Dixon has faced blowback for his political activism before and remained in his role at UNC.
Eros Hoagland/Getty Images
Officials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill placed Professor Dwayne Dixon on leave Monday while the university investigates his “alleged advocacy of politically motivated violence,” said Dean Stoyer, UNC Chapel Hill’s vice chancellor for communications and marketing.
Dixon, an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, used to be a member of Silver Valley Redneck Revolt, a chapter of the antifascist, antiracist, anticapitalist political group Redneck Revolt. The group was formed in 2016 and some members, including Dixon, were present at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., to provide armed security and medical assistance to counterprotesters. Redneck Revolt disbanded in 2019 and has no active chapters, according to its website.
In a 2018 interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dixon described himself as an “anarchist,” and he is no stranger to blowback for his political activism and support for gun rights. He was arrested for bringing a semiautomatic rifle to a Ku Klux Klan counterprotest in Durham, N.C., in 2018—the case was later dismissed as unconstitutional on the grounds that the charges violated Dixon’s First and Second Amendment rights. He was also among 20 people who protected counterprotesters in Durham when white supremacists protested the removal of a Confederate statue in 2017. Through all these events, Dixon remained employed at UNC Chapel Hill.
Why is Dixon in the hot seat now? The answer is convoluted, but it begins with fliers on the Georgetown University campus.
On Sept. 24, Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, posted on X a photo of a flier on the Georgetown campus in Washington, D.C., that read, “Hey Fascist! Catch!”—a nod to engraving on the casing of bullets left behind by Kirk’s suspected killer—and “The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.” The flier also included a QR code to a Google form for a potential Georgetown chapter of the John Brown Gun Club, a Redneck Revolt affiliate organization known as a “leftist gun-rights group” with multiple independent chapters, including one in the D.C. area, according to the Counter Extremism Project. It “arms itself to defend against far-right violence and often appears as a security force at protests to protect against expected far-right violence,” the CEP wrote. Google has since removed the form for violating its terms of service.
University officials removed the fliers and reported them to the FBI. Education Secretary Linda McMahon also weighed in: “At a moment like this, Georgetown has to determine what it stands for as an institution … Allowing violent rhetoric to fester on our nation’s campuses without consequences is dangerous. It must be condemned by institutional leaders,” she wrote on X. “I am grateful to those who spoke out against this and made noise about the posters on campus—you made a difference. There is power in speaking up to reveal these hateful ideologies that have incited deadly violence.”
Kolvet posted again, this time linking to a recent Fox News article that cited Dixon’s involvement in Redneck Revolt based on an old blog post that has since been taken down. “I posted this flyer our team spotted at Georgetown University, and now we find out professors at ‘elite’ schools are members of this group and its offshoots,” Kolvet wrote. “This professor must be immediately fired and the group/network investigated.”
Dixon was placed on leave Monday, which will “allow the University to investigate these allegations in a manner that protects the integrity of its assessment,” UNC’s Stoyer said in his statement. “Depending upon the nature and circumstances of this activity, this conduct could be grounds for disciplinary action up to and including potential termination of employment.”
UNC Chapel Hill officials declined to answer any other questions about Dixon and did not say whether Kolvet’s post or the Fox News article led to the investigation. Dixon did not reply to a request for comment but told the student newspaper The Daily Tarheel that he left the Silver Valley Redneck Revolt in 2018.
A Change.org petition to reinstate Dixon is circulating and as of Wednesday evening had more than 900 signatures. In a statement Wednesday, the North Carolina chapter of the American Association of University Professors, as well as UNC Chapel Hill’s AAUP president, condemned the university’s actions and demanded Dixon be reinstated.
“Right-wing activists are attacking Dixon for prior membership in a group that has been inactive since 2019, and are baselessly connecting him to flyers allegedly posted by a different group on a different campus outside of North Carolina. Fox News picked up the story on September 27, 2025, without verifying the existence of the flyers, and apparently this was enough for UNC’s administration to remove a professor from the classroom in the middle of the semester and bar him from campus,” the statement read. “Let’s call this what it is: UNC administrators are capitulating to a call from a right-wing group, infamous for attacking faculty, to fire a professor based on an unsubstantiated rumor.”
Dixon joins the ranks of dozens of college and university faculty members who have been placed on leave, disciplined or fired in the weeks since Kirk was shot and killed. All of these professors have been investigated after right-wing personalities identified them on social media. Two of them—Michael Hook, who was placed on leave for social media comments he made about Kirk’s death, and Thomas Alter, who was terminated after being accused of inciting violence during a speech—have been reinstated by court orders.
The Lane Community College Board of Education apologized to President Stephanie Bulger at its Tuesday meeting for how members disrespected her on the basis of her race and sex, Lookout Eugene-Springfield reported.
The board’s apology follows the findings of an investigative report released in August that determined board members were frequently dismissive of Bulger—a Black woman—and often deferred questions to male staff members. The report found that former board chair Zach Mulholland was frequently hostile toward Bulger and often cut her off in their interactions. (He was also found to have physically intimidated a student at a board meeting.) Although Mulholland was censured by the board last month, he has resisted calls to step down.
Much of the report focused on Mulholland, but other members were also implicated.
“The board recognizes and is accountable for the harm caused to you, President Bulger,” said Austin Fölnagy, the current board chair, who was also accused of dismissive behavior. “We are deeply sorry for the negative impact our behavior has had on you and the college community at large. President Bulger, please accept the board’s apology for treating you badly.”
He added that the board is “committed to learning from our shortcomings” and will take “remedial actions including training in bias, discrimination and harassment” this fiscal year.
Bulger has been president of the Oregon community college since July 2022.
University of Missouri president Mun Choi is pressing local officials about crime rates near the Columbia campus after a student from neighboring Stