Category: Students

  • Texas Study Reveals Power of Combined Accelerated Programs for College Success

    Texas Study Reveals Power of Combined Accelerated Programs for College Success

    High school students who combine dual enrollment courses with Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate programs are significantly more likely to graduate from college and earn higher salaries in their early twenties than peers who pursue only one type of accelerated coursework, according to a new report from the Community College Research Center.

    File photoThe study, which tracked Texas high school students expected to graduate in 2015-16 and 2016-17 for six years after high school, found that 71% of students who took both dual enrollment and AP/IB courses earned a postsecondary credential within six years—including 60% who completed a bachelor’s degree. By comparison, only 10% of students who took no accelerated coursework completed any postsecondary credential.

    “Most dual enrollment students in Texas also take other accelerated courses, and those who do tend to have stronger college and earnings trajectories,” said Dr.Tatiana Velasco, CCRC senior research associate. “It’s a pattern we hadn’t fully appreciated before, which offers clues for how to expand the benefits of dual enrollment to more students.”

    The financial benefits of combining accelerated programs extend well beyond graduation. Students who took both dual enrollment and AP/IB courses earned an average of $10,306 per quarter at age 24—more than $1,300 per quarter above students who took dual enrollment alone and nearly $1,400 per quarter more than those who took only AP/IB courses.

    These advantages persisted even after researchers controlled for student demographics, test scores, and school characteristics, suggesting the combination of programs provides genuine educational value rather than simply reflecting differences in student backgrounds.

    While the study revealed promising outcomes for students combining dual enrollment with career and technical education programs, participation in this pathway remains critically low. Fewer than 5% of students combine a CTE focus—defined as taking 10 or more CTE courses—with dual enrollment.

    Yet those who do show remarkable success. By age 24, dual enrollment students with a CTE focus earned an average of $9,746 per quarter, substantially more than CTE-focused students who didn’t take dual enrollment ($8,097) and second only to the dual enrollment/AP-IB combination group.

    The findings suggest a significant missed opportunity, particularly for students seeking technical career paths who could benefit from early college exposure while building specialized skills.

    The report highlights concerning equity gaps in accelerated coursework access. Students who combine dual enrollment with AP/IB courses are less diverse than those taking AP/IB alone, raising questions about which students have opportunities to maximize the benefits of accelerated learning.

    Early college high schools present a partial solution to this challenge. These specialized schools, where students can earn an associate degree while completing high school, serve more diverse student populations than other accelerated programs. Their graduates complete associate degrees at higher rates and earn more than Texas students overall by age 21. However, early college high schools serve only 5% of Texas students statewide.

    With less than 40% of Texas students without accelerated coursework enrolling in any postsecondary institution, and only one in five Texas students taking dual enrollment, researchers see substantial room for expansion.

    The report’s authors recommend that K-12 districts and colleges work to expand dual enrollment participation while ensuring these programs complement rather than compete with AP/IB offerings. They also call for increased access to dual enrollment for CTE students and additional support structures to promote student success in college-level coursework during high school.

     

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  • Plenty of schools have no-zeroes policies. And most teachers hate it, a new survey finds

    Plenty of schools have no-zeroes policies. And most teachers hate it, a new survey finds

    This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

    About one in four teachers say their schools don’t give students zeroes. And nearly all of them hate it.

    The collection of practices known as equitable grading, which includes not giving students zeroes, not taking off points for lateness, and letting students retake tests, has spread in the aftermath of the pandemic. But it wasn’t known how widespread the practices were.

    A new nationally representative survey released Wednesday finds equitable grading practices are fairly common, though nowhere near universal. More than half of K-12 teachers said their school or district used at least one equitable grading practice.

    The most common practice — and the one that drew the most heated opposition in the fall 2024 survey — is not giving students zeroes for missing assignments or failed tests. Just over a quarter of teachers said their school or district has a no-zeroes policy.

    Around 3 in 10 teachers said their school or district allowed students to retake tests without penalty, and a similar share said they did not deduct points when students turned in work late. About 1 in 10 teachers said they were not permitted to factor class participation or homework into students’ final grades.

    Only 6% of teachers said their school used four or more equitable grading practices.

    That was surprising to Adam Tyner, who co-authored the new report for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, in partnership with the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. He expected more schools would be following a “whole package” of grading reforms supported by advocates like former teacher and education consultant Joe Feldman, who wrote the influential book “Grading for Equity.”

    “It’s not like this has swept the country,” said Tyner, who has studied grading practices. He argues that some policies meant to create equity lead to grade inflation and don’t benefit students.

    The findings come as many schools are rethinking what students should have to do to get a high school diploma, and how much emphasis should be put on grades. At the same time, many schools continue to struggle with student disengagement and historically high rates of absenteeism following the pandemic. As a result, they’re trying to hold students accountable for their work without making it impossible to catch up on missed assignments.

    Though ideas about how to grade students more fairly predate the pandemic, several large districts started rethinking their grading practices following that disruption, as more students struggled to meet strict deadlines or do their homework.

    Proponents of equitable grading say it’s important for students to be able to show what they know over time, and that just a few zeroes averaged into a grade can make it difficult for students to ever catch up. When students don’t see a path to passing a class, it can make them less motivated or stop trying altogether.

    Still, some teachers have pushed back, arguing that no-zeroes policies can hurt student motivation, too.

    That showed up in the recent survey.

    Eight in 10 teachers said giving students partial credit for assignments they didn’t turn in was harmful to student engagement. Opposition to no-zeroes policies came from teachers of various racial backgrounds, experience levels, and who worked with different demographics of students.

    No-zeroes policies can take various forms but often mean that the lowest possible grade is a 50 on a 100-point scale. Some schools use software that will automatically convert lower grades to a 50, one teacher wrote on the survey.

    Schools that enrolled mostly students of color were more likely to have no-zeroes policies, the survey found. And middle schools were more likely than high schools and elementary schools to have no-zeroes policies, no-late-penalty policies, and retake policies.

    Researchers weren’t sure why those policies popped up more in middle schools.

    But Katherine Holden, a former middle school principal in Oregon’s Ashland School District who trains school districts on equitable grading practices, has some guesses.

    High schools may be more worried that changing their grading practices will make it harder for students to get into college, Holden said — a misconception in her eyes. And districts may see middle schoolers as especially likely to benefit from things like clear grading rubrics and multiple chances to show what they know, as they are still developing their organization and time-management skills.

    In the open-ended section of the survey, several teachers expressed concerns that no-zeroes policies were unfair and contributed to low student motivation.

    “Students are now doing below-average work or no work at all and are walking out with a C or B,” one teacher told researchers.

    “Most teachers can’t stand the ‘gifty fifty,’” said another.

    More than half of teachers said letting students turn in work late without any penalty was harmful to student engagement.

    “[The policy] removes the incentive for students to ever turn work in on time, and then it becomes difficult to pass back graded work because of cheating,” one teacher said.

    But teachers were more evenly divided on whether allowing students to retake tests was harmful or not.

    “Allowing retakes without penalty encourages a growth mindset, but it also promotes avoidance and procrastination,” one teacher said.

    Another said teachers end up grading almost every assignment more than once because students have no reason to give their best effort the first time.

    The report’s authors recommend getting rid of blanket policies in favor of letting individual teachers make those calls. Research has shown that other grading reforms, such as grading written assignments anonymously or using grading rubrics, can reduce bias.

    Still, teachers don’t agree on the best approach to grading. In the survey, 58% of teachers said it was more important to have clear schoolwide policies to ensure fair student grading — though the question didn’t indicate what that policy should look like — while the rest preferred using their professional judgment.

    “There are ways to combat bias, there are ways to make grading more fair, and we’re not against any of that,” Tyner said. “What we’re really concerned about is when we’re lowering standards, or lowering expectations. … Accountability is always a balancing act.”

    Nicole Paxton, the principal of Mountain Vista Community School, a K-8 school in Colorado’s Harrison School District 2, has seen that balancing act in action.

    Her district adopted a policy a few years ago that requires teachers to grade students on a 50-100 scale. Students get at least a 50% if they turn in work, but they get a “missing” grade if they don’t do the assignment. Middle and high schoolers are allowed to make up missing or incomplete assignments. But it has to be done within the same quarter, and teachers can deduct up to 10% for late assignments.

    Paxton thinks the policy was the right move for her district. She says she’s seen it motivate kids who are struggling to keep trying, when before they stopped doing their work because they didn’t think they could ever bounce back from a few zeroes.

    “As adults, in the real world, we get to show what we know and learn in our careers,” Paxton said. “And I think that kids are able to do that in our building, too.”

    Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

    For more news on classroom trends, visit eSN’s Innovative Teaching hub.

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  • Universities don’t seem to understand how power dynamics on campus are abused

    Universities don’t seem to understand how power dynamics on campus are abused

    I can’t be the only person to have been shocked that 1.5 per cent of respondents to OfS’ NSS extension on harassment and sexual misconduct said they’d been in an intimate personal relationship with a member of university staff in the past year.

    Nor, notwithstanding the sampling issues, can I have been the only one to have been alarmed that of those relationships, 68.8 per cent said that the staff member was involved with their education or assessment.

    A few weeks ago now over on LinkedIn, former Durham psychology prof and harassment and sexual misconduct expert Graham Towl triggered a bit of debate.

    Having asserted that, to his knowledge, no university had initiated an outright ban on intimate personal relationships between staff and students, a whole raft of respondents appeared to tell him he was wrong – at least when it came to their university.

    So I checked. And sadly, whatever their perceptions, almost all of said contributors were mistaken. There’s plenty of strong discouragement, a lot of bans where there’s a supervisory relationship, but not a lot of policies that actually respond to what students want – which is for university to be one of the few settings where they’re not pestered for sex.

    Anna Bull’s work on professional boundaries couldn’t be any clearer, really. Two studies surveying students about staff-student relationships show that the vast majority of students – at least 75 per cent – are uncomfortable with teaching staff having sexual or romantic relationships with students.

    The research examined both “sexualized interactions” (such as dating or romantic relationships) and “personal interactions” (like adding students on social media or drinking with them). Notably, there were no differences in attitudes between undergraduate and postgraduate students, suggesting that different policies for different levels of study may not be justified.

    Women students were considerably more uncomfortable than men with both sexualized and personal interactions from staff, no doubt reflecting their heightened awareness of potential sexual harassment and intrusion. Black and Asian students also reported greater discomfort with personal interactions than white students, which researchers linked to preferences for greater professionalism and concerns about culturally inappropriate settings like pub meetings.

    The findings point towards establishing clear professional boundaries in higher education to create a more inclusive and comfortable learning environment for diverse student groups. So why hasn’t that happened?

    Power imbalance

    Since August 1st, the Office for Students (OfS) has required universities to implement one or more steps that could make a “significant and credible difference” in protecting students from conflicts of interest and abuse of power in intimate personal relationships between relevant staff members and students.

    While a complete ban on those relationships is deemed to meet this requirement, it is not mandatory – providers can alternatively adopt other measures such as requiring staff to disclose relationships, managing academic interactions to prevent unfair advantage or disadvantage, ensuring students can report harassment through alternative channels, and providing appropriate training on professional boundaries.

    If providers choose not to ban relationships, they have to actively manage any actual or potential conflicts of interest. Conversely, if they do implement a ban, breaches must result in disciplinary action through usual processes, including the possibility of dismissal.

    The policy must apply to “relevant staff members” – those with direct academic or professional responsibilities for students, including lecturers, supervisors, personal tutors, and pastoral support staff. And OfS expects providers to regularly review their approach based on evidence of prevalence, consultation with students, and the effectiveness of measures in place, adjusting policies as necessary to ensure student protection.

    That’s the bare minimum – but save for that stuff on “training on professional boundaries”, the problem has always been that it partly misses the point. Both OfS’ Condition E6 and several of the policies I’ve read since August 1st seem to suggest that intimate personal relationships between staff and students are somehow inevitable, or will just “happen”.

    But someone has to initiate them. Is it really too much to ask that higher education will be a space where students can get on with their lives without that initiation? Apparently it is.

    And if we’re looking more broadly at the professional boundaries that students think should exist, I can say with some confidence that they’re barely addressed at all in the policies I’ve seen.

    Between August 1st and October 16 this year, I’ve been using the odd break to search for what universities in England have done, or continue to do, in this space via what is supposed to be an easy-to-find “single source of information” on harassment and sexual misconduct. The difficulty in finding information in some cases is a different article, and in some cases searches might have surfaced old policies or rules that have since been updated.

    But having reached York St John University down the alphabetical list, I think I can now say what I can see. And it’s pretty disappointing.

    Ban or regulate?

    A clear minority of English universities now operate we might define as a total “ban” – prohibiting intimate relationships between staff and students, allowing only excluded pre-existing relationships, and making breach subject to disciplinary sanction up to dismissal.

    Those operating a ban between relevant staff members and students have moved decisively beyond the traditional “discourage and disclose” model, recognising that a prohibition sends a clearer message about acceptable professional conduct than a register that implicitly frames relationships as permissible if declared.

    But the vast majority of providers continue to run hybrid disclosure-and-mitigation regimes. These typically prohibit relationships where staff have direct academic, supervisory or pastoral responsibility whilst requiring declaration elsewhere so conflicts can be managed.

    Some variants include mandatory disclosure forms, formal HR records, automatic removal of responsibilities, and explicit disciplinary consequences. Weaker implementations rely on cultural expectations of disclosure with what read like vague enforcement mechanisms.

