Streamlining recognition of prior learning (RPL) is one way the tertiary education sector can boost the economy during the Albanese government‘s mission to tackle declining productivity.
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This week on the podcast we examine the Office for Students’ new free speech guidance as controversial requirements prepare to take effect from August 1st.
What do the “deeply disturbing” YouGov findings about academic self-censorship really tell us, and how should universities navigate campus protests and challenging research topics?
Plus we discuss outgoing UKRI chief Ottoline Leyser’s stark warning about “inevitable consolidation” in university research.
With Mark Peace, Professor of Innovation in Education at King’s College London, Arti Saraswat, Senior Policy Manager for Higher Education at the Association of Colleges, Livia Scott, Partnerships Coordinator at Wonkhe, and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
Sussex fined almost £600k over free speech
So are universities allowed to chill misogyny or not?
Most of us spend a good part of our lives glued to our iPhone or other similar devices. It seems as if we cannot survive without being connected to cyberspace.
It turns out that Apple, a U.S.-based company which makes the iPhone and depends on its sale, cannot survive without being connected to China, which is a key partner in the production of most every iPhone that people use. And that puts the iPhone at the center of the great power struggle underway between the United States and China.
One of the earliest insights into iPhone production came along in 2010 thanks to research by economists Yuqing Xing and Neal Detert. They lifted the veil off the mystery behind the iPhone label “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China”.
The iPhone model 3G was indeed designed in Cupertino, California, by Apple. But the vast majority of components were sourced from Japan, South Korea, Germany and elsewhere in the United States. All iPhone components were then shipped for assembly to Foxconn, a Taiwanese contract manufacturer based in Shenzhen, China.
Less than 4% of the iPhone manufacturing value came from the assembly in China.
The iPhone was only first launched in 2007, and iPhones were not sold in China until late 2009. At the time, there was no production of Chinese smartphones. Since those days, the iPhone and other smartphones have become ubiquitous in modern life. Apple now sells 230 million iPhones annually, each one of which has one thousand components and about 90% of them are produced in China.
Financial Times journalist Patrick McGee, in his recent book “Apple in China“, explained how Apple began assembling iPhones in China for its cheap labour costs but that came with a different cost: China’s labour was not of high quality.
In contrast to the general impression, China does not have great vocational training systems. So Apple became China’s vocational school.
Although Apple did not own any factories, it assumed close control over the factories of Foxconn and other companies to ensure its traditional perfectionist quality control. This included sending over planeloads of high-level engineers from the United States to train Chinese workers and investing in machinery for production lines.
Further, while components from foreign companies are still used in Apple products, these companies are now increasingly based in China. Over time Chinese companies have played a growing role in the production of the iPhone and other devices. Workers from all these companies have also been trained by Apple engineers.
Over the past decade, Apple invested some $55 billion a year for staff training and machinery. Since 2008, 28 million Chinese have received training from Apple — a figure larger than the workforce of California.
But there is more to China’s human capital than training offered by Apple. A key element has been China’s investment in human capital more generally, notably education and health.
Chinese students participating in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment — from Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, collectively home to nearly 200 million people — have outperformed the majority of students from other education systems, including the United States.
China has also made extraordinary progress in lifting its life expectancy, which is now the same as that of the United States at 78 years, even though the gross domestic product per capita in the United States — a key measure of the economic health of a country — at $83,000, is more than six times that of China. For the first time, China has overtaken the United States in healthy life expectancy at birth, according to World Health Organization data.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that there is a popular conception that companies come to China because of low labour cost. Cook argues that the truth is China stopped being a low labor cost country many years ago.
He insists that Apple is motivated by the quantity and type of skill that China offers. For example, while it requires really advanced tooling engineers, Cook is not sure the United States could fill a room with such engineers, while in China you could fill multiple football fields. Such vocational expertise is now very, very deep in China.
U.S. President Donald Trump insists that Apple must “reshore” its production to the United States. This is not realistic. The United States does not have the capacity to produce Apple’s products at scale and at competitive cost. It most certainly does not have the same competitive cost, well-trained engineering workforce as China, which has some three million people working in Apple’s supply chain.
Under Trump 1.0, Apple made a commitment to build “three big, beautiful factories” (in Trump’s words) in the United States. But that was just hot air, as none were built. Now, Trump has threatened to impose a 25% tariff on iPhones if they are not made in the United States.
In response, Apple said that phones sold there would be labelled “Made in India” (although this is unacceptable for Trump), and has pledged to invest $500 billion in the United States. What this pledge means in reality is still unclear. Apple may ultimately need to build a token factory or two, with limited production functions, to pander to Trump.
Many commentators are suggesting India as an alternative production base for Apple. And some assembly functions are indeed being shifted to India. But these are just the very final assembly phase of production, which are sufficient to justify attaching an “Assembled in India” label.
All the pre-assembly activities remain in China. At this stage, India is not a viable option for replacing China because of deficiencies in human capital, infrastructure and logistics systems.
