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  • Revolutionizing University Assessments: From Essays to Portfolios

    Revolutionizing University Assessments: From Essays to Portfolios

    First posted on Substack

    The AI arms race still rages. Students will identify AI writing support tools, educators will rearm themselves with AI-aware plagiarism-detection software, and students will source apps that can bypass the detection software. Institutions are increasingly prioritising the ease with which mass assessments can be marked. Governments are revising legislation that banned ‘essay mills’ used for contract cheating to incorporate restrictions on Generative AI.

    Students may find themselves asked to handwrite their submissions to avoid the temptation to use fully integrated generative AI tools in their word processing software. Some shrewd students will (re)discover software that takes your typed text, AI-generated or otherwise, and turn it into a version that mimics your handwriting (calligraphr.com).

    Many institutions have already been thinking about this for years. In 2021, UNESCO issued a useful report, ‘AI and Education’, which remains a foundational reader for any institutional leader who wants to be able to go head-to-head with their head of technology services, and to be informed when members of the Senate repeat some of the dystopian viewpoints gleaned from their social media feeds.

    What we need is a revolution in the design of university assessments. This also means some radical redesign of programs and courses. Institutions should be redefining what assessment looks like. Not just because much of the assessments currently on offer lend themselves too easily to plagiarism, contract-cheating, or AI-generated responses, but also because they are bad assessments. Bad assessments, designed loosely to assess very badly written learning outcomes.

    Many universities face a fundamental problem: their entire assessment philosophy (if they have one) remains rooted in a measuring psychosis. One that sees its self-justification in measuring what the learner knows now, rather than what they could do before they undertook a specific course or degree, and how much they have improved. Each course is assessed against its own learning outcomes (where these exist and assuming they are actually well-formed). The odds are that these outcomes are heavily weighted towards the cognitive outcomes and have not moved beyond Bloom’s standard pyramid.

    Rarely are these course-level outcomes accurately mapped and weighted against programme outcomes. A student should always be able to match the assessment they are asked to complete against a set of skills expected as the outcome for a specific course. These skills need to be clearly mapped onto programme outcomes. Each assessment task is assessed against some formulation of marking rubrics or guides, often with multiple markers making controlled, monitored judgements to attempt to ensure just (not standardised) marks.

    Unfortunately, it remains common to see all of these cohort-marked assessments plotted against a bell curve, and top marks to be ‘brought back into line’ where convention dictates.

    Why? Surely the purpose of undertaking a university degree is self-improvement. There is a minimum threshold that I must meet, a pass mark, that allows me to demonstrate that I am capable of certain things, certain abilities or skills. But beyond that? If I got a second-class honours degree and my friend got a first, does that mean they knowmore than I do? Currently, given the emphasis on cognitive skills and knowledge, one can fairly say yes. Does it mean they are necessarily more proficient out there in the big, wide world? Probably not. We are simply not assessing the skills and abilities that most graduates need.

    I advocate for Universities to abandon isolated course-specific assessments in favour of programme-wide portfolio assessments. These are necessarily ipsative, capturing students’ disparate strengths and weaknesses relative to their own performance over time. There may be pass/fail assessments as part of any portfolio, but there are also opportunities for annual or thematic synoptic assessments. Students would be encouraged to draw on their contributions to the university drama club, the volleyball team, or their part-time work outside the university.

    I undertook a short consultancy last year for a university that has been a bit freaked out by the advent of Generative AI. The head of department had a moment of realisation that the vast majority of the degree assessment was based entirely on knowledge recovery and transmission. In reality, of course, their assessment strategy has been flawed long before the advent of ChatGPT. They’ve struggled with plagiarism detection, itself imperfect, obviously, and with reproducing answers that differ only at the margins between students.

    The existing assessment certainly made it easier for them to have external markers looking for specific words to match a pro forma answer. No educational developer worth their salt would have looked at this particular assessment strategy and thought it was in any way valid. The perceived threat to assessment integrity does offer an opportunity for those who are still naive enough to think that essay questions demonstrate anything other than the ability to regurgitate existing knowledge and, at its best, an ability to write in a compelling way. Unless such writing is a skill that is required of the programme of study, it’s a fairly pointless exercise.

    Confidentiality means I don’t wish to identify the organisation, let alone the department, in question. What became abundantly clear is that the assessment strategy had been devised as the programme grew. As they increased the number of students, they had contracted out significant amounts of the marking. This led to a degree of removal from individual students’ actual experiences.

    Surely one can see that it will become pointless to ask students to answer knowledge-based questions beyond a diagnostic exercise early in each course or programme.

    So what’s the alternative? With very rare exceptions, the vast majority of tertiary students will have lived for at least 18 years. They have life experiences that make their perspectives different from those of their fellow students. Suppose we can design our assessments around individuals’ personal epistemology, culture, and experience. We have a chance to differentiate between them. We can build assessment incrementally within specific courses and programmes. Each course in a programme can build on previous courses. In the case of this particular client, I suggested that eliminating as many electives as possible and narrowing the options would not deter applicants and would make the design of assessment strategies within the programme more coherent.

    Developing a personal portfolio of evidence throughout a programme of study gives students both a sense of ownership over their own learning and potentially a resource they will continue to augment once they graduate. The intention is to develop an incremental assessment approach. Students in the third year of studies would be asked to review coursework from previous years, for example. Students could be asked to comment and provide feedback on students in earlier years within the same programme. Blending the ipsative nature of assessments with credit-bearing assessment tasks is the crucial skill now required of learning designers.

    Maybe it is now a good time for you to review your learning outcomes and ask whether you are assessing skills and attributes?

    Paid subscribers will have access to assessment design tools

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  • Virginia AG searches for university general counsels to counter ‘federal overreach’

    Virginia AG searches for university general counsels to counter ‘federal overreach’

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    Dive Brief:

    • Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones has begun the hiring process for three university general counsel positions, framing the search as a counter to the Trump administration’s “federal overreach” into the state’s public institutions. 
    • Jones, a Democrat who took office on Jan. 17 alongside Gov. Abigail Spanberger, said this week that he would hire the “best and brightest legal counsel” for three public institutions with vacancies: the University of Virginia, George Mason University, and Virginia Military Institute.
    • “Over the past year, the Trump Administration’s continued politically-motivated assaults on Virginia’s academic institutions have sought to tarnish their reputations and undermine their ability to successfully prepare our students for the future,” Jones said in a statement. This national search will deliver on the promise to “fight back” against those attacks, he added.

    Dive Insight:

    Jones’ announcement follows up on his campaign promise to “take politics out of Virginia’s higher education system.” Both Jones and Spanberger have accused state officials of allowing undue political influence over their institutions.

    Virginia’s public universities have been in turmoil since the summer, when then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, sought to appoint a handful of members to UVA, George Mason, and VMI’s boards. But when Youngkin faced opposition from Virginia’s Democrat-controlled Senate committee — which has the power to reject appointments — he instructed his picks to begin serving anyway. The ensuing legal battle ended with a federal judge blocking the appointments. 

    All three boards had numerous unfilled seats through the end of 2025.

    Then, at the end of June, Jim Ryan abruptly stepped down as UVA’s president amid pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice over the university’s diversity work.

    UVA’s governing board did not defend Ryan publicly. 

    The board then struck a deal with the DOJ in October to pause its investigations into UVA and formally close them by 2028 if the university “completes its planned reforms prohibiting DEI,” the agency said at the time.

    The agreement requires the university to make several policy changes, including adopting the DOJ’s contentious anti-DEI guidance and filing quarterly compliance reports with the agency.

    In a November letter, Spanberger called on UVA trustees to hold off naming a new president until she took office.

    Spanberger argued that trustees’ response to the ouster of Ryan and their search for a new president had “severely undermined the public’s and the University community’s confidence,” citing votes of no confidence from the UVA faculty senate and the university student council.

    She also pledged in the letter to fill vacant positions on the UVA board shortly after she was sworn in. 

    Instead of waiting, however, the governing board appointed Scott Beardsley as UVA’s new president on Dec. 19. Beardsley took office on Jan. 1 — 16 days before Spanberger was inaugurated.

    At least four members of UVA’s board, including the board head, stepped down after Spanberger asked them to resign shortly before she became the first woman to serve as Virginia’s governor, The New York Times reported.

    She then appointed over two dozen board members across all three universities’ boards on her first day in office. The state Senate’s committee on privileges and elections approved those appointments on Tuesday.

    New members could prove especially impactful at George Mason, whose board has operated without a quorum in recent months. The Trump administration has targeted the university and its president, Gregory Washington, over its DEI work — similar to its play against UVA. But Washington has rebuked the DOJ’s calls to fall in line.

    Jones‘ national search for new general counsels isn’t the only move the attorney general has made to undo former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’ last acts in office.

    Just days before his term ended, Miyares filed a joint motion with the DOJ to strike down a state law allowing certain undocumented students to pay in-state tuition to public colleges.

    Jones’ office withdrew Miyares’ joint motion three days after his swearing in. It also withdrew the former attorney general’s opposition to third-party intervention in the case, easing the path for Virginia students to defend the state law.

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  • Did Grok break the law?

    Did Grok break the law?

    Grok, the AI system integrated into X, has reportedly been used to turn real pictures of people — including minors — into nude or sexualized imagery.

    People are understandably outraged. This episode shows how a person can use AI tools to violate a sense of human dignity and security with little more than a photo and a prompt. The fact that the tool was used to target real people, especially children, without their knowledge or consent is particularly disturbing to many. 

    Some have responded by calling for new laws. That instinct is understandable. But many proposals would raise serious First Amendment concerns, and before trying to scratch the “do something” itch with new legislation, it’s important to first ask: does existing law already prohibit this? 

    In many cases, the answer is yes.

    Federal criminal law prohibits knowingly making or sharing child sexual abuse material involving actual children, whether it is created by a camera or with the assistance of AI. Likewise, AI-generated material that meets the high bar for obscenity and is publicly created or distributed, is not protected speech. Users who knowingly prompt an AI system to create such content, or who share it, can already face criminal prosecution. Liability shields don’t protect anyone from federal criminal prosecutions. AI operators that knowingly provide substantial assistance to those creating this unlawful content may face legal exposure as well.

    Existing law also provides other avenues to hold people accountable through private lawsuits. Civil claims for harms like intentional infliction of emotional distress, invasion of privacy, defamation, and misappropriation of likeness may also be available to people depicted in the images created by Grok, provided the elements of those torts, and any constitutional protections built into them, are satisfied. These types of claims allow victims to collect monetary damages against users who make, share, or sell such content and, in limited cases, developers.

    At the same time, it’s important to be clear about the limits of the law. The law will never be able to fully prevent bad actors from doing bad things. And the Constitution limits how far the government can go in trying. Nudity and sexual content involving adults are generally protected by the First Amendment unless they fall into a narrow category of unprotected speech. Use of AI does not change that constitutional analysis. This means a great deal of offensive or distasteful expression remains protected speech, even when it disturbs or makes us uncomfortable.

    This matters. If every technological failure becomes an excuse to expand government authority over speech, the predictable outcome is overreach that chills expression and silences voices. 

    Public pressure, reputational risk, and the possibility of lawsuits are powerful incentives to motivate xAI, the parent company of both Grok and X, to improve safeguards, redesign systems, and limit misuse. That is the preferred path. Editorial and design decisions made by private companies are far less dangerous than granting the government broad power to regulate speech and assume control over platforms protected by the First Amendment.

    Using Grok’s failures as a justification for sweeping new AI speech regulations would be a mistake. Existing laws already target real harms and real actors. Broad new rules risk overreach, chilling lawful expression and empowering the state in ways that are difficult to unwind.

    The right response here starts with enforcing the law we already have, and to resist the temptation to trade constitutional principles for the illusion of control.

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  • LAWSUIT: Illinois law blocks Democratic dissenters from operating without party elites’ permission

    LAWSUIT: Illinois law blocks Democratic dissenters from operating without party elites’ permission

    CHICAGO, Jan. 27, 2026 — Like most Americans, you’ve probably criticized the Democrats or the Republicans at some point. But imagine that the next day, state officials told you to go down to party headquarters and request a permission slip to continue speaking out.

    What seems like an absurd hypothetical is the reality in Illinois, where nonprofits are barred from operating in the state if they mention either “democrats” or “republicans” in their title unless they go to the parties for permission. Now, with the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, one group of dissident Democrats is suing to strike down Illinois’ unconstitutional law — permanently.

    “Illinois can’t get around the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to party bosses,” said FIRE attorney Daniel Zahn. “No American — Republican, Democrat, or independent — should have to bend the knee before a political party to participate in the political system.”

    Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender is a charitable organization composed of current and former Democrats who disagree with the party’s stance on transgender issues. The all-volunteer organization believes it offers a unique perspective by voicing their belief that the current Democratic Party consensus is contrary to “core liberal values,” such as “promoting evidence-based medical care,” “protecting vulnerable children and adults,” and “upholding the rights of women and girls.”

    “The Illinois Democratic Party doesn’t get to decide whether we can call ourselves ‘Democrats,’” said DIAG Board Secretary Jenny Poyer Ackerman. “DIAG was founded on our belief in open inquiry, challenging ideological conformity, and above all, the freedom to speak out. Backing down would go against everything we believe in.”

    DIAG has successfully registered as a nonprofit at a national level and has been able to solicit donations in 37 states, but was rejected when it attempted to register to solicit donations in the Prairie State for being in violation of a provision of Illinois law. “To get qualified in Illinois, you will need [an] approval letter . . . saying it is ok to use ‘Democrats’ in your name,” explained Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias’ rejection letter.

    Without that letter, DIAG is banned from conducting affairs in the state and could face fines or jail time if it engages in constitutionally protected speech like soliciting donations, sponsoring lectures, or meeting with supporters in Illinois. Based on previous disagreements with the Democratic establishment — the Colorado Democrats denounced DIAG last year and demanded a name change — DIAG has every reason to believe that the Democratic Party of Illinois will deny it approval. But more to the point, its leaders refuse on principle to seek a permission slip from a party whose platform it has criticized and plans to criticize in Illinois. 

    Illinois’ law violates the First Amendment by restricting Americans’ speech only when they broach a specific topic: political parties. The law even lists specific words that are banned absent permission. Using a name with “republican” or “democrat” or “democratic” automatically requires outside party approval, while “green” or “libertarian” might not.

    As a result, the Democratic Party has a veto over groups like DIAG, and Republicans get a veto over groups like Log Cabin Republicans. But absurdly, it also means the Democratic Party has a veto over organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, or even Federation for a Democratic China, simply because those organizations choose to use the word “democratic” when describing their beliefs.

    The Supreme Court has previously held these sorts of “content-based” speech restrictions are only constitutional when they’re the least restrictive way to achieve a compelling government interest. But Illinois doesn’t have any compelling interest here. Its provision only serves the interests of the entrenched political parties.

    Now, FIRE is suing Giannoulias in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois not only to obtain an injunction stopping him from applying the name provision to deny DIAG’s application but also to halt enforcement of the law across the board.

    “The Democratic and Republican parties don’t have a monopoly on the concepts of what is democratic or republican,” said Zahn. “When the government tries to give them that monopoly, it’s absurd and unconstitutional.”

    The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them. 

    CONTACT:

    Alex Griswold, Communications Campaign Manager, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected]

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  • The campaign to crush free speech in Minnesota

    The campaign to crush free speech in Minnesota

    This essay was originally published in The Free Press on Jan. 21, 2026. Three days later, ICE agents shot and killed intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. See Aaron Terr’s analysis, “The Alex Pretti shooting and the growing strain on the First Amendment.”

    Over the past two weeks, Minneapolis has given the country a crash course in the First Amendment.

    The actions of protesters and politicians, during and in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have become real-world lessons in the law of speech. The clashes have demonstrated which types of speech aren’t protected, along with passionate, angry, and unsettling speech that is protected. We’ve also gotten a chilling reminder of what goes wrong when the government pretends not to know the difference.

    For starters, the Justice Department has issued grand jury subpoenas to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and at least three other Democratic officials in the state, as part of an investigation into whether state and local officials obstructed federal immigration enforcement. Grand jury matters are secret, so we may never see the subpoenas themselves. But the public justification keeps circling back to speech. Federal officials have portrayed Walz’s and Frey’s criticisms of ICE as incitement, which is not protected by the First Amendment.

    But by any reasonable assessment, the statements that have been publicly attributed to Walz do not meet the legal standard for incitement. The governor urged people to speak out “loudly, urgently, but also peacefully,” and warned them not to “fan the flames of chaos.” That doesn’t cross the constitutional line. Walz also used metaphorical political rhetoric, saying no governor should have to “fight a war against the federal government every single day” — language that has lived comfortably inside First Amendment protection for generations.

    The speech that federal officials have criticized in Minnesota seems like protected political dissent, not obstruction or conspiracy.

    Frey’s most quoted line — telling ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis” — may strike some as crude and unstatesmanlike. But the f-bomb is not an actual bomb, and heated rhetoric like that is absolutely protected speech. Frey has also been accused of telling police to “fight ICE,” but at the same time he warned against a scenario in which federal and state authorities are “literally fighting one another,” and he urged de-escalation.

    The First Amendment exists to deny the government the knee-jerk ability to decide which dissent is too dangerous, irritating, or inconvenient to tolerate during tense moments. We must not forget that, even when the content of others’ speech unnerves or infuriates us.

    This is where the landmark 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio comes in. By the standard set in that case, advocacy is protected unless it’s “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”

    That standard exists for a reason. Governments are always tempted to blame words for violence they can’t control. If “heated rhetoric” were enough, dissent would disappear whenever officials felt threatened — which, of course, would end up being all the time.

    The speech that federal officials have criticized in Minnesota seems like protected political dissent, not obstruction or conspiracy. That raises the discouraging possibility that the point of the Justice investigation isn’t to bring charges that will stick. Rather, it may be to use the threat of prosecution to chill speech.

    That’s not law enforcement. It’s ideology enforcement, backed by mob-like bully tactics.

    In defense of fiery words

    In the wake of political violence, calls to criminalize rhetoric are growing louder. But Brandenburg v. Ohio set the bar — and it’s a high one.


    Read More

    As for the protests themselves, some of what we’ve seen is textbook First Amendment activity: protesters chanting in public streets, filming law enforcement, warning neighbors of enforcement activity, criticizing policy. This is precisely the kind of free speech and free assembly the First Amendment was designed to protect.

    Nevertheless, there is plenty of unprotected speech being improperly justified on First Amendment grounds. Since the start of ICE operations in Minnesota in November, we have seen objects thrown at officers, crowds pepper sprayed and tear-gassed, and worse. But the extent to which the First Amendment is implicated in interactions between protesters and ICE agents often depends on how the granular details played out, which isn’t always clear from the videos and testimonies.

    U.S. district judge Katherine Menendez ruled last week that ICE agents can’t detain or use tear gas on peaceful observers who haven’t obstructed their operations. The 83-page ruling includes countless allegations from activists and ICE officers about each other’s conduct, many of which are egregious and some of which are factually incompatible with others.

    Some types of speech, like crowds telling ICE agents to kill themselves in the heat of a protest, might strike most people as upsetting and offensive, but are still protected. While the White House has claimed that such incidents are the result of a campaign of targeted harassment against federal officers, it has so far not provided evidence to that effect. It seems just as probable that those protesters were motivated by their personal dislike of federal law enforcement and chose a harsh way to express it.

    Some law enforcement activity violates the First Amendment even though it’s nonphysical. For example, there are credible reports that ICE agents have led civilian observers back to the observers’ homes. The message couldn’t be any clearer: ICE knows where you live. Assuming there’s no law enforcement reason to go to those homes, it’s a pure intimidation tactic designed to create a chilling effect, and the First Amendment is meant to protect us from that kind of retaliation for speaking out.

    Minnesota isn’t showing that the First Amendment is obsolete. It’s showing that balancing its demands is difficult, and that getting it wrong is dangerous.

    And then there’s the moment where the First Amendment lesson goes completely off the rails.

    Across the river in St. Paul, protesters entered a church and disrupted a worship service. Journalist Don Lemon filmed the event, and while interviewing a member of the congregation, was told: “Our church had gathered for worship, which we do every Sunday. We asked them to leave and they obviously have not left.” The next thing we hear is Lemon saying, “So, this is what the First Amendment is about.”

    No, it is not.

    The First Amendment does not grant a right to commandeer private spaces or force unwilling audiences in a private space into a political confrontation. A church is not a public forum, and the actions of that group that day are not legally protected expression. They have a right to gather outside the church and protest on the sidewalk, but by walking into a private service and refusing to leave, they are, at a minimum, trespassing.

    In this case, the protesters displayed a flawed understanding of protected speech. Believing your cause is morally urgent isn’t a valid defense for entering a private space unlawfully to deliver a message.

    Put all these events and incidents together and the overall lesson becomes clear. Minnesota isn’t showing that the First Amendment is obsolete. It’s showing that balancing its demands is difficult, and that getting it wrong is dangerous.

    Speech is not violence. Protest is not conspiracy. Criticism is not incitement. Violence is not speech. And disruption of private spaces is not protest. When we blur those lines, we don’t advance justice; we empower whoever currently has the authority to determine what those words mean. The First Amendment exists to deny the government the knee-jerk ability to decide which dissent is too dangerous, irritating, or inconvenient to tolerate during tense moments.

    We must not forget that, even when the content of others’ speech unnerves or infuriates us.

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  • What Higher Ed Needs to Know (and Do) About the DOJ’s New Title II Web Accessibility Rule

    What Higher Ed Needs to Know (and Do) About the DOJ’s New Title II Web Accessibility Rule

    Accessibility is now a mandate, not a “nice to have”

    Digital experiences have become essential public infrastructure. For colleges and universities, that means every student, parent, faculty member, and stakeholder must be able to access institutional websites and apps without barriers. With the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) new rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), public institutions are now legally required to ensure their digital experiences are accessible.

    Accessibility in higher education spans physical environments, signage, communication, and more. But this article focuses specifically on digital accessibility — websites, mobile apps, and online content. The institutions that thrive under this rule won’t treat accessibility as a checkbox project. They’ll embrace it as a digital operating model, one that improves user experience, compliance posture, and long-term digital performance.

    A quick breakdown of 2024 Title II requirements

    The DOJ’s final rule applies to state and local government entities, including public colleges and universities. It requires that all digital programs, services, and activities (whether on the web or in mobile apps) be accessible to individuals with disabilities.

    Key requirements include:

    • Use of WCAG 2.1 Level AA as the technical standard
    • Accessibility across websites, web apps, documents, videos, and mobile applications
    • Compliance deadlines that vary by institution size, with the first deadline set for April 24, 2026

    Common barriers to digital accessibility compliance

    Most institutions aren’t starting from scratch, but recurring obstacles within their digital ecosystems continue to put compliance at risk. These include:

    • Decentralized web teams
    • Fragmented domains
    • Legacy PDFs
    • Inaccessible videos
    • Third-party tools

    Without strong governance, accessibility debt builds every day. Worse, content continues to be created in non-compliant ways. Waiting to address it means digging a deeper hole. Even the best CMS tools can’t solve this without clear processes and accountability.

    Laying the foundation for sustainable accessibility

    Digital accessibility isn’t something that can be addressed once and set aside. It requires institutional commitment, cross-functional coordination, and repeatable processes. The good news is that building a sustainable program is possible with the right structure in place. Here’s where to begin:

    Establish ownership

    • Assign a digital accessibility lead or working group
    • Secure sponsorship from institutional leadership
    • Define WCAG 2.1 Level AA as your north star

    Define processes

    • Create a regular cadence for training, monitoring, and review
    • Build accessibility considerations into content workflows and publishing guidelines

    Inventory and prioritize

    • Document all digital properties: websites, subsites, mobile apps, PDFs, and media libraries
    • Triage by impact: prioritize content critical to student success (apply, register, pay, request support)

    Proving progress: Documentation that defends and builds trust

    Demonstrating good-faith efforts is critical not only for legal defensibility but also for building institutional credibility. While the primary goals are usability and inclusion, these same steps are also your best protection against ADA-related lawsuits. When schools document progress and act transparently, they strengthen their position should legal challenges arise — showing a clear commitment to meeting federal accessibility standards.

    Institutions should be prepared to show:

    • A public-facing accessibility statement and internal accessibility policy
    • Logs of audits, training sessions, and issue backlogs
    • Records of vendor accessibility reviews and remediation sprints
    • A feedback loop for reporting and responding to barriers

    Prioritization strategies: Where to start when everything feels urgent

    Not all content is equally critical. Here’s a practical way to tackle accessibility without getting overwhelmed:

    1. Critical student pathways: admissions, registration, payment, accommodation requests, portals
    2. High-traffic content: landing pages, program information, financial aid, academic policies
    3. Transactional experiences: forms, payment flows, scheduling tools
    4. Document-heavy content: course catalogs, student handbooks, policy libraries
    5. Everything else: governed backlog with regular cycles of review and remediation

    Accessibility tools, tactics, and must-haves

    A well-rounded accessibility program includes both the right tools and a focus on the fundamentals of WCAG 2.1 AA. Institutions should prioritize the following.

    Tools and workflows:

    • Automated scanners for global and template-level checks
    • Manual spot checks for screen reader compatibility and form validation
    • CMS guardrails: accessible templates, checklists, and heading/link standards
    • Ticketing systems to track issues, exceptions, and fixes
    • Vendor procurement workflows with accessibility reviews built in

    WCAG 2.1 AA essentials:

    • Keyboard navigation and visible focus states
    • Adequate color contrast
    • Logical heading structure
    • Descriptive link text and meaningful alt text
    • Forms with clear labels and instructions
    • Captions and transcripts for all media content

    How Collegis can help

    While schools are ultimately responsible for their own compliance, Collegis can support institutions in developing accessibility strategies that scale. We help our partners:

    • Build prioritized remediation roadmaps
    • Integrate accessibility into digital governance frameworks
    • Implement monitoring workflows and training programs
    • Evaluate tools and vendors with accessibility in mind

    Digital accessibility also supports stronger SEO (search engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization). In fact, just like optimizing for search or AI, making your content accessible helps machines consume and interpret it — whether it’s assistive technology, search engine crawlers, or generative AI systems.

    Take the first step toward an inclusive digital strategy

    The best time to act on digital accessibility was yesterday. The second-best time is now. Start with an inventory and a review of top student pathways. Establish clear ownership and repeatable processes.

    Remember: Accessibility is more than compliance — it’s a commitment to usability, inclusion, and digital readiness. When institutions invest in accessibility, they improve user experience, strengthen their SEO and AI visibility, and align with their mission to serve all learners.

    Collegis is here to help you take the next step. Let’s build a more accessible, inclusive digital future together.

    Innovation Starts Here

    Higher ed is evolving — don’t get left behind. Explore how Collegis can help your institution thrive.

    Jessica Summers is Director of Website Strategy at Collegis Education, where she leads initiatives to elevate digital experience, search visibility, and website performance for higher education institutions. She combines strategic and creative insight with emerging AI-driven approaches to build and optimize websites that perform as true marketing and user experience engines. Her work helps prospective students find what they need and take action. With extensive experience guiding web strategy for universities and agencies, Jessica aligns content, design, and technology while strengthening the structured content, technical optimization, and data governance behind the scenes that make websites effective and sustainable.

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  • Rethinking metrics, rethinking narratives: why widening access at elite universities requires more than procedural fairness

    Rethinking metrics, rethinking narratives: why widening access at elite universities requires more than procedural fairness

    by Kate Ayres

    For many years, the fair access agenda in UK HE has emphasised more transparent and consistent admissions processes that are underpinned by clearer criteria and targeted support. As a qualified accountant and training in Lean Six Sigma, I’ve always been drawn to efficiency, clarity, and measurable improvement – principles that shaped much of my work in HE. However, as I moved into more senior roles and worked more closely with institutional decision-makers, I started to ask a different kind of question: why do some reforms, even when implemented well, seem to make little real difference?

    That question sits at the centre of my doctoral research. Despite significant reforms the social composition of Durham University’s student body has felt largely unchanged. From within the institution, it was evident that fairer offer-making was not translating into meaningful shifts in the home-student entrant profile. This revealed an uncomfortable truth: so far, no amount of investment or policy reform can, by itself, reshape the social forces that determine who sees a Durham degree as desirable.

    To understand why, we need to stop looking only at what universities do, and start looking at how students behave, and how the wider customer base, or audience, signals who belongs where.

    Why aren’t internal reforms enough?

    The limited shift in Durham’s home-student body prompts a key question: are our current metrics assuming universities can control demand, when in fact they can only affect the choices of applicants already in their pool?

    My research used fourteen years of UCAS admissions data for Durham University to analyse how applicant characteristics, predicted attainment, school type, and socio-economic background intersect with admissions decisions and outcomes. Using multivariate logistic regression and Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis, I examined the impact of Durham’s 2019 move from decentralised to centralised admissions.

    Results

    Since the centralisation of admissions in 2019:

    • Contextual students are now 72% more likely to receive an offer, reflecting a major shift in offer-making behaviour.
    • Contextual applicants to selecting departments remain 40% less likely to get offers than those applying to recruiting ones.
    • No improvement is seen in firm-acceptance rates, suggesting culture or fit still shape applicant choices.
    • Insurance-acceptance has risen 21%, showing Durham is increasingly seen as a backup option for these students.
    • Contextual students are now 2% less likely to enrol after receiving an offer, raising concerns about deeper barriers to entry.