    Definitional inconsistencies and structural complexities

    Policy complexity and inconsistency remain significant compliance risks. E6’s definition of “relevant staff member” extends beyond academic roles to include pastoral advisers, complaints handlers, and security personnel, yet plenty of policies restrict prohibitions to “teaching” or “supervisory” staff. That narrower scope risks under-compliance, particularly given the condition’s emphasis on addressing “direct professional responsibilities” broadly conceived.

    The challenge is then compounded by the increasingly blurred boundaries of contemporary academic work. Academic casualisation means many staff occupy ambiguous positions – postgraduate students who teach undergraduates, visiting fellows with limited institutional attachment, or part-time lecturers working across multiple institutions. Hybrid roles complicate traditional staff-student distinctions and create enforcement challenges that policies rarely acknowledge explicitly.

    Similarly, institutions vary widely in defining “intimate personal relationship.” Some focus narrowly on romantic and sexual connections, whilst others encompass emotional intimacy or even brief encounters. The definitional variation undermines the sector’s ability to provide consistent protection – and creates real confusion for staff and students moving between institutions.

    Disciplinary frameworks

    E6 explicitly requires that breaches of relationship bans be actionable under disciplinary codes with the possibility of dismissal. Many policies use hedged language – “may be subject to disciplinary processes” – without clearly linking to dismissal procedures. This vagueness reads like a compliance gap, given the condition demands visible enforceability rather than implied consequences.

    More fundamentally, some universities fail to integrate relationship policies with their harassment and sexual misconduct frameworks, treating consensual relationships as a separate administrative matter rather than a safeguarding issue. The siloed approach risks missing the connection between power abuse in relationships and broader patterns of misconduct.

    Meanwhile, even where I found the “single comprehensive source of information”, there were publication gaps. Multiple providers either don’t publish any staff-student relationship policies or fragment them across HR documents, safeguarding procedures, and harassment frameworks. It makes it impossible for students to locate the unified information that E6 demands.

    And even where policies exist, they often read as HR-focused documents with limited student-facing clarity. E6 expects providers to communicate that students can report misconduct within relationships, will not be penalised for participating in permitted relationships, and will be protected from retaliation. Few policies include explicit student-facing assurances on these points – they’re largely staff-facing. Students won’t know what they can and can’t expect.

    Maybe it’s the lack of student engagement. E6 encourages providers to gather evidence, review complaints data, and consult students when setting policy. Very few institutions mention regular review cycles or evidence of student consultation in developing their approach. Over the past two weeks, just two of the 35 SUs I’ve spoken to have been shared the institution-level NSS extension prevalence data. Sigh.

    Transition and review

    The core critique of disclosure regimes – that they prioritise staff honesty over student protection and create implicit permission for advances – remains pretty much unaddressed by the sector. Most universities retain register-based systems that focus on “managing conflicts of interest” once relationships exist, rather than preventing the harm that may occur from approaches themselves.

    Policies typically frame concerns in managerial language around “professional integrity,” “institutional reputation,” and “fairness in assessment.” Staff-centric discourse contrasts sharply with student-centric concerns about discomfort, vulnerability, and psychological harm. The regulatory emphasis on conflict management appears to miss the fundamental critique that the proposition itself, regardless of outcome, can damage students’ academic confidence and sense of safety.

    While many policies acknowledge “power imbalances,” they operationalise the idea narrowly through formal supervisory relationships. Few grapple with the diffuse cultural authority that academic staff wield as gatekeepers to disciplinary knowledge, professional networks, and career opportunities. It suggests that universities don’t know how power operates in their own environments, particularly for students from underrepresented backgrounds who may be more dependent on staff endorsement and support.

    The evidence that women, Black, Asian, and LGBTQ+ students are disproportionately uncomfortable with boundary-crossing receives pretty much no acknowledgement in institutional policies. The absence of intersectional analysis by definition means that universal policies may systematically under-protect the most vulnerable student populations, despite E6’s emphasis on safeguarding.

    Technology and boundaries

    Both academic research and common sense tells us that contemporary academic relationships increasingly develop through digital channels that traditional policies struggle to address. Social media connections, informal messaging platforms, and online collaboration tools blur the boundaries between professional and personal communication in ways that very few of the policies I’ve seen acknowledge explicitly.

    More broadly, the policies on offer are poorly equipped to address subtle forms of grooming and boundary erosion. Most frameworks deal with binary outcomes – either declared relationships to be managed, or clear breaches to be disciplined – but offer little on the grey areas where inappropriate behaviour develops incrementally through seemingly innocent interactions.

    The research evidence on grooming pathways – special attention, informal meetings, personal communications, boundary-testing compliments – finds limited reflection in the material. Where policies do address professional boundaries, they typically focus on practical arrangements (meeting locations, communication channels) rather than the relational dynamics that create vulnerability to exploitation.

    It’s a gap that is particularly significant given evidence that students often recognise exploitation only retrospectively, after the power dynamic becomes clear. Policies designed around consent at the time of relationship formation do nothing to address the temporal aspects of harm recognition.

    Reporting barriers and trust

    Despite E6’s emphasis on accessible reporting, most universities have not fundamentally addressed the structural barriers that deter students from raising concerns. Few policies guarantee independent reporting channels or provide concrete protections against retaliation beyond general misconduct language. The asymmetry of consequences – where students risk academic and career damage whilst staff face at most employment consequences – receives little institutional acknowledgement.

    This trust deficit is compounded by the limited evidence of truly independent support systems, particularly at smaller and specialist institutions. Students in performing arts, agriculture, PGRs in general – all are characterised by intense staff-student interaction often face the thinnest protection frameworks despite arguably facing the highest risks of boundary-crossing.

    And miserably inevitably, to read the policies you’d think that staff in professional placement settings, years abroad, sports coaching, franchised provision and students’ unions don’t exist. Either those developing the policies have a limited understanding of the contemporary student experience, or have thought about the complexities and placed them in the “too difficult” pile for now. Or maybe it’s that the bulk of policies read like HR policies and have been developed with the university’s own employed staff in mind.

    There’s no doubt that the regulatory intervention has successfully prompted some policy development across the sector, but on the evidence I’ve seen so far, the translation from policy text to cultural change remains incomplete.

    Whether E6 delivers meaningful protection for students will depend on how universities implement the frameworks in practice, whether they address the underlying trust, power, and vulnerability dynamics that create risks, and how effectively they navigate the complex economic and cultural pressures that shape contemporary academic life.

    They’ll also depend on universities proving the regulator wrong by actively deciding to do the right thing, rather than deciding that the bare minimum derived from the checklist will do.

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  • Why mentorship networks are essential in the college admissions process

    Why mentorship networks are essential in the college admissions process

    Key points:

    As the vice president of academic affairs and a member of the admissions committee at SSP International (SSPI), a nonprofit organization offering immersive scientific experiences, I review hundreds of applications each year from rising seniors for our flagship program, Summer Science Program. What we’ve learned is that many of our bright and talented students are navigating their academic careers without access to the same supports as similarly high-achieving students.

    Where other Summer Science Program applicants might benefit from private tutors, college consultants, or guidance from parents familiar with the college application process and the high stress of today’s competitive college market, these students rise to the top of the applicant pool without leaning on the same resources as their peers.

    This is especially true for first-generation students who will be the first in their families to graduate from high school, go through the college admissions process, apply for financial aid, and enroll in college. Not only do they need to be more resourceful and self-reliant without the support of their personal networks, but they also often take on the responsibility of guiding their parents through these processes, rather than the other way around.

    School counselor shortage

    For many students who are underrepresented in academia, their exposure to different colleges, careers, and networks comes from their school counselors. While the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) recommends a minimum student-to-school counselor ratio of 250:1, the nationwide shortage of counselors led to a national average ratio of 385:1 between 2020-2023. That is a lot of strain on counselors who already serve as jacks of all trades–needing to keep up with evolving college admissions processes, understand the financial circumstances of hundreds of families, provide emotional support, and stay on top of the job market to advise accordingly. This ultimately affects the level of personalized counseling students receive.

    Making the college admissions process accessible

    In 2020, SSPI launched College Link, a mentorship program offering Summer Science Program alumni access to one-on-one or group mentoring. Mentors support students during their transition from high school to college through guidance on financial aid, early decision/early action processes, college applications, personal essay writing, resume workshopping, and more. To date, College Link has served over 650 mentees and recruited over 580 mentors sourced from SSPI’s 4,200 alumni network.

    This mentorship network comprises individuals from various backgrounds, leading successful and diverse careers in academia and STEM. Mentors like Dr. Emma Louden, an astrophysicist, strategist, and youth advocate who also helped develop the program, provided SSPI’s recent alumni with insights from their real-world professional experiences. This helps them explore a variety of careers within the STEM field beyond what they learn about in the classroom.

    Demographic data from last year’s Summer Science Program cohort showed that 37 percent of participants had parents with no higher education degree. That is why College Link prioritizes one-on-one mentoring for first-generation college alumni who need more personalized guidance when navigating the complexities of the college application and admission process.

    College Link also offers group mentoring for non-first-generation students, who receive the same services from several mentors bringing great expertise on the varying topics highlighted from week to week.

    With the support of College Link, nearly one hundred percent of Summer Science Program alumni have gone on to attend college, including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech and other prestigious institutions.

    Using College Link as a blueprint

    As the U.S. continues to face a counselor shortage, schools can further support students, especially first-generation students, through the college admissions process by creating mentorship networks using the College Link model. Schools can tap into their alumni network and identify successful role models who are ready to mentor younger generations and guide them beyond the admissions process. With the widespread implementation of Zoom in our everyday lives, it is now easier than ever to build networks virtually.

    Mentorship networks in schools can provide additional support systems for high school students and alleviate the pressures school counselors experience daily during college admissions season. Let’s continue to ensure the college admissions process is accessible to all students.

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  • Why is regulation on disabled students so weak?

    Why is regulation on disabled students so weak?

    When I read university strategies, there tend to be three themes – teaching, research, and that stuff that underpins it.

    If I’m glancing through students’ union strategies, there’s almost always a version of voice, activities/opportunities, and that stuff that underpins it.

    And so it is also the case that when we think about higher education regulation in England, everything from the TEF to the Regulatory Framework tends to have a triangle too – there’s experience, outcomes and that other stuff.

    The problem is that the case of disabled students presents a bit of a problem for the design of the regulation.

    Whatever the current design or theory of change being deployed, the basic question that OfS asks providers to ask is – are disabled students’ outcomes worse than everyone else’s?

    The underpinning theory is that if they are, that’s bound to be because their experience is worse. And if the experience was so poor as to be unlawful, that would definitely show up in outcomes.

    But what if, despite the experience being considerably (and often unlawfully) worse, the outcomes are broadly comparable – or even better? Where does that leave regulation that tends to start with outcomes and work backwards, rather than start with experience and then feed forwards?

    A new brief

    The Office for Students (OfS) has published new research that seems to show that disabled students are increasingly dissatisfied with their university experience even as their degree outcomes improve.

    The regulator has released two documents – a new insight brief examining equality of opportunity for disabled students, and commissioned research from Savanta exploring how 150 students experienced applying for reasonable adjustments.

    The publications come via work from the OfS Disability in Higher Education Advisory Panel, which was established in April 2024 to improve disabled students’ experiences and provide expert guidance.

    The latest data reveals an interesting pattern. For full-time undergraduates with reported disabilities, continuation rates are now 1.1 percentage points higher than for non-disabled peers – and attainment rates are 2.0 percentage points higher. That’s a significant shift from 2019 when disabled students lagged behind on both measures.

    It’s worth saying that, albeit on a smaller N, part-time undergraduates and degree apprentices tell a different story. Part-time disabled students have completion rates 13.0 percentage points lower than their non-disabled peers whilst degree apprentices show a 5.0 percentage point gap in attainment. These gaps suggest that not all disabled students are benefiting equally from institutional support.

    But back on full-time students, when it comes to experience, National Student Survey (NSS) results paint a very different picture. Disabled students consistently report lower satisfaction across all seven themes measured by the survey, and the gaps have grown over the past two years.

    The difference in satisfaction with organisation and management has widened from 6.5 percentage points in 2023 to 7.5 percentage points in 2025. Assessment and feedback satisfaction gaps have grown from 2.5 to 3.7 percentage points over the same period.

    Complaints to the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA) tell a similar story. Disabled students now represent over 40 per cent of OIA complaints, up from around one-third in 2023. More significantly, a higher proportion of disabled students’ complaints are being upheld, suggesting some universities are failing to meet their legal obligations.

    Six years on

    The insight brief isn’t OfS’ first disabled students insight rodeo. 2019’s Insight brief asked whether universities were doing enough for disabled students. It contained a prescient observation:

    “Many disabled students are achieving despite the barriers which remain in their way, not because these barriers have been entirely removed.

    Over time, the disabled student population has grown substantially. In 2017, 13.2 per cent of students reported a disability. By 2023-24, this had risen to 19.9 per cent of full-time undergraduates and 24.6 per cent of part-time undergraduates. Mental health conditions have driven much of this increase, growing from 0.6 per cent of all students in 2010 to representing a significant proportion of disabled students today.

    2019 focused heavily on the social model of disability and questioned whether universities had truly embedded inclusive practices into their institutional structures. It noted that whilst many providers claimed to follow the social model, in practice they still treated disabled students as problems to be solved rather than addressing environmental barriers.

    2025’s brief takes a more pragmatic approach. Rather than debating models of disability, it provides a checklist of specific actions universities should take on experience that draws on the new evidence sources – including workshops with 105 university representatives and the Savanta research to understand both student experiences and institutional challenges.

    You could call it a statement of expectations, although OfS doesn’t quite go that far.

    The Savanta research found that 43 per cent of disabled students had applications for reasonable adjustments fully or partially rejected. Of those students whose needs were not fully met, 91 per cent took further action such as seeking advice or lodging complaints. This level of self-advocacy suggests that students are fighting for support rather than receiving it as a matter of course.

    The research also revealed significant differences between mature and younger students. Mature students were much more likely to take proactive steps when their support was inadequate, with 53 per cent following up or escalating concerns compared with 31 per cent of younger students. Success appears to depend partly on students’ ability to work the system rather than the system working for students.

    Implementation delays are another indicator that students are succeeding despite rather than because of support arrangements. Over half of students who received positive application outcomes waited five weeks or longer for support to be implemented. Students with three or more health conditions faced even longer waits, with 73 per cent waiting five weeks or more for exam adjustments compared with 45 per cent of students with fewer conditions.

    Workshops with university representatives showed that only 15.2 per cent of institutions have established processes for systematically evaluating whether reasonable adjustments are effective. That suggests most universities are not learning from experience or improving their support based on evidence of what works. Students are therefore navigating systems that are not designed to continuously improve.

    And the National Student Survey data on organisation and management is particularly telling. This theme, which includes questions about whether the course is well organised and running smoothly and whether the timetable works efficiently, shows the largest gap between disabled and non-disabled students at 7.5 percentage points. If disabled students are achieving good academic outcomes whilst rating organisational aspects poorly, they must be compensating for institutional failings through extra effort.

    Disabled Students UK’s 2024 research reinforces this picture. It found that only 38 per cent of disabled students who declared their disability reported having the support they need to access studies on equal terms with non-disabled peers. It also noted that most disabled students hold back from raising access issues with their university, suggesting they are managing barriers independently rather than relying on institutional support.

    And the OIA’s annual reports note that disabled students are overrepresented in complaints and that events occurring because a student is disabled are likely to have significant and lasting impacts. The 2024 report specifically highlighted complaints about implementation of support and reasonable adjustments to teaching and assessment. If support systems were working effectively, disabled students wouldn’t need to resort to formal complaints at such high rates.

    The brief reminds readers that the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register now explicitly identifies being disabled as a characteristic indicating risk to student success, and reminds that Access and Participation Plans must address gaps in disabled students’ outcomes with specific targets – and that OfS then monitors progress against these commitments.

    But there’s a problem. Providers would have to pick those risks, and pick disabled students.

    We (don’t) have a plan

    If we look across 99 now published Access and Participation Plans for universities, 27 providers have no disability targets whatsoever across any stage of the student lifecycle including widening access.

    Then if we isolate targets related to experience (ie we ignore access), thirty-five providers have set no targets for disabled students in the continuation, completion, attainment or progression stages. This means over one-third of institutions have no measurable goals for improving outcomes once disabled students arrive on campus.

    Most that do have a target don’t have them in all three of the experience measures. And even those that have targets often have them for a subset of disabled students where the disability type suggests a gap.

    If we assume that providers have been reasonable in not selecting disabled students and/or the risks in the EORR associated with disabled students, it’s a design problem. For a start, when an issue is spread thinly across providers and you have a provider-based regulatory system, you don’t get detailed plans in large parts of the long tail – and so the actions are absent.

    But that’s not the only problem. If we then turn to what providers say they do or are promising to do and look at the aspects of OfS’ checklist that directly relate to student experience, just 39 discuss a process for students to raise issues if support isn’t meeting needs or isn’t implemented properly, and none of the others (working with and listening to disabled students, communication about reasonable adjustments, sharing information about adjustments across the institution and ensuring teaching and assessments are accessible for disabled students while maintaining rigour) go above 60.

    Even then, we tend to see descriptions of existing activity and service provision rather than a new and properly resourced intervention. After all, who’s going to put in their plan that new for this cycle is that provider complying with the law?

    Imagine if the design worked the other way. OfS – as it did with Harassment and Sexual Misconduct (first with a Statement of Expectations, then through a formal Regulatory Condition) – sets out expectations. Then through polling (or ideally, an NSS extension, again a la H&SM) determines whether students are experiencing those expectations. Then it can take both system-wide and provider-level action.

    That – as is also the case with Harassment and Sexual Misconduct – might all lead to better outcomes, it might not. But those design flaws mean that for plans to be made and action to be monitored to secure students’ basic legal rights over their HE, there have to be a decent number of disabled students at their provider, and they have to be failing. If not, no promised action.

    Checklists and ticked boxes

    Overall, we’re left with a checklist – one that represents a pragmatic attempt to provide universities with clear guidance about what they should be doing to support disabled students. The questions about personalisation, implementation, communication, information-sharing, complaints processes, evaluation and accessible assessment all address real problems identified in the research.

    But that checklist’s weaknesses reflect a broader challenge in OfS regulation of experience. The questions are framed as prompts for institutional reflection rather than as requirements with clear standards. That approach may encourage tonal buy-in from universities, but it risks allowing institutions to tick boxes without making meaningful changes. And that’s if they even download the PDF.

    The checklist doesn’t specify what good looks like in any of the areas. It doesn’t set expectations about response times, explain what effective information-sharing systems should include, or define what routine evaluation means in practice. The lack of specificity makes it difficult for institutions to know whether they are meeting expectations, or for OfS to hold them accountable.

    Nor does the checklist address the resource constraints that universities identified as barriers to supporting disabled students effectively. The workshops noted that more students are reporting disabilities, that many have complex support needs and that institutions face staff shortages and stretched budgets.

    Unlike on H&SM – where OfS says “afford this detail or don’t provide HE” – the checklist acknowledges none of the challenges nor provides guidance about how universities should prioritise support when resources are limited.

    As usual on disability, no teeth are being bared here – a list of questions to muse on, rather than requirements to meet, and no consequences for those that fail.

    To be fair, the brief notes that students can make internal complaints, complain to the OIA or take their university to court. But as OfS CEO Susan Lapworth herself said about students in general – let alone disabled students – back in 2019:

    We should… consider whether a model that relies primarily on individual students challenging a provider for a breach of contract places a burden on students in an undesirable way.

    As I say, the checklist is a useful starting point for institutional self-reflection. But without clearer standards, stronger accountability mechanisms and recognition of the resource challenges universities face, it is unlikely to transform disabled students’ experiences, and is more likely to be just another PDF whose link I look up in a few years time in another article like this.

    And crucially, the evidence suggests that plenty of disabled students will continue to succeed despite, rather than because, laws that are supposed to achieve equality.

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  • Should students be involved in governance? – Campus Review

    Should students be involved in governance? – Campus Review

    On Campus

    Student voice is not a survey or metric but rather fostering a culture of participation on campus

    Erin MorleyOctober 15, 2025Last Updated: October 15, 2025

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    Students participating in management decisions starts in the classroom and should be supported right through to governing bodies, a student experience expert has said.