In many ways, modern China and Apple have made each other.
Technology and knowledge transfer have underpinned China’s growing contribution to the iPhone and other Apple products — as well as the Chinese smartphone brands like Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo, which now dominate world markets. Moreover, Chinese engineers are capable of building all sorts of electronic products, some of which could be used in military conflicts.
In sum, Apple has made a major contribution to the rise of China as a technological powerhouse. China has been a key factor in the rise of Apple as one of the world’s most successful companies. Apple has a Chinese system for producing the iPhone and other products that works like a song.
No other country has the human capital, and production and logistics systems for producing Apple products at scale and at a competitive cost. Thus, Apple is in a way now trapped in China, which makes it vulnerable to coercion from China’s authoritarian government.
It should try to make greater efforts to de-risk itself from China, although that is not easy and might provoke the ire of the Chinese authorities.
Apple now finds itself caught between a rock and a hard place — meaning President Xi and President Trump.
1. Where is the iPhone made?
2. What would make a device that is made outside the United States more expensive to buy in the United States?
3. Should people be able to buy anything from anywhere without any extra costs from governments? Why?
A Black History Month event, canceled. A lab working to fight hunger, shuttered. Student visas revoked, then reinstated, uncertain for how long. Opportunities for students pursuing science careers, fading.
The first six months of the Trump administration have brought a hailstorm of changes to the nation’s colleges and universities. While the president’s faceoffs with Harvard and Columbia have generated the most attention, students on campuses throughout the country are noticing the effects of the administration’s cuts to scientific and medical research, clampdown on any efforts promoting diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), newly aggressive policies for students with loan debt, revoking of visas for international students and more.
Many of the administration’s actions are being challenged in court, but they are influencing the way students interact with each other, what support they can get from their institutions — and even whether they feel safe in this nation.
The Hechinger Report traveled to campuses around the country to look at what these changes mean for students. Reporters visited universities in four states — California, Illinois, Louisiana and Texas — to understand this new era for higher education.
Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.
Louisiana State University
BATON ROUGE, La. — Last fall, Louisiana State University student A’shawna Smith had an idea for a new campus group to educate students about their legal rights and broader problems in the criminal justice system. Smith, a sociology major, had spent the prior summer interning at a law firm and noticed how many clients didn’t know their rights after an arrest.
Smith, now a rising senior, called it The Injustice Reform and soon recruited classmates and a campus adviser. They wrote a mission statement and trained as student group leaders. On Feb. 20, LSU’s student government, which awards money to campus groups that comes from student fees, gave them $1,200; Smith and her classmates planned to use the award to recruit members and organize events.
But on April 8, Injustice Reform’s treasurer received a text message from Cortney Greavis, LSU’s student government adviser. She said LSU was rescinding the money: The group’s mission statement ran afoul of new federal and state restrictions on DEI. Its mission mentions racial disparities and police brutality, but the organizers were never told which words violated the rules. Smith and fellow leaders started chipping in their own money to keep the group going: $10 here and there, whatever they could afford, said Bella Porché, a rising senior on the group’s executive board.
Canceling awards to student groups is one way students say administrators at LSU, the state’s flagship university, have restricted what they can do and say since the U.S. Department of Education wrote to schools and colleges nationwide on Valentine’s Day. The letter described DEI efforts — designed to rectify current and historic discrimination — as discriminatory and threatened schools with the loss of federal money unless they ended the consideration of race in admissions, financial aid, housing, training and other practices.
Since the letter, discussion of DEI on campus “has become an anti-gay, anti-Black sort of conversation,” said Emma Miller, a rising senior and elected student senator. “People who are minorities don’t feel safe anymore, don’t feel represented, don’t feel seen, because DEI is being wiped away and their university is not saying anything.”
In a March 7 report, the university detailed dozens of changes made to comply with the letter’s demands. For example, it ended any preference granted to students from historically underrepresented groups for certain privately funded scholarships; opened membership in school-funded student organizations — like a women-in-business group — to all; and canceled activities perceived to emphasize race, even a fitness class kicking off Black History Month.
Student government leaders say the restrictions hinder their ability to operate. Rising junior Tyhlar Holliway, a member of the student government’s Black Caucus, said school administrators essentially shut down the caucus’ proposal that the student government issue a statement after the Department of Education letter in support of DEI programs and initiatives.
LSU public relations staff did not respond to interview requests or to an emailed list of questions, and the school’s civil rights and Title IX division director declined to speak.
Miller said administrators have told student leaders that all their proposed legislation must be reviewed by the school’s general counsel for compliance with the March 7 guidelines. The administration, for example, blocked a student government bill to fund a Black hair care event designed to help students prepare for career and professional opportunities, said senior Paris Holman, a student government member. “We have conferences and interviews and need to know how to take care of our hair,” said Holman, who is Black.
Students have also tailored the language of other bills to avoid the appearance of support for DEI. Holman said that in one case the student senate changed the language in a bill funding an end-of-year event for a minority student organization to remove any reference to the organization as serving minority students.
The school also overrode student government decisions about which groups, like A’shawna Smith’s, could be funded by student fees. In February, the student government voted to provide $641 to help a pre-med student, who is Black, attend a student medical education conference, in part so she could share what she’d learn with other pre-med students. A few weeks later, she received an email from Greavis, the student government adviser, saying she wouldn’t be able to attend with university funds because that money could no longer be used for “DEI-related events, initiatives, programs, or travel.” Greavis didn’t respond to requests for an interview.
The email didn’t specify why the medical conference crossed the line. But the sponsoring organization’s mission statement notes its commitment to “supporting current and future underrepresented minority medical students,” and a conference plenary speaker was scheduled to address the “enduring case for DEI in medicine.” Fewer than 6 percent of doctors are Black and research has shown improved health outcomes for Black patients who are seen by physicians of the same race.
“It doesn’t feel like a democracy,” said Holman of serving in student government at this moment.
She and other students say the university’s actions are starting to change the broader culture at LSU, which serves nearly 40,000 undergraduate and graduate students on its campus of Italian Renaissance buildings shaded by magnolias and Southern live oaks. About 60 percent of students are white and 18 percent are Black, according to federal data.
Mila Fair, a rising sophomore journalism major and a reporter for the campus TV station, said students tell her they’re afraid to join protests, in part because of LSU’s new anti-DEI rules and the national crackdown on student demonstrations. Those who do attend are often afraid to go on camera with her, she said.
Latin American studies professor Andrew Sluyter said administrators normally listen to the student government — even more than to the faculty government — but now worry about students getting the school into “political hot water.” He had his own run-in with the DEI ban: As part of a February effort to scrub school websites of diversity references, in which the university purged hundreds of webpages referencing DEI-related content, LSU deleted a 2022 press release announcing a prestigious fellowship he’d won that mentioned “higher education’s racial inequities.”
Students recognize the pressure LSU is under from the federal government, but they want administrators to stand up for them, said graduate student Alicia Cerquone, a student senator. “We want some sort of communication from the university that shows commitment to its community, that they have our backs and they’ll protect students,” she said.
— Steven Yoder
The University of California, Berkeley
BERKELEY, Calif. — Since early April, Rayne Xue, a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, has watched with trepidation as the Trump administration has taken one step after another to limit international students’ access to American higher education.
First came the abrupt cancellation, then reinstatement, of visas for 23 Berkeley students and recent graduates. Then the government cut off Harvard’s ability to enroll international students — a move since blocked by a federal judge — raising fears that something similar could happen at Berkeley. And late last month, as this year’s graduates were celebrating their recent commencements, Secretary of State Marco Rubio paused interviews for all new student visas and announced he would “aggressively revoke” those of Chinese students.
Xue, who is from Beijing and won a student senate seat this past spring on a platform of supporting international students, said the administration’s actions strike at a critical part of campus life at Berkeley.
“College is the opportunity of a lifetime to unlearn prejudices and embrace new perspectives, neither of which is possible without a student body that comes from a wide range of geographic and cultural backgrounds,” she said.
About 16 percent of UC Berkeley’s more than 45,000 students come from outside the United States to study at the crown jewel of California’s public research university system, where creeks run through campus beneath cooling redwoods and parking spaces are set aside for Nobel laureates. China, India, South Korea and Canada send the biggest numbers. International students pay higher tuition than California residents, boosting the university’s coffers and subsidizing some of their peers. Many of them conduct cutting-edge research in fields like computer science, engineering and chemistry.
Now the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, magnified by the yanking of billions in federal research dollars, has international students worried about their future on campus. Many are changing their behavior to avoid scrutiny: Some canceled travel plans and many said they avoid walking near any campus protests in fear of being photographed.
“It’s difficult for international students to feel secure when they cannot anticipate what the administration might charge against them next — or whether they might be unfairly targeted,” said one global studies major who asked not to be identified for fear of attracting retaliation.
Tomba Morreau, a rising junior from the Netherlands studying sociology, said he stopped posting about politics on social media — just in case.
That kind of self-censorship troubles Paul Fine, co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, which represents about a fifth of the university’s tenure-track faculty.
Federal policies are “creating this culture of fear where people start to censor themselves and try to stay under the radar and not show up in their full selves, whether for academic work or activism,” he said.
Related: International students are rethinking coming to the U.S. That’s a problem for colleges
International students in Fine’s classes told him they wanted to attend a recent protest against federal threats to higher education but were afraid of the consequences, he said. Others told him they were skipping academic conferences outside the United States that they otherwise would have attended.
“Berkeley really prides ourselves on being an intellectual hub that convenes people from all over the world to work on the most important problems,” Fine said. Now that identity is at risk, he said, especially as actual and threatened cuts to grants make it harder for faculty to hire international graduate students and postdocs.