    Trend Analysis

    The findings were initially encouraging with Contextual applicants became more likely to receive an offer after centralisation. However, the increased offer rate had very limited effect on who actually enrolled. Contextual applicants were increasingly likely to accept alternative universities before Durham. Meanwhile, the proportion of entrants from higher parental SES groups increased, and independent-school students (already overrepresented) continued to make up around one-third of Durham’s home undergraduate intake in 2023.

    Who is in control of demand?

    While Durham has a history of taking affirmative action for contextual students, these findings illustrate that the OfS-set POLAR4 ratios will never be achievable for somewhere like Durham because these measures assume that universities themselves control demand. Drawing on Organisational Ecology, I argue that this assumption is flawed.

    To understand why improved offer-making did not shift entrant composition, we need to look beyond institutional behaviour and examine the ecosystem dynamics that shape demand. Just as ecosystems rely on diversity, so does HE. No institution can appeal to every audience, nor should it. Organisations operate within ecosystems shaped by social, economic, and political forces, and crucially by their audiences, who ultimately determine demand. Therefore, it is the audience that defines an organisation’s niche. In HE, applicants gravitate toward universities that align with their social tastes, expectations, and sense of belonging. Therefore, the most powerful forces shaping demand are the social networks and information transmissions within and these influence applicants long before they apply: what they hear at school, family expectations, and what peers believe “people like us” do—and where “people like us” go.

    Currently, wider systemic shifts are reinforcing and entrenching Durham’s niche, especially among white independent-school applicants:

    1.  As Oxbridge intensifies its widening participation initiatives, applicants who traditionally succeed (predominantly white students from independent schools) are increasingly less likely to secure offers.
    2. These applicants seek the closest alternative to the Oxbridge experience, with Durham emerging as a preferred option.
    3. Durham is increasingly accepted as a firm choice because of its perceived “fit” with these applicants’ identity and expectations (as seen in this research).
    4. These applicants typically achieve their predicted grades, making entry more likely.
    5. Their growing presence reinforces existing social narratives about Durham’s student profile.
    6. Consequently, the entrant composition remains socially narrow, and these dynamics may intensify.
    7. The narrative of Durham as a socially exclusive institution persists.
    8. Applicants from non-traditional backgrounds thus perceive a lack of belonging.
    9. As a result, these applicants are less likely to select Durham as their firm choice.

    While these dynamics may prompt questions about whether Durham could or should shift away from its position as an “almost-Oxbridge” institution, the evidence suggests that only limited movement is structurally possible. Organisational Ecology predicts that Durham’s niche will remain relatively stable over time and there are many benefits of sticking with a niche approach. The university may be able to broaden its appeal slightly at the margins, drawing in more students from POLAR4 Q3 and Q4 backgrounds, but POLAR4 Q1 and Q2 students are likely to remain outliers. The real question is therefore not whether Durham can radically transform its appeal, but whether it can create the conditions in which those who do apply feel they can belong and thrive. This is where the OfS should take action because, rather than holding universities accountable for applicant pools (which they do not control), it should focus on the areas where institutional agency is strongest. Improving the lived experience of contextual students, strengthening narrative and cultural inclusion, and raising offer-to-acceptance conversion rates are all within Durham’s sphere of influence. Current patterns, particularly the relatively low acceptance and entry rates among contextual applicants, suggest that cultural barriers remain. Regulators should therefore attend less to the composition of the total entrant pool and more to how effectively institutions support, retain, and attract those who already see themselves as potential members of the community.

    Taken together, the wider systemic effects detailed above reinforce, rather than shift, Durham’s niche. Only a proportion of applicants will ever feel an affinity with the institution, which is entirely natural in a diverse HE ecosystem where students gravitate toward environments that resonate with their identities and expectations.

    These systemic forces lie largely outside Durham’s control, and changing the feedback loop requires more than procedural reform. It demands narrative change within the social networks where ideas of belonging are first formed, and a commitment to ensuring that the lived experiences of contextual students at Durham are positive and affirming. Building stronger partnerships with schools can help shift these early perceptions, while amplifying the stories and experiences of students from diverse backgrounds can offer powerful, alternative points of identification. Applicants make decisions based not just on information, but on a deep, intuitive sense of whether a place feels like it’s for “people like us”. This cannot be achieved through admissions policy, strategy, or marketing alone. Institutions can also look to examples such as the University of Bristol, which has reshaped its entrant pool through doing exactly this. Their efforts have influenced not only who feels able to apply, but who can genuinely imagine themselves thriving within the institution, resulting in a gradual shift in their niche.

    Proposal for new metrics

    If we evaluate universities on metrics that assume they control demand, we will misread both the problem and the solution. In the short term, universities cannot determine who chooses to apply, but they can influence who feels confident enough to accept an offer, which may, as seen with Bristol, create gradual shifts in the entrant pool over time. Universities can and should work to broaden their niches, yet Organisational Ecology reminds us that institutions rarely move far from their point of peak appeal, meaning Durham’s niche is likely to remain relatively stable and only widen at the margins. Expecting rapid transformation would be like assuming a population adapted to the Arctic could swiftly relocate to the Caribbean. That’s not saying it’s not possible, but it is not fast. Any substantial change in who feels an affinity with Durham will likewise unfold slowly, as cultural experiences and social narratives evolve. In the meantime, improving the lived experience of contextual students, and seeing this reflected in rising conversion rates, is the most realistic and meaningful early sign of movement within the niche. This stability also means that proportion-based performance measures will continue to make the University appear as though it is underperforming, even when it is behaving exactly as expected within its ecological position. Durham has added complexities in that it will always occupy a relatively small share of the HE market because the physical constraints of Durham City limit expansion. This adds presents further broadening of the niche simply because they can’t change by admitting more students.

    Therefore, metrics focused solely on broad institutional demand will never fully capture the dynamics of access or institutional “progress”. However, rising conversions – from offer to firm acceptance or offer to entry – among contextual students would signal a growing sense of fit, belonging, or affinity. And even if these students never form a majority, improving conversion is a meaningful and realistic way to measure widening participation progress, because it focuses on what an institution can actually influence, the student experience.

    To take these social forces seriously, and to acknowledge that a healthy HE system depends on a diversity of institutions meeting the diverse needs of students, we need metrics that reflect audience attraction and demand dynamics. Current proportion-based measures, fail to capture these realities. Instead, I propose:

    • Because Russell Group institutions occupy a similar position in the Blau Space (they attract applicants with comparable social, cultural, and educational characteristics), organisational ecology theory suggests they compete in neighbouring overlapping niches. This means that isolated widening participation initiatives at a single institution may simply redistribute socially advantaged applicants across the group rather than increase diversity overall. Coordinated widening participation strategies across the Russell Group would therefore reduce competitive displacement and support genuine, sector-wide broadening of access.
    • Introduce regulatory metrics that reward successful conversion, for example offer-to-firm-acceptance rates for underrepresented groups, rather than focusing solely on offers or entrant proportions. This would bring cultural belonging into WP evaluation by capturing the fact that where these students accept an offer and enter, there is likely be a greater sense of affinity, a place where they feel they can “fit”, belong, and succeed.
    • Measure and report the impact of cross-institution outreach among universities with similar audience profiles, recognising that widening participation is driven by sector-level dynamics rather than isolated institutional efforts.
    • Track behavioural demand patterns (such as firm-choice decisions) across groups of institutions to reveal how social signalling influences applicant preferences.