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  • Next gen learning spaces: UDL in action

    Next gen learning spaces: UDL in action

    Key points:

    By embracing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles in purchasing decisions, school leaders can create learning spaces that not only accommodate students with disabilities but enhance the educational experience for all learners while delivering exceptional returns on investment (ROI).

    Strangely enough, the concept of UDL all started with curb cuts. Disability activists in the 1960s were advocating for adding curb cuts at intersections so that users of wheelchairs could cross streets independently. Once curb cuts became commonplace, there was a surprising secondary effect: Curb cuts did not just benefit the lives of those in wheelchairs, they benefited parents with strollers, kids on bikes, older adults using canes, delivery workers with carts, and travelers using rolling suitcases. What had been designed for one specific group ended up accidentally benefiting many others.

    UDL is founded on this idea of the “curb-cut effect.” UDL focuses on designing classrooms and schools to provide multiple ways for students to learn. While the original focus was making the curriculum accessible to multiple types of learners, UDL also informs the physical design of classrooms and schools. Procurement professionals are focusing on furniture and technology purchases that provide flexible, accessible, and supportive environments so that all learners can benefit. Today entire conferences, such as EDspaces, focus on classroom and school design to improve learning outcomes.

    There is now a solid research base indicating that the design of learning spaces is a critical factor in educational success: Learning space design changes can significantly influence student engagement, well-being, and academic achievement. While we focus on obvious benefits for specific types of learners, we often find unexpected ways that all students benefit. Adjustable desks designed for wheelchair users can improve focus and reduce fatigue in many students, especially those with ADHD. Providing captions on videos, first made available for deaf students, benefit ELL and other students struggling to learn to read.

    Applying UDL to school purchasing decisions

    UDL represents a paradigm shift from retrofitting solutions for individual students to proactively designing inclusive environments from the ground up. Strategic purchasing focuses on choosing furniture and tech tools that provide multiple means of engagement that can motivate and support all types of learners.

    Furniture that works for everyone

    Modern classroom furniture has evolved far beyond the traditional one-size-fits-all model. Flexible seating options such as stability balls, wobble cushions, and standing desks can transform classroom dynamics. While these options support students with ADHD or sensory processing needs, they also provide choice and movement opportunities that enhance engagement for neurotypical students. Research consistently shows that physical comfort directly correlates with cognitive performance and attention span.

    Modular furniture systems offer exceptional value by adapting to changing needs throughout the school year. Tables and desks that can be easily reconfigured support collaborative learning, individual work, and various teaching methodologies. Storage solutions with clear labeling systems and accessible heights benefit students with visual impairments and executive functioning challenges while helping all students maintain organization and independence.

    Technology that opens doors for all learners

    Assistive technology has evolved from specialized, expensive solutions to mainstream tools that benefit diverse learners. Screen readers like NVDA and JAWS remain essential for students with visual impairments, but their availability also supports students with dyslexia who benefit from auditory reinforcement of text. When procuring software licenses, prioritize platforms with built-in accessibility features rather than purchasing separate assistive tools.

    Voice-to-text technology exemplifies the UDL principle perfectly. While crucial for students with fine motor challenges or dysgraphia, these tools also benefit students who process information verbally, ELL learners practicing pronunciation, and any student working through complex ideas more efficiently through speech than typing.

    Adaptive keyboards and alternative input devices address various physical needs while offering all students options for comfortable, efficient interaction with technology. Consider keyboards with larger keys, customizable layouts, or touchscreen interfaces that can serve multiple purposes across your student population.

    Interactive displays and tablets with built-in accessibility features provide multiple means of engagement and expression. Touch interfaces support students with motor difficulties while offering kinesthetic learning opportunities for all students. When evaluating these technologies, prioritize devices with robust accessibility settings including font size adjustment, color contrast options, and alternative navigation methods.

    Maximizing your procurement impact

    Strategic procurement for UDL requires thinking beyond individual products to consider system-wide compatibility and scalability. Prioritize vendors who demonstrate commitment to accessibility standards and provide comprehensive training on using accessibility features. The most advanced assistive technology becomes worthless without proper implementation and support.

    Conduct needs assessments that go beyond compliance requirements to understand your learning community’s diverse needs. Engage with special education teams, occupational therapists, and technology specialists during the procurement process. Their insights can prevent costly mistakes and identify opportunities for solutions that serve multiple populations.

    Consider total cost of ownership when evaluating options. Adjustable-height desks may cost more initially but can eliminate the need for specialized furniture for individual students. Similarly, mainstream technology with robust accessibility features often costs less than specialized assistive devices while serving broader populations.

    Pilot programs prove invaluable for testing solutions before large-scale implementation. Start with small purchases to evaluate effectiveness, durability, and user satisfaction across diverse learners. Document outcomes to build compelling cases for broader adoption.

    The business case for UDL

    Procurement decisions guided by UDL principles deliver measurable returns on investment. Reduced need for individualized accommodations decreases administrative overhead while improving response times for student needs. Universal solutions eliminate the stigma associated with specialized equipment, promoting inclusive classroom cultures that benefit all learners.

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  • Championing Equity in Workforce Development

    Championing Equity in Workforce Development

    Kioshana LaCount Burrell

     At 9:30 p.m., when most working mothers are winding down for the day, Kioshana LaCount Burrell is just getting started. After putting her three children to bed in their Columbus, Ohio home, the 38-year-old Ph.D. student settles into what she calls “The Quiet Hour Critiques” — her dedicated time for scholarship that has earned her recognition as a Rising Graduate Scholar.

    “I get up in the morning, get the kids ready for school, go to work all day, or go to class,” Burrell explains. “Then I come home, I do mom things until about 9 or 9:30, and then once the kids go to sleep, I’m able to focus on scholarship and my studies.”

    This demanding schedule reflects the determination that has defined Burrell’s journey from a small town in Northeast Alabama to the halls of The Ohio State University, where she’s pursuing a doctorate in workforce development with a focus that could reshape how America serves its most vulnerable populations.

    Growing up biracial in Gadsden, Alabama — located in a county of 30,000 people — Burrell witnessed inequality firsthand within her own family. As the oldest of four children with a white mother and Black father, she observed how her grandparents “came from similar backgrounds, but their socioeconomic outcomes were markedly different for what appeared to be no other reason than race.” 

    These early observations planted seeds that would later bloom into a career dedicated to dismantling systemic barriers. After completing her undergraduate degree at Alabama State University and earning her MBA at Faulkner University, Burrell entered the workforce development field in 2014, eventually landing in Columbus through federal contract work. 

    “I’ve been a career coach or doing career development stuff for about 15 years,” she says. But it was her experience working at the Gadsden Job Corps Center—her very first professional role—that crystallized her understanding of systemic inequity.