Most poignant, he said, was hearing from demoralized Chinese students who left a repressive government to come to the United States only to see attacks on academic freedom replicated here.
Are you a student, professor, staff or faculty member? Our journalists want to know how the Trump administration is affecting higher education and life on your college campus.
Xue said she hopes the crisis facing universities would draw attention to the challenges international students face, including limited financial aid and the stereotype that all of them are wealthy. With her colleagues in student government, she is lobbying for Berkeley to spend more on the international office, which provides one-on-one advising on visa issues and employment.
For Lily Liu, a Chinese computer scientist, 2025 was shaping up to be a year of milestones. She graduated with a doctorate last month, has a job lined up at a leading artificial intelligence company and is engaged to be married in November.
But the Trump administration’s changing policies toward international scholars have complicated celebrations for Liu, who’s in a federal program that extends her visa for up to a year beyond graduation so she can gain work experience here. She canceled summer travel plans with her family, concerned she might not be let back into the country. And she’s considering moving her wedding to the United States from China, even though many of her relatives wouldn’t be able to attend.
“For international students, every policy affects us a lot,” she said. So Liu is careful. After the publication of her thesis was delayed, she visited Berkeley’s international office to make sure the setback wouldn’t affect her work permit. Her fiancé has a green card, which should theoretically mean his immigration status is more stable. But these days, she said, who knows?
— Felicia Mello
The University of Texas at San Antonio
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Growing up here, Reina Saldivar had always loved science — all she wanted to watch on TV was “Animal Planet.” Yet until she applied on a whim to a program for aspiring researchers after her first year at the University of Texas at San Antonio, she assumed she would spend her life as a lab technician, running cultures.
The program, Maximizing Access to Research Careers, or MARC, was started by the National Institutes of Health decades ago at colleges around the country to prepare students, especially those from historically underrepresented backgrounds, for livelihoods in the biomedical sciences.
Saldivar got in. And through the program, she spent much of her time on campus in a university lab, helping develop a carrier molecule for a new Lyme disease vaccine. Now Saldivar, who graduated this spring, plans to eventually return to academia for a doctorate.
“What MARC taught me was that my dreams aren’t out of reach,” she said.
Saldivar is among hundreds who’ve participated in the MARC program since its 1980 founding at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She may also be among the last. In April, the university’s MARC program director, Edwin Barea-Rodriguez, opened his email inbox to find a form letter terminating the initiative and advising against recruiting more cohorts.
The letter cited “changes in NIH/HHS [Health and Human Services] priorities.” In recent months, the Trump administration has canceled at least half a dozen programs meant to train scholars and diversify the sciences as part of an effort to root out what the president labels illegal DEI.
In a statement to The Hechinger Report, NIH said that it “is committed to restoring the agency to its tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science” and is reviewing grants to make sure the agency is “addressing the United States chronic disease epidemic.”
With MARC ending, Barea-Rodriguez is searching for a way to continue supporting current participants until they graduate next academic year. Without access to federal money, however, the young scientists are anxious about their futures — and that of public health in general.
“It took years to be where we are now,” said Barea-Rodriguez, who said he was not speaking on behalf of his university, “and in a hundred days everything was destroyed.”
UTSA’s sprawling campus sits on the northwest edge of San Antonio, far from tourist sites like the Alamo and the River Walk. Forty-four percent of the nearly 31,000 undergraduate students are the first in their families to attend college; more than 61 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino. The university was one of the first nationwide to earn Department of Education recognition as a Hispanic-serving institution, a designation for colleges where at least a quarter of full-time undergraduates are Hispanic.
When Barea-Rodriguez arrived to teach at the school in 1995, many locals considered it a glorified community college, he said. But in the three decades since, the investments NIH made through MARC and other federal programs have helped it become a top-tier research university. That provided students like Saldivar with access to world-class opportunities close to home and fostered talent that propelled the economy in San Antonio and beyond.
The Trump administration has quickly upended much of that infrastructure, not only by terminating career pipeline programs for scholars, but also by pulling more than $8.2 million in National Science Foundation money from UTSA.
One of those canceled grants paid for student researchers and the development of new technologies to improve equity in math education and better serve elementary school kids from underrepresented backgrounds in a city that is about 64 percent Hispanic. Another aimed to provide science, technology, engineering and math programming to bilingual and low-income communities.
UTSA administrators did not respond to requests for comment about how federal funding freezes and cuts are affecting the university. Nationwide, more than 1,600 NSF grants have been axed since January.
Related: So much for saving the planet. Climate careers, plus many others, evaporate for class of 2025
In San Antonio, undergraduates said MARC and other now-dead programs helped prepare them for academic and professional careers that might have otherwise been elusive. Speaking in a lab remodeled and furnished with NIH money, where leftover notes and diagrams on glass erase boards showed the research questions students had been noodling, they described how the programs taught them about drafting an abstract, honing public speaking and writing skills, networking, putting together a résumé and applying for summer research positions, travel scholarships and graduate opportunities.