    The future of access lies in changing what we measure—and what we tell ourselves

    Universities often feel they are held solely accountable for widening access, yet my research demonstrates that applicant perceptions, social networks, and systemic hierarchies play an equally powerful role. The most important conclusion of this research is that access outcomes are co-produced. Universities are not solely responsible for entrant composition; applicants are active agents whose perceptions and choices shape institutional realities. To make meaningful change, we need approaches that reflect this distributed responsibility. To make real progress, we must rethink both the metrics we prioritise and the narratives we reproduce.

    Fair admissions processes matter – but without addressing the social dynamics shaping applicant behaviour, procedural fairness alone will never deliver equitable outcomes. By shifting the sector’s focus to behavioural metrics and narrative change, we can begin to challenge the feedback loops that sustain exclusivity and move toward a system where access is genuinely a collaborative effort.

    Durham University may never appeal to more than a small share of the applicant pool, but perhaps the real measure of success is ensuring that those who do not fit the perceived mould feel confident enough to accept and enter. Ecosystems flourish through diversity, and so does HE; no single institution can – or should – meet every need. Our responsibility is to keep access fair, to reshape the narratives that limit choice, and to support those who want to join us to feel that they truly belong. In focusing on this conversion (from offer to entrant) we move toward a more honest and sustainable understanding of what widening participation success looks like. We cannot control the applicant pool, but we can influence the student experience, the narratives that spread through their networks, and their confidence in imagining themselves belonging here.

    Dr Kate Ayres is a Chartered Management Accountant (CIMA) with a DBA from Durham University, where her research explored market niches and widening participation in UK HE through organisational ecology using quantitative methods. She has worked across finance, academic, and project management roles in UK Higher Education, including positions at Durham University and the University of Oxford. Kate currently serves as an Academic Mentor on the Senior Leaders Apprenticeship at Durham University Business School. Her work brings together analytical insight, organisational experience, and a commitment to improving HE culture. She also co-manages and sings with the Durham University Staff Chamber Choir, which she founded.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

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  • AI may unleash the most entrepreneurial generation we’ve ever seen

    AI may unleash the most entrepreneurial generation we’ve ever seen

    Editor’s note: This piece originally ran on the Clayton Christensen Institute’s blog and is republished here with permission.

    Picture someone sitting at a kitchen table after the kids are finally in bed, laptop open, half-drunk mug of herbal tea nearby. For years, she has had a vague idea for a business–custom curriculum design for small learning pods, for example, or a micro-studio creating bespoke art for local nonprofits. She never moved on it. Too many barriers: no time to figure out incorporation, no budget for a web developer, no clue how to do marketing or bookkeeping, no appetite for the legal and tax homework.

    But now she types a prompt into an AI assistant.

    Within an evening, she has a draft business plan, a shortlist of ideas for company names with available domains, a first version of a logo, a one-page website, basic contract language, a starter bookkeeping system, filled-out forms and instructions for registering her business, and a rough sense of how many clients she’d need to cover her bills. None of it is perfect. But it’s enough to move from daydream to first customer.

    That’s the quiet revolution we’re underestimating.

    Most of the public conversation about AI and the labor market is fixated on one (very real) side of the story: which jobs disappear, which tasks get automated, which industries will “lose” the most positions. 

    That conversation isn’t wrong. But it’s incomplete. The same technology that allows big companies to run with far fewer people also lowers the barriers to entry for people who want to create value on their own.

    AI is about to pull the labor market in two directions at once: inward, as firms need fewer employees; and outward, as more individuals gain the tools to act like firms.

    The coming wave of layoffs

    Inside large organizations, the logic is brutally simple. If a machine can do part of a task, fewer humans can do the same job. If a machine can coordinate multiple tasks, fewer humans are needed to manage them. AI turns out to be remarkably good at exactly the kind of work that employed millions of people: following procedures, coordinating handoffs between departments, and navigating bureaucratic complexity.

    Some companies will use AI to squeeze costs out of business-as-usual: automating reporting, drafting, customer support, basic analysis, etc. Others will be challenged by newcomers who never built the bulky structures at all. A firm launched in 2026 might not need a marketing department; it has an AI system that writes, tests, and schedules campaigns. It might not need layers of middle management; coordination and monitoring can be handled by software.

    Clayton Christensen wrote about “efficiency innovations“–efforts to improve profitability by letting a company do the same work with fewer resources. AI might be the ultimate efficiency innovation. Whether it’s deployed by incumbents to trim fat or by startups that never had the fat to begin with, the destination is similar: less demand for traditional employment inside firms.

    We will still have multinational corporations worth billions of dollars. But they will be increasingly lean on staff compared with their 20th-century predecessors: more revenue per employee, more output per headcount, and fewer career ladders.

    The personal back office

    At the same time, something more hopeful is happening at the edges of the economy.

    For most of history, the jump from “I have an idea” to “I have a business” required access to expertise. Lawyers to set up entities and contracts. Accountants to manage books and taxes. Designers and engineers to build products, websites, and marketing. Consultants or mentors to help you avoid rookie mistakes. You either had those skills yourself, had friends who did, or had enough capital to hire them. Many people simply didn’t.

    AI breaks that bottleneck. It turns fragments of expertise into something you can “rent by the prompt.”

    You still need judgment. You still need creativity. You still need taste, grit, and some tolerance for risk. But you no longer need a small army. The solo founder at the kitchen table has, for the first time in history, a kind of general-purpose back office: a system that can draft, design, summarize, translate, troubleshoot, and simulate at a level that used to require multiple professionals.

    Entrepreneurship won’t suddenly become easy. Most new ventures will still fail. Markets will still be unforgiving. Competition may become even more fierce as barriers to entry fall. But the option to try becomes widely available in a way it simply wasn’t before. The barrier shifts from “I can’t even begin” to “Is the potential upside on this idea worth the risk,” which is a very different kind of problem.

    The paradox young people will inherit

    Put these forces together, and the picture that emerges is neither techno-utopian nor apocalyptic.

    Inside firms, AI will quietly erode demand for routine cognitive work. Meanwhile, outside firms, AI will expand the frontier of what individuals can plausibly do on their own or in small teams. That’s the real tension: fewer stable slots in the big machines; more tools to build something of your own.

    Whether this becomes a story of flourishing or precarity depends on lots of things–tax policy, social safety nets, and the speed of change. But one piece of the puzzle is squarely in the domain I work in: how we educate young people for the world they’re walking into.

    The school of compliance in an entrepreneurial age

    For more than a century, mass schooling has been the farm system for large organizations. It has been remarkably good at what it was implicitly designed to do: teach people to be reliable cogs in bureaucratic machines.

    The official curriculum covers math, reading, science, history, etc. The unofficial curriculum teaches something else: how to succeed in a rule-bound institution.

    You learn that:

    • There is always someone above you who sets the assignment.
    • The path to success is deciphering what that person wants.
    • The safest strategy is to follow instructions faithfully.
    • Tasks come with rubrics that specify the criteria for a good performance.
    • Your job is to hit those criteria as cleanly as possible.