    Over her 15 years in workforce development, Burrell has traveled the country and encountered the same troubling pattern: programs inadequately modified for neurodivergent participants. This frustration led Burrell to pursue a Ph.D., recognizing that academic credentials would provide the platform and credibility needed to drive systemic change.

    “Some people listen to you a little bit differently when you can show that, no, actually, I am a subject matter expert in this,” she notes pragmatically.

    Her research focuses particularly on neurodivergent individuals of color — a population facing compounded challenges. 

    “We know that in all populations, Black kids and brown kids tend to get the short end of the stick. And when it is compounded by them also having an intellectual cognitive disability or just being different, the outcomes and the numbers are even worse,” she adds. 

    Dr. Donna Y. Ford, a renowned expert in gifted education and multicultural issues and a distinguished professor of education at The Ohio State University, has become a key mentor in Burrell’s academic journey. The two connected when Burrell took Ford’s anti-racist education course last spring. 

    “Kio is a very motivated and impressive student who is dedicated to having a positive impact on those she works with,” Ford observes. “Her commitment reminds me of my own—devoted to equity and justice for all, but especially individuals who have been marginalized.”

    Under Ford’s mentorship, Burrell is working on groundbreaking research that applies Ford’s Bloom-Banks matrix for multicultural education to special education contexts — an application that hasn’t been explored before. “I’m really excited to get to look at her work in a new and different way, and she’s been just super supportive,” Burrell says.

    Pursuing a Ph.D. while working full-time and raising three children requires careful orchestration. Burrell works for Ohio State University — a strategic choice that provides both tuition benefits and the health insurance her family needs. Living with Crohn’s disease adds another layer of complexity to her already demanding schedule.

    Despite starting her Ph.D. program just last year, Burrell is already making impressive progress. She’s on track to finish her coursework within the next year and has already written three chapters of her dissertation — a remarkable pace that speaks to both her dedication and the clarity of her vision.

    Burrell’s post-graduation plans reflect her commitment to institutional change rather than traditional academic paths alone. While she’d “love to be in a classroom” and “really flourish in an educational environment,” her sights are set on administrative roles that could reshape how higher education approaches workforce development. 

    “I really feel there’s a lot of opportunity for institutions of higher education to make a pivot towards a more intentional way of pursuing workforce development,” she explains. Whether as a director of workforce development programs or working within student disability services, her goal is to “figure out how to better incorporate individuals who have cognitive disabilities or intellectual disabilities into the mainstream classroom.”

    For others considering graduate school while juggling family and career responsibilities, Burrell’s advice is characteristically direct: “Just do the thing.”

    Her approach centers on backward planning from a clear vision. 

    “I want you to think about what kind of life you want five years from now, ten years from now,” she tells the students she coaches. “Figure out what it is that you want to do, and then once you have that clear thing in mind, it is easier to figure out the path to get there.” 

     

     

     

     

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  • For students, the costs of failure are far too high

    For students, the costs of failure are far too high

    Back in May, I argued that the UK’s “pace miracle” – the system that produces the youngest, fastest-completing graduates in Europe – is damaging students’ learning and health.

    Our system’s efficiency, I suggested, comes at the cost of pressure, exhaustion, and a creeping normalisation of distress.

    But what happens when students fall behind in that miracle? What happens when someone breaks the rhythm that the entire funding and regulatory framework assumes to be normal?

    For our work with SUs, Mack Marshall and I have been looking in detail at the rules and funding that surround “retrieval”.

    From what we can see, UK higher education doesn’t just expect rapid completion – it punishes deviation from it.

    When students stumble, the architecture designed to retrieve them from failure taxes disadvantage and rewards privilege.

    The illusion of generosity

    Pretty much every university we’ve looked at has policies designed to look fair. There is almost always a promise of one reassessment opportunity, and increasingly a public line about not charging resit fees. On paper, that sounds humane – but in practice, the design is economically brutal.

    When a student fails a module and resits within the same academic year, the direct cost may be zero. But there’s no maintenance support for any extra study they need to do. And if that student is placed on reassessment-only status for the following year – allowed to resit assessments without attending teaching – they become ineligible for maintenance funding for much, much longer.

    That means no support for rent, bills, or food for months. The student who can rely on family help revises in comfort. The student who can’t works full-time through summer and fails again, or drops out entirely.

    The sector calls the resit “free” and congratulates itself on removing barriers. But the barrier was never the invoice – it was the maintenance cliff.

    This is not a marginal anomaly – it’s the structural product of the same system that glorifies pace. It’s a logic that insists most degrees must be achieved within three years – one that also dictates that recovery from failure must happen outside the funded frame.

    To understand what happens to students who fail, students need to navigate a maze of regulations, finance policies, visa rules, and handbooks – each written in its own dialect of compliance.

    Students from professional families likely know where to look and what questions to ask. They have the vocabulary, the contacts, the confidence, while first-generation students rarely do. They may well discover “compensation” rules only after exam boards meet, and learn about extenuating circumstances after the deadline passes.

    The result is an information economy that mirrors the class system. The retrieval framework may be universal, but its navigation costs are socially distributed.

    The poverty penalty v pedagogy

    When students pass a module on reassessment, their mark is often capped at the pass threshold – 40 per cent for undergraduates, maybe 50 per cent for postgraduates. The principle sounds rigorous, but the reality is punitive.

    A student who failed once because they were caring for a parent, working nights, or suffering mental ill-health can never escape the academic scar tissue unless it’s a complex and approved mit-circs application. The capping rule converts a temporary difficulty into a permanent credential penalty.

    It is the same ideology that underpins the pace miracle – a meritocracy of difficulty that romanticises struggle and treats rest as weakness. Only it is encoded in assessment policy rather than culture.

    For international students, the same logic takes on a bureaucratic form. Those who fail a single module often face a choice between reassessment-only status – which ends their visa – or repeating with attendance purely to remain sponsored.

    Repeating with attendance can cost thousands of pounds in tuition and visa fees. Many have no realistic option but to pay. The system enforces what looks like a market choice – but is in practice compulsion.

    The Lifelong Learning Entitlement – fix or mirage

    In England at least, the forthcoming Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) ought to usher in flexibility. Funding will finally be linked to credits rather than years. Students will be able to study, pause, and return across their lifetimes. In theory, that should dismantle the rigid three-year cage.

    But in practice, everything will depend on how universities classify students, and how they’re allowed to resit. If reassessment-only learners are still coded as “not in attendance”, they still fall outside maintenance entitlement. The policy will have modernised the vocabulary of exclusion without addressing its cause.

    And even when students do qualify, the LLE’s promise of proportional maintenance means something subtle but serious – flexibility is offered as additional debt, not as forgiveness. Students who fall behind because of illness or bereavement will borrow more, not owe less.

    Unless maintenance is reconceived as a right to recovery rather than a privilege of progression, the LLE risks becoming a faster, more efficient version of the same trap.