“All of the achievements that I’ve collected have pretty much been, like, a direct result of the program,” said Seth Fremin, a senior biochemistry major who transferred to UTSA from community college and has co-authored five articles in major journals, with more in the pipeline. After graduation, he will start a fully funded doctoral program at the University of Pittsburgh to continue his research on better understanding chemical reactions.
Similarly, Elizabeth Negron, a rising senior, is spending this summer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researching skin microbiomes to see if certain bacteria predispose some people to cancers.
“It’s weird when you meet students who didn’t get into these programs,” Negron said, referring to MARC. “They haven’t gone to conferences. They haven’t done research. They haven’t been able to mentor students. … It’s very strange to acknowledge what life would have been without it. I don’t know if I could say I’d be as successful as I am now.”
With money for MARC erased, Negron said she will probably need a job once she returns to campus in the fall so she can afford day-to-day expenses. Before, research was her job.
“Without MARC,” she said, “it becomes a question of can I at least cover my tuition and my very basic needs.”
— Alexandra Villarreal
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When Peter Goldsmith received notice in late January that his Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois would soon lose all of its funding, he had no idea it was coming. Suddenly Goldsmith, the lab’s director, had to tell his 30 employees they would soon be out of a job and tell research partners across Africa that operations would come to a halt. The lab didn’t even have money to water its soybean fields in Africa.
One employee, Julia Paniago, was in Malawi when she got the news. “We came back the next day,” she said of her team, “and it was a lot of uncertainty. And a lot of people cried.”
The University of Illinois’ Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) was part of a network of 17 labs at universities across the country, all working on research related to food production and reducing global hunger, and all funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development — until the Trump administration shut down USAID.
Soybeans — which provide both oil and high-protein food — aren’t yet commonly grown in Malawi. SIL researchers have been working toward two related goals: helping local farmers increase soybean production and ameliorate malnutrition and generating enough interest in the crop there that a new export market will open for American farmers.
The lab’s researchers work in soybean breeding, economics and mechanical research as well as education. They hope to show that soybean production in Africa is worth further investment so that eventually the private sector will come in after them.
“The people who work at SIL, they like being right at the frontier of change,” Goldsmith said. “It’s high-risk work — that’s what the universities do, that’s what scientific research is about.”
UI, the state’s flagship with a sprawling campus spread between the cities of Urbana and Champaign, is noted for its research work, especially agricultural research.
Labs and researchers across the university lost funding in cuts made by the Trump administration; more than $25 million from agencies including NIH, NSF and the National Endowment for the Humanities was cut, Melissa Edwards, associate vice chancellor for research and innovation, said, a total of 59 grants amounting to 3.6 percent of their overall federal grant portfolio.
Annette Donnelly, who just received her doctorate in education, is among those affected. Her research focuses on educating malnourished children in Africa and developing courses to help Africans learn how to process soybeans into oil.
Related: The college degree gap between Black and white Americans was always bad. It’s getting worse
In April, SIL was handed a lifeline — an anonymous $1 million gift that will keep the lab running through April 2026. The donation wasn’t enough for Goldsmith to rehire all of his employees; SIL’s annual operating budget before the USAID cuts was $3.3 million (and would have kept things running through 2027). But, he said, the money will allow SIL to continue its research in the Lower Shire Valley in Malawi, a project he hopes will attract future donors to fund the lab’s work.
The April donation saved Donnelly’s job, but her priorities shifted. “We’re doing research,” she said, “but we’re also doing a lot of proposal writing. It has taken on a much greater priority.”
Donnelly hopes to attract more funding so she can resume research she had started in western Kenya, demonstrating that introducing soy into children’s diets increased their protein intake by up to 65 percent, she said.
The impact that funding cuts will have on researchers at the soybean lab pales in comparison to the impact on their partners in Africa, Donnelly emphasized. There, she said, the cuts mean processors will likely slow production, limiting their ability to deliver soy products. “The consequences there are much bigger,” she said.
The Soybean Innovation Lab was funded through the Feed the Future initiative, a program to help partner countries develop better agricultural practices that began under the Obama administration in 2010. All 17 Feed the Future innovation labs funded through USAID lost funding, except for the one at Kansas State University, which studies heat-tolerant wheat.
The soybean lab’s office is housed on a quiet edge of the Illinois campus in a building once occupied by the university’s veterinary medicine program. Across the street, rows of greenhouses are home to the Crop Science Department’s experiments.
There, Brian Diers is breeding soybean varieties that resist soybean rust, a disease that’s been an obstacle to ramping up soybean production across sub-Saharan Africa. A professor emeritus who is retired, Diers works part-time at SIL to assist with soybean breeding. The April donation wasn’t enough to cover his work. Now he volunteers his time.
“ If we can help African agriculture take off and become more productive, that’s eventually going to help their economies and then provide more opportunities for American farmers to export to Africa,” he said.
Goldsmith drew an analogy between his lab’s work and the state of American agriculture in the 1930s. As the Dust Bowl swept through the Great Plains, Monsanto or another company could have stepped in to help combat it, but didn’t. Public land-grant universities did.
“That’s where the innovation comes from, from the public land grants in the U.S.,” Goldsmith said. “And now the public land grants still work in U.S. agriculture but also in the developing world.”
Commercial soybean producers hesitate to dip their toes into unproven markets, he said, so it’s SIL’s job to demonstrate that a viable market exists. “That was our secret sauce, in that lots of commercial players liked the products, the technologies we had, and wanted to move into the soybean space, but it wasn’t a profitable market,” Goldsmith said of the African soybean market.
Diers said federal funding cuts imperil not just the development of commerce and global food production but the next generation of scientists as well.
“We could potentially lose a generation of scientists who won’t go into science because there’s no funding right now,” he said.
— Miles MacClure
Contact editor Lawrie Mifflin at [email protected] or 212-678-4078. Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
This story about international students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Since January, President Donald Trump has taken countless steps to transform the nation’s colleges and universities. His administration has cut scientific and medical research, ended efforts to promote diversity equity and inclusion (DEI), introduced newly aggressive policies on loan repayment, revoked visas for international students, and more. While Trump’s battles with Harvard and Columbia have received the most attention, the administration’s actions have had consequences far beyond those two universities.
We want to know how the Trump administration is affecting higher education and life on your campus. What, if any, changes are you seeing at your college or university because of federal policy shifts? In what ways do you see higher education changing?
If you prefer, you can also email us directly at [email protected]. Contact editor Lawrie Mifflin at [email protected] or 212-678-4078. Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
This story about higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletters.
This week on the podcast we examine the government’s spending review and what it means for higher education. How will the £86bn R&D commitment translate into real-terms funding, and why was education notably absent from the Chancellor’s priorities?
Plus we discuss the Post-18 Project’s call to fundamentally reshape HE policy away from market competition, the startling new REF rules, and the striking rise in student term-time working revealed by the latest Student Academic Experience Survey.
With Stephanie Harris, Director of Policy at Universities UK, Ben Vulliamy, Executive Director at the Association of Heads of University Administration, Michael Salmon, News Editor at Wonkhe, and presented by Mark Leach, Editor-in-Chief at Wonkhe.
Tooling up: Building a new economic mission for higher education
Investing for the long term often loses out to pensioner power
What’s in the spending review for higher education
The student experience is beyond breaking point
On a weekday in Kampala, people line up early outside the embassies of European countries. Last year, almost 18,000 Ugandans joined these queues, according to an analysis by the Lago Collective. This year, I was one of them, folder in hand, hope in check.
Typically, those folders contain bank statements, proof of visa payment, job contracts, medical records, photos of family members, land titles, academic transcripts, flight reservations and detailed itineraries — each one meant to prove stability, legitimacy and belonging.
After paying to apply for a Schengen visa — which allows free travel between some 29 European countries for a limited time period — 36% of those Ugandans were rejected. Why? Mostly because embassy officials doubted the applicants would return home.
Each applicant must pay €90. That added up to more than €1.6 million that Ugandans paid Schengen countries last year, more than half a million of which was from applicants who ended up rejected.
The collective wager lost by Ugandan applicants was part of an estimated €60 million spent in Africa last year on Schengen visa applications that led nowhere. In fact, Africa alone accounted for nearly half of the €130 million the world paid in failed bids to enter the Schengen zone.
Tucked behind those numbers lies a quieter cost: missed opportunities for work or travel and the often-overlooked spending on legal consultations or third-party agencies hired to improve one’s chances. But more tellingly, there is a perception problem — wrapped in geopolitics and sealed with a stamp of denial.
“It’s like betting,” says Dr. Samuel Kazibwe, a Ugandan academic and policy analyst. “Nobody forces you to pay those fees, yet you know there are chances of rejection.”
One such story belongs to Fred Mwita Machage, a Tanzanian executive based in Uganda as human resource director at the country’s transitioning electricity distribution company. Machage thought he was just booking a summer getaway — a chance not only to unwind, but to affirm that someone like him, who had worked in Canada, had traveled to the United States and Great Britain, and, if you checked his profile, was “not a desperate traveler,” could move freely in the world. That belief, like the visa itself, did not survive the process.
He had planned a trip to France the past April. Round-trip tickets? Booked. Five-star hotel? Paid. Travel insurance? Secured. A $70,000 bank statement and a letter from his employer accompanied other documents in the application.
“They said I had not demonstrated financial capability,” Machage recalled, incredulous. “With my profile? That bank balance? It felt like an attack on my integrity.”
Worse, the rejection wasn’t delivered with civility: “The embassy staff were rude,” he said. “And they weren’t even European — they were African. One of the ladies looked like a Rwandan. It felt like being slapped by your own.”
