – built with and for our current and future staff and students. Now more than ever, play really matters.

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May 22, 2025
Higher education postcard: University of Greater Manchester

Greetings from Bolton. Definitely Bolton.

In 1824, a mechanics’ institute was established in Bolton. Mechanics’ institutes were a new phenomenon – the first was established in Scotland in 1821. They were, in essence, a subscription-based club which provided an opportunity for education, aimed at the better-off members of the working class.

As the 1857 advert in the Bolton Chronicle shows, it was still going fifty years later.

You can see the 1857 subscription fees in the advertisement. It’s hard to directly read across into today’s prices, because costs and wage structures change so much over the years. On a straightforward inflation calculation, using the Bank of England calculator, the annual fee would be about £50 today, which is a bit of a bargain. But comparing wages makes this feel different – for example, an average agricultural wage in 1857 was just shy of 11 shillings a week, so the subscription would be a quarter of a week’s wages. (And note also that the annual fee of ten shillings was just the quarterly fee multiplied by four. No discounts here for upfront payment.)

The curriculum looks good, but elementary: school rather than higher education. And this makes sense – many people would have had minimal schooling. Only about 70 per cent of the population could read and write. And so a good basic education didn’t hurt.

By the late 1880s there was a groundswell of opinion that Bolton needed better. As reported in the Bolton Evening News of 1 December 1886, the new chairman of the Mechanics’ Institute, Mr John Haywood MA, argued that:

In Manchester, they are content with one well-equipped technical school; whereas in Bolton we must, forsooth, have three struggling institutions, with the result, as far as the Mechanics’ is concerned, that the progress made is in the direction of increased debt.

The newspaper continued: “Mr Haywood thinks that Bolton has gone mad on sectarian and political distinctions when its young men cannot even sit on the same form to receive technical education.”

And so in 1887 the committee of the Mechanics’ Institute agreed to establish a technical school. A committee was established, which raised funds, but found itself short; and an appeal was made to the county council. And in 1891 the Bolton Technical School opened.

In 1926 Bolton Technical School became Bolton Technical College, and in 1941 a new building opened – that shown on the card – which enabled a broader range of courses to be offered. Engineering was, apparently, the most popular.

In 1964 the college bifurcated, splitting the lower and higher level education. Bolton Technical College focused on FE, and the Bolton Institute of Technology focused on higher studies.

A brief aside is now necessary, to introduce another institution, the Bolton Training College. This focused on training teachers for technical subjects and was one of three in the country doing this (the others being in Huddersfield and at Garnett College, in London). I’m afraid I can’t tell you when it was founded, but it is clear that there was a threat to close it in the 1950s, happily averted.

And in 1982 the Bolton Institute of Technology merged with the Bolton Training College to form the Bolton Institute of Higher Education. This gained taught degree awarding powers in 1992, research degree awarding powers in 1996 and became a university in 2004.

In December 2024 the university changed its name, becoming the University of Greater Manchester. And in what is becoming a bit of a busy year for the university, in governance terms, it was placed under enhanced OfS monitoring in February and suspended its vice chancellor in May. Let’s see what June and July bring for the university.

The postcard was sent in October 1961 to Miss Medley in Andover.

Dear Janet, Today I am going through to Blackpool to see “West Side Story”. The week has flown by, and tomorrow I shall have to return to the quiet South from the lively North. Love Jillian

And here’s the customary jigsaw – hope you enjoy it. Comment below if you can identify the cars.

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May 22, 2025
Podcast: Cuts, student suicide, widening access

This week on the podcast we examine the government’s brutal funding cuts to universities.

What does the £108m reduction in the Strategic Priorities Grant mean for higher education, and why are media studies and journalism courses losing their high-cost subject funding?

Plus we discuss the independent review of student suicides, and explore new research on widening participation and regional disparities.

With Shân Wareing, Vice Chancellor at Middlesex University, Richard Brabner, Executive Chair at the UPP Foundation, Debbie McVitty, Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

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A review of student suicides suggests that standards are now necessary

What have coroner’s reports said about student suicide?

A brutal budget for strategic priorities from the Department for Education

Why are we so embarrassed about Erasmus?

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May 22, 2025