    Across Europe, completion frameworks are slower and more forgiving. Some countries permit students a decade to complete a bachelor’s degree without financial penalty. Temporary setbacks don’t trigger existential crises – because variations in time are built into the design.

    As I referenced here, the HEDOCE project found that students in systems with longer completion horizons are less likely to drop out entirely and more likely to recover from setbacks. Those systems treat time as a pedagogical resource, not an efficiency problem.

    In contrast, our compressed model leaves no room for error. Once you stumble, the treadmill doesn’t slow down – it throws you off.

    Beyond efficiency

    Our systems for “retrieval” are not an isolated bureaucracy. They’re the endpoint of a philosophy – the same one I explored in the “pace miracle” piece. Both the speed and the punishment are symptoms of a culture that prizes output over understanding, and throughput over humanity.

    When the system is calibrated around efficiency, every deviation becomes failure, and every failure becomes costly. The student who needs time is framed as wasteful – and the institution that supports them risks financial loss.

    I suspect that is why academic pressure now appears so often in mental health reviews. The structure of funding itself generates the anxiety we later medicalise – what looks like individual struggle is really systemic design.

    If we genuinely wanted a system that supports learning rather than policing pace, we would start by aligning time, funding, and compassion.

    Maintenance support would continue for students on reassessment-only status. Resit marks would reflect achievement, not past misfortune. Compensation and extenuating circumstances policies would be clear, accessible, and generous.

    And more profoundly, universities would stop treating recovery as inefficiency. Every student who fails and returns would be evidence of persistence, not profligacy.

    In England, the LLE could be a turning point – a framework that finally recognises learning as cyclical and non-linear. Or it could simply re-brand the same cruelty in the language of flexibility.

    When I wrote about the UK’s “pace miracle”, I argued that we have built a higher education system that prizes speed and punishes delay – a model that achieves impressive completion rates at the cost of wellbeing, mastery, and fairness.

    Our retrieval systems are the mirror image of that miracle. One governs what happens when students move too slowly during the race – the other governs what happens when they fall altogether. Both reveal the same problem – UK HE mistakes motion for progress, and speed for success.

    A humane higher education system would not just help students recover from failure – it would stop treating recovery as failure in the first place.

    Until then, our miracle of efficiency will continue to hide a quiet cruelty. The students least able to afford failure will remain those the system punishes most heavily – not because they lacked talent or effort, but because we built a structure that makes time itself the privilege they can rarely get a loan for.

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  • Three Notable StatsCan Papers | HESA

    Three Notable StatsCan Papers | HESA

    Over the summer, Statistics Canda put out a few papers on higher education and immigration which got zero press but nevertheless are interesting enough that I thought you might all want to hear about them. Below are my précis: 

    The first paper, Recent trends in immigration from Canada to the United States by Feng Hou, Milly Yang and Yao Lu, is a very general look at outbound migration to the United States, looking  specifically at the characteristics of Canadian citizens who applying for labour certification in the United States in 2015 and in 2024. I found the three top-line results all somewhat surprising.

    • The number of US certification applicants declined by just over 25% between 2015 and 2024.
    • Outbound migration to the US by Canadians is predominantly a “new” Canadian thing. In 2015, Canadian citizens born outside Canada made up 54% of those seeking certification, and by 2024 that proportion had increased to nearly 60%.
    • Among Canadians seeking US certification in 2015, 41% had a master’s or doctoral degree.  In 2024, that proportion had fallen to 31%.

    In other words, brain drain to the US changed significantly over the space of a decade: fewer Canadians headed south, and among those who did, declining proportions were Canadian-born or held advance degrees. All somewhat surprising.

    The second paper, Fields of study and occupations of immigrants who were international students in Canada before immigration by Youjin Choi and Li Xu, divides out two recent cohorts (2011-15 and 2016-21) of immigrants and starts to tease out various aspects of their current status in Canada.  Here the key findings were:

    • In the 2011-15 period, 13% of all immigrants were former international students. By the 2016-21 period, that number had risen to 23%.
    • About a third of immigrants who were students in Canada say their highest degree was taken outside Canada. It’s a bit difficult to parse this. It may mean, for instance, that they obtained a bachelor’s degree in Canada, went to another country for their master’s degree and came back; it may also mean that they took a master’s degree abroad and took some kind of short post-graduate certificate here.
    • A little over a third of all immigrants who studied in Canada have a STEM degree, a proportion that increased a tiny bit over time. This is higher than for the Canadian-born population, but not hugely different from that of immigrants who did not study here.
    • A little under half of all former international STEM students in the immigrant pool were working in a STEM field, but this is strongly correlated with the level of education. Among sub-Bachelor’s graduates this proportion was a little over 20%, while among those with a Master’s degree or higher it was over 50%. This is significantly higher than it is for Canadian-born post-secondary graduates. In non-STEM fields, the relationship is reversed (i.e. Canadian-born graduates are more likely to be working in an aligned field).

    In other words, former international students are a rising proportion of all immigrants, a high proportion are STEM graduates, and a high proportion of them go on to work in STEM fields. All signs that policy is pushing results in the intended direction.

    The final paper, Retention of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and computer science graduates in Canada by Youjin Choi and Feng Hou, follows three cohorts of both domestic and international student graduates to see whether they stayed in the country (technically, it measures the proportion of graduates who file tax returns in Canada, which is a pretty good proxy for residency). The results are summed up in one incredibly ugly chart (seriously, why is StatsCan dataviz so awful?), which I reproduce below:

    So, in the chart the Y-axis is the percentage of STEM graduates who stay in Canada (measured by the proxy of tax filing) and the X-axis is years since graduation. Since they are following three different cohorts of graduates, the lines don’t all extend to the same length (the earliest cohort could be followed for ten years, the middle for seven and the most recent for just three).  The red set of lines represents outcomes for Canadian-born students and the blue set of lines does the same for international students.

    So, the trivial things this graph shows are that: i) both Canadian and international students leave Canada but ii) international students do so more frequently and iii) leaving the country is something that happens gradually over time. The interesting thing it shows, though, is that the most recent cohort (class of 2018) of STEM graduates are more likely to stay than earlier ones, and that this is especially true for international students: the retention rate of international graduates from the class of 2018 was almost fifteen percentage points higher than for the class of 2015.

    Was it a more welcoming economy? Maybe. But you’d have to think that our system of offering international students a path to citizenship had something to do with it too.

    Two other nuggets in the paper:

    • Canadian-born STEM graduates are slightly more likely to leave than non-STEM graduates (it’s not a huge difference, just a percentage point or two) while among international student graduates, those from STEM programs are substantially less likely to leave than those from non-STEM fields (a fifteen-point gap or more).
    • Regardless of where they are from, and regardless of what they studied, graduates from “highly-ranked” universities (no definition given, unfortunately) were more likely to leave Canada, presumably because degree prestige confers a certain degree of mobility.

    You are now fully up to date on the latest data on domestic and international graduates and their immigration pathways. Enjoy your day.

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