For Machage, the betrayal was not just bureaucratic — it seemed personal. He estimates his total loss at nearly $12,000, including tickets, hotel deposits, agent fees and visa costs. While he hopes for a refund, it’s understood that most travel agents don’t return payments; instead, they often suggest that you travel to a visa-free country.
That will likely get more difficult to do. This month, U.S. President Donald Trump issued a sweeping travel ban targeting twelve countries — seven in Africa. Somalia, Sudan, Chad and Eritrea faced full bans; Burundi, Sierra Leone and Togo, partial restrictions. The official reasons included high visa overstays, poor deportation cooperation from the home countries and weak systems for internal screening. And it ordered all U.S. embassies to stop issuing visas for students to come to the United States for education, although U.S. courts are considering the legality of that order.
For Machage, the rejection left him with a lingering sense of humiliation, though he found some small relief in a LinkedIn post where hundreds shared similar tales of visa rejection.
“I realised I wasn’t alone,” he said, “But the process still left me feeling worthless. Sorry to mention, but it’s a disgusting ordeal.”
I know exactly how Machage feels.
When I applied for a visa to the United Kingdom, I too was rejected. The refusal read:
“In light of all of the above, I am not satisfied as to your intentions in wishing to travel to the UK now. I am not satisfied that you are genuinely seeking entry for a purpose that is permitted by the visitor routes, not satisfied that you will leave the UK at the end of the visit.”
The “I am” who issued the rejection did not sign their name. Perhaps they knew I’d write this article and mention them. How easily the “I am” dismissed my ties, my plans, my story. Meanwhile, my British friend who had invited me was livid.
“It felt like they were questioning my judgment — about who I can and cannot welcome into my own home,” she said. She was angry not just on my behalf, but because she felt disregarded by her own government.
Captain Francis Babu, a former Ugandan minister and seasoned political commentator, doesn’t take visa rejections personally. He said the situation is shaped by global anxieties over the scale of emigration out of Africa into Europe that has taken place over the past decade.
“Because of the boat people going into Europe from Africa and many other countries and the wars in the Middle East, that has caused a little problem with immigration in most countries,” he said.
The issue is complicated. Babu said that these countries depend on the immigrants they are trying to keep out. In the United States, for example, farms depend on low-cost workers from South America.
“Most of those developed countries, because of their industries and having made money in the service industry, want people to do their menial jobs. So they bring people in and underpay them,” Babu said.
For Babu, even the application process feels unfair. “Even applying for the visa by itself is a tall order,” he said. “There are people here making money just to help you fill the form.”
While Babu highlights the systemic hypocrisies and challenges, others, like Kazibwe, see hope in a different approach — one rooted in political and economic organisation. Where people enjoy strong public services and can rely on a social safety net, there tends to be low emigration so countries are less hesitant to admit them.
“That’s why countries like Seychelles are not treated the same,” he explains. “It’s rare to see someone from Seychelles doing odd jobs in Europe, yet back home they enjoy free social services.”
For Kazibwe, the long-term fix is clear: “The solution lies in organising our countries politically and economically so that receiving countries no longer see us as flight risks,” he said.
Perhaps that is the hardest truth. Visa rejection is not just an administrative outcome, it’s a mirror: a verdict not simply on the individual but on the nation that issued their passport.
Back at the embassies, the queues remain. Young Ugandans, Ghanaians and Nigerians — some with degrees, others with desperation — wait in line, folders in hand, their hopes in check. And every rejection carries not just a denied trip, but a deeper question:
What does it mean when the world sees your passport and turns you away?
1. Why are so many Ugandans getting denied travel visas to Europe?
2. Why do some people think that the visa and immigration policies of many Western nations are hypocritical?
3. If you were to travel abroad, how would you prove that you didn’t intend to stay permanently in that country?
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced a productivity roundtable between business leaders, unions and community associations with the aim of boosting economic growth and wages, in his National Press Club address on Tuesday.
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“There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel,” Gallant said. “Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
President Isaac Herzog said militants and civilians in Gaza would be treated alike. “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Herzog said. “This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved — it’s absolutely not true … and we will fight until we break their backbone.”
Netanyahu has been equally explicit, comparing Hamas to “Amalek”, a tribe in the Bible which the Israelites were told to eradicate. He blames Hamas for all civilian casualties.
Other ministers have urged Gaza’s total destruction — one proposed dropping a nuclear bomb — and expulsion of its people, as in the 1948 “Nakba” when several hundred thousand Palestinians were ethnically cleansed as part of Israel’s independence war.
Whether Israel’s Gaza onslaught amounts to genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity, or very possibly all three, is for international courts to decide.
What matters now is stopping the killing in a ruined land that has lost its schools, homes, hospitals, roads, power and water plants, farms, places of worship and historical heritage. That is a moral issue for all of us, and most pertinently for Israel and its Western allies, principally the United States, which supplies most of the weapons used against Gaza.