    Do that over thirteen years, and those who get good at winning in the game of school also get very good at reading institutions. They sense where the boundaries are, who has authority, and which boxes need to be checked. They become, in a word, employable–especially in environments where advancement comes from mastering the existing playbook rather than writing a new one.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with those skills. For much of the 20th century, this was a rational preparation for a world in which the dominant path to a middle-class life ran through large, hierarchical employers.

    But it’s almost the opposite of what today’s entrepreneurship requires.

    Innovative entrepreneurship is what happens when there’s no rubric, when no one has written the assignment. When the problem itself is fuzzy, you have to decide which part of it is worth solving. It rewards people who notice friction or unmet needs, test rough solutions, and iterate under uncertainty. It punishes those who are good at execution but expect someone else to tell them what to execute. It favors those who are comfortable with ambiguity and relish innovation. It hobbles those who see their purpose as delivering reliability and efficiency on well-worn rails.

    The risk we face is that we will send a generation of students into an AI-transformed economy superbly trained in the old game, just as the old game is shrinking. We’ve taught them to follow procedures, coordinate handoffs, and navigate bureaucracy–precisely the skills AI systems excel at. We’ve led them to expect that career success comes from mastering the rungs on tried-and-true institutionalized career pathways. Meanwhile, the jobs along those conventional pathways are dwindling.

    A different kind of preparation

    If AI really does reduce the number of people big firms need, while making it dramatically easier for individuals to create value directly, then schools have a choice.

    They can double down on being pipelines into a narrowing corporate world–ever more focused on test scores, credentials, and compliance with external standards. Or they can take seriously the task of preparing young people to navigate a world in which many of the best opportunities will be ones they help invent.

    That doesn’t mean abandoning core knowledge and skills. Young people will still need to know how to read and communicate with each other and with AI. They’ll still need math and science to conceptually understand how the world works. They’ll still need literature and history to engage with the narratives from the past that define the present. But it also means they’ll need repeated, meaningful practice in:

    • Identifying problems that no adult has pre-packaged.
    • Spotting unmet Jobs to Be Done where people are cobbling together workarounds.
    • Finding their comparative advantages rather than competing on narrow measures.
    • Designing and testing solutions that might fail.
    • Dealing with ambiguous feedback.
    • And exercising agency rather than just obedience.
    • Learning how to wrestle with problems that are complex, not just complicated.

    Traditional schooling trains students to compete for scarce slots–top class rankings, starting positions on teams, and admission to selective colleges–on standardized dimensions where everyone is measured the same way. That made sense when the goal was landing one of a limited number of corporate jobs. But entrepreneurship works differently. It rewards people who identify niches that are valuable but unattractive to large companies, and who figure out where they can meaningfully differentiate rather than trying to be marginally better than everyone else at the same thing.

    My prediction, then, is this:

    In the coming years, AI will allow companies to do more with fewer employees. At the same time, it will quietly lower the barriers to entrepreneurship and creative self-employment in ways we are only beginning to see. 

    The question for education is whether we will keep treating students primarily as future employees of large systems or help them become future innovators in a landscape where powerful new tools of creation are sitting right in front of them.

    For more on what the future looks like for today’s students, visit eSN’s Digital Learning hub.

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  • Report Delves Into How Indirect Rate Cost Policies Differ

    Report Delves Into How Indirect Rate Cost Policies Differ

    The Trump administration tried last year to cap indirect rate costs at 15 percent.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | gorodenkoff and Jacob Wackerhausen/iStock/Getty Images | FatCamera/E+/Getty Images

    Compared to private industry contractors and federal laboratories, universities receive less from the federal government to cover costs indirectly related to research, according to a study commissioned by research university associations.

    Indirect costs can include building maintenance, utilities and compliance with patient safety regulations. Currently, individual colleges and universities negotiate reimbursement rates with federal agencies, but the Trump administration has sought unsuccessfully to cap funding for indirect costs at 15 percent of the research grant. Federal courts have blocked those efforts, and a coalition of higher ed associations have since proposed their own model to change how the government funds research.

    The Association of American Universities (AAU) and the COGR commissioned Attain Partners, a consulting firm, to conduct the study in part to dispel confusion about the current approach to funding indirect costs.

    “It is important to note that the government’s approach to indirect cost accounting and reimbursement for universities and nonprofit research organizations is different than its approach for other entities conducting federally sponsored research,” the report states. “This fact has contributed to the resulting confusion—and that confusion, in turn, is now imperiling the funding needed for America’s research institutions to continue performing groundbreaking research that improves health, saves lives, and nourishes America’s innovation ecosystem.”

    One key goal of the study was to ascertain how indirect cost rates and reimbursement policies at universities compare to other research entities. Ultimately, the indirect cost rates weren’t comparable with private industry because policies differed. However, because private companies aren’t subject to the same rate caps as universities, “the effective reimbursement rate for universities’ actual indirect costs is likely lower than that of private industry,” according to the report. 

    Universities also pay upfront to cover operational costs related to research and only receive some of the money back via reimbursement. Such losses totaled $7.06 billion in fiscal year 2024, according to AAU.

    Another key question for the report was whether private and public universities have different reimbursement policies. Private universities tend to have higher reimbursement rates than public ones, leading some to suggest “private universities are gaming the indirect cost system to obtain more funding than other institutions or that are reasonable and necessary costs to conduct research,” according to the report.

    But the authors were quick to counter that idea, saying in the report that that belief “misrepresents the actual reasons for differences in rates between various universities.” Instead, the rate differences stem from location and the type of research being conducted, among other factors. Biomedical research and engineering tend to result in higher reimbursement rates.

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  • Mapping Out the “Current Moment” in College Admissions

    Mapping Out the “Current Moment” in College Admissions

    Few people understand the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end race-conscious admissions in higher education better than Julie Park, a University of Maryland professor who has been studying race in college enrollment and admissions since long before it became a national flashpoint.

    The case thrust her area of study into the limelight. She also served as a consulting expert on the side of Harvard University, one of two institutions—along with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—that Students for Fair Admissions sued over their race-conscious admissions policies.

    In her new book, Race, Class, and Affirmative Action (Harvard Education Press, 2026), Park explores how that seminal case has changed the admissions landscape, highlighting the ways the decision allows institutions to continue promoting racial diversity in their admissions processes. Written in early 2025, it also explores how President Trump has repeatedly wielded the SFFA decision as a tool to push forward anti-diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

    The book aims to “document the current moment” in admissions, Park writes in the introduction. She spoke with Inside Higher Ed over the phone about where things stand coming up on three years after the SFFA decision.

    The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

    Q: I appreciate that at the beginning of the book, you talk about your background, as well as how you got your start researching admissions. Could you talk a little bit about why you wanted to include some of those personal details in this book?

    A: I think because the book is written purposefully in a conversational tone, and I bring some of my own story in here and there, or some of my observations, that it just made sense to talk about who I am, right? When you read a research article, you don’t always get that perspective. But I think, like it or not, we all have world views or life experiences that have shaped how we might think about something like college admissions. So, I wanted to be upfront with some of my own experiences and background for readers. And also, I think, given that Asian Americans have been such a central part of the Harvard case, I wanted to explain that I myself am Korean American, Asian American. I grew up in this type of immigrant community that talked a lot about colleges. But, then at the same time, I have other experiences that have shaped me, as well.

    Q: From the very beginning of the book, you talk quite a bit about people’s perceptions of admissions and some of the myths that exist. Why do you think that college admissions are prone to mythologizing and misinformation?

    A: I wrestled with it a lot in my last book [Race on Campus: Debunking Myths with Data [Harvard Education Press, 2018]. Like it or not, I think some of these entrenched perceptions are here to stay, but I keep trying to correct the record, and I think others do as well. I think sometimes it comes just from maybe misunderstanding, right? We know that we live in this TL,DR [too long, didn’t read] society. People aren’t always interested in the nuance. And so, something like race-conscious admissions, which is complex, even for people working in higher ed—they don’t always understand that the process is so nuanced, right? So, people will say things like, ‘oh, it’s involving quotas’ or ‘oh, students are only getting in because of race.’ And we know that’s not true from the research.

    With young people, I think why they are vulnerable to some of these characterizations of race-conscious admissions is, when you’re applying to college, and if you’re 17 or 16, you kind of only know your own world. You know your own world the best. And so, sometimes within peer networks, the way people talk about college admissions can be really simplified. We hear people talk about, “oh, so-and-so got in, and they’re of this race, but so-and-so didn’t get in and they had higher SAT scores.” That becomes this urban legend, and that just kind of passes on, unfortunately, and reflects some of the popular discourse.

    Q: You spend some time in the book talking about the flaws in admissions that already existed pre-SFFA. What are some ways that privilege and bias manifests in the admission system that people might not be aware of?

    A: Oh, so many ways. People who are immersed in the admissions world might know this, but I think the general public is less aware of how things like college visits work, and who gets visited, who doesn’t get visited. I think the public have a sense of, “OK, private school kids are going to have a certain amount of privilege.” But it’s really layers upon layers; it’s not just one singular thing. If you connect the dots, and I talk about this somewhat in the book, you have this kind of pipeline where you have people who work in admissions offices, and then they go work at private schools. Like, do you think people just suddenly stop knowing each other? Of course not. Those are networks, for better or for worse.

    And then, athletic recruitment. I wrestled with this once with a journal article reviewer, because they said, “Well, isn’t athletics more diverse?” But I thought it was really fascinating—I think this made it into the end notes, it didn’t go into the actual text. Because they were arguing, “Oh, athletics is dominated by these more diverse sports,” like basketball, football—which is true. Football does tend to have more racial, ethnic diversity. So, I actually took the time and I looked at the rosters of different big athletic schools, like University of Michigan, Alabama, etc. And then I looked at the athletic rosters at small liberal arts colleges, as well. And even I was surprised by the lack of diversity overall. Football is what takes up our minds, and football does take up a certain amount of sports, but there are so many other teams—swimming, golf, lacrosse, etc. They just add up. So, the cumulative total athletics ends up being pretty white.

    Q: What are solutions for some of these things? Is there any way for colleges to separate out the people who are more on the “pay-to-play side,” versus people who have a passion and have succeeded in, say, an extracurricular despite their circumstances?

    A: It’s really hard to say. Being a parent now, I’m very aware that everything is paid; even to be kind of mediocre is kind of expensive. My older kid, bless his heart, we are not doing piano to become a piano star. And I, too, took piano lessons, and I was terrible, right? And I took them until I was, I don’t know, 13. I was never very good, and it cost a lot of money. But it was sort of just this developmental thing, and I still am, in a weird way, glad I did it, because I can read music.

    I just saw Alysa Liu, the figure skater—her dad said it cost about a million to have her career. So, to be really good, it costs so much money.

    So how would colleges cut through that? I think it’s really difficult. In terms of more systemic reforms, thinking of the measure that certain liberal arts colleges did take to reduce the number of spots in the incoming class that were allocated basically to athletic recruitment—could they do it again? Could they reduce those numbers even more? This is [Division III]. These kids aren’t getting scholarships or anything like that. It’s like, what if you just filled those teams with the students who were able to get admitted, anyway. I understand that these institutions are just really wedded to the status quo in certain respects, which is why you still see legacy, right?

    I do think [about] how to parse out the authentic student—I don’t know. And I raised this issue at the beginning and the end of the book: [There is] another big concern of what admissions has become in terms of performativity. It’s demanding on young people and just that stress and pressure to package yourself. I don’t think it’s healthy. I think it’d be a brave college to really reverse course.

    Q: In this book, in the context of both admissions and the Trump administration’s broad reading of SFFA, that they’ve applied to non–admissions-related things, you really call on colleges to take a bold stand. But I obviously think a lot of colleges would say, we can’t be singled out right now. Can you talk more about what you think colleges should be doing in this moment?

    A: After the decision in SFFA rolled out in 2023, college presidents were very public about condemning the decision, saying, “This is a terrible decision. We still value diversity. We value racial diversity.” They were very specific. How quickly things can change, right? I think it’s leadership, it’s the choice that people make. We just had this news [last week] that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI mandates, which were shut down in court—the Trump administration isn’t going to challenge that. But it’s just this roundabout—they got what they wanted, right? They got the compliance. They got preemptive, really preemptive compliance. And it’s really tricky. I mean, I’m not a college president, I’m not a general counsel, so I know I had the luxury of saying, “Stay true to yourself, everyone!” but I think these difficult times call for leadership.

    Of course, I would like them to stand up for racial and ethnic diversity, and I think they should. Right now, institutions probably feel safer talking about economic diversity. If that’s the way to at least keep diversity in the conversation, then that might be part of things as well. The Trump administration has shown itself hostile even to certain efforts to advance economic diversity. That’s the area where we have a much larger legal bandwidth, to pursue economic diversity intentionally.

    Q: The Trump administration has used the term “racial proxy” to describe some recruiting strategies, like geographic recruiting. What are your thoughts on how colleges should respond to that?

    A: The stuff from the Trump administration, it’s important to read carefully. They’re saying, “[You can’t use] this as a proxy for race,” and then the colleges can just say, “We’re not using it as a proxy for race,” and they have a whole track record of saying, “We value geographic diversity; we value economic diversity.” And, honestly, economic diversity isn’t a great proxy for race. If they’re trying to use that as a proxy, they’re failing, because we are seeing these major regressions, especially in Black enrollment.

    There’s a lot of bluster, and I know that sometimes institutions feel like they’re having to thread the needle or kind of maneuver things, but I don’t think they should back away from these efforts, because they’re greatly needed.

    Q: On the other side of the coin, you talk about things that made you hopeful in research for this book. Can you tell me about some of those things?

    A: It’s been such a demoralizing year. I think it is a hopeful book, or at least—I’m amazed that I closed it out and I said, “I did the deep dive into the research, and when I looked at what things actually said, I have hope.” Now, I recognize, in this current era, it’s just not about what’s legal or not legal; it’s about what this administration wants. Let’s hope—let’s collectively hope—that it won’t always be this way, and look at the options that still exist, both in the law and what institutions can do.

    I talk about the Croson case, which is a little-known Supreme Court case from 1989. There is some legal precedent that says, “Hey, [institutions] actually could defend their efforts to expand access by saying that they have these programs either due to addressing specific past discrimination by that institution or entity, or through passive participation in some sort of industry that resulted in racial inequality.” Well, guess what? Everyone possibly participated in [such an] industry; the standardized testing industry, that’s a huge one, right?

    I know it doesn’t feel politically feasible in the current era, but I think [continuing to use race in a limited way] is something that institutions should not dismiss. So that is something that gave me hope, just to see that that the door is not totally shut.

    And I think reading the actual [SFFA] ruling, while it is not ideal, to recognize that it could have been worse. I think that the court tried to be as specific as possible in affirming that race still matters to individuals’ experiences, that institutions can still consider how students talk about race and the relevance of race to their lives and traits valued by institutions.

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