U.S. complicity is beyond doubt. Many European and other countries, by their silence in face of the carnage, or their failure to take action, are also to blame.
Leaders in some of these nations are only now chiding Israel more strongly. Spain’s prime minister has called it a genocidal state. There is talk in European and other capitals of sanctions targeting Israeli leaders, a ban on arms shipments or trade penalties.
But no measures likely to push Netanyahu to alter course have been adopted. His eyes are fixed on the United States, the only nation that could swiftly halt the Gaza debacle — by halting or suspending the $3.8 billion it gives Israel each year in mostly military aid, along with extra arms shipments worth billions of dollars since the current war began.
Cold statistics mask the individual suffering of Gazans, but tell part of the story.
More than 54,000 people, including more than 16,000 children, have been killed since the war began, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures considered reliable by the United Nations, or 2.5% of the population — equivalent to 8.5 million Americans.
This number does not count many thousands whose bodies may still lie under the rubble, or who died weakened by hunger, preventable diseases and failing health care. It includes more than 1,400 health workers and more than 200 journalists and media workers.
United Nations officials say more than 90% of homes have been destroyed or damaged, along with 94% of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, with only some still struggling to function. Gaza has the world’s highest number of child amputees per capita.
According to Hans Laerke, spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Gaza is also the only territory in the world where “100% of the population is threatened with famine” despite Israel’s denial of any humanitarian blockade.
The horrors endured by Palestinians have been documented by local journalists (Israel has banned all international reporters from Gaza), U.N. officials, Palestinian and foreign doctors and aid workers, as well as locally shot videos and photos.
Foreign physicians with long experience of many countries ravaged by war say conditions they witnessed in Gaza are worse than anything they have ever encountered.
“I have worked in conflict zones from Afghanistan to Ukraine,” said U.S. paediatrician Seema Jilani, after an assignment in the southern city of Rafah for the International Rescue Committee. “But nothing could have prepared me for a Gaza emergency room.”
No one can plausibly claim “we did not know” what was, and is, going on.
Yet world powers have largely stood by as massacres unfold in Gaza. They have kept equally silent as Israel batters parts of Lebanon at will despite a ceasefire with Hezbollah militants agreed in November. Israel has also grabbed more land in Syria and bombed hundreds of targets there since Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell in December.
U.S. President Donald Trump, like President Joe Biden before him, has backed Israel to the hilt. Not even images of emaciated children in Gaza have prompted a change of heart.
Trump’s own contempt for international law and his plan for the removal of Gazans to allow for a fantasy reconstruction on the toxic ruins of their land has only emboldened far-right Israeli leaders with ambitions to “purify”, annex and resettle Gaza, and to do likewise in the West Bank, where half a million Israeli settlers already live.
Israel’s actions, under permissive Western eyes, are shredding a longstanding international consensus on a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – an idea incompatible with an ever-expanding Israeli grip on the West Bank and Gaza.
After French President Emmanuel Macron called for recognition of a Palestinian state, Defence Minister Israel Katz responded with brutal clarity.
“They will recognise a Palestinian state on paper — and we will build the Jewish-Israeli state on the ground,” he said in the West Bank on May 29 at one of 22 new settlements just approved by the Israeli government.
Western outrage at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has no echo when it comes to Israel which for decades has defied U.N. resolutions and violated international law.
The fate of Gaza may prove a final blow to the rules of international conduct and treatment of civilians agreed after the Second World War — a system already frayed by the Cold War and more recently the illegal U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Crushing the Palestinian people will not make Israel any safer in the long run. Only a true peace settlement on a basis of mutual respect and equality can do that.
If Western nations ever get around to imposing sanctions on Israel and its leaders, they should do so to promote the Jewish state’s real interests which they claim to have at heart — as a stepping stone to such a peace between human beings.
The German-born Jewish-American philosopher and political scientist Hannah Arendt foretold the consequences for a society unable to perceive others as human.
“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism,” she wrote.
1. Is it justified, or wise, for a state to take revenge on its enemies?
2. Do people everywhere have the right to resist occupation?
3. How should we react when a possible genocide is taking place?
This week on the podcast we examine Universities UK’s efficiency and transformation taskforce report. What do shared back-office services, federation models and subject cold spots tell us about the sector’s financial pressures?
Plus we discuss Research England’s new EDI action plan, and explore whether the UK’s rapid three-year degree model is harming student wellbeing and learning outcomes.
With Rille Raaper, Associate Professor in Sociology of Higher Education at Durham University, Jess Lister, Director (Education) at Public First, Mack Marshall, Community and Policy Officer at Wonkhe SUs, and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
Our drop-out and pace miracle is harming students’ health and learning
Universities UK’s new era of collaboration
Fixing the potholes in postgraduate funding
The spending review is a critical moment for UK science and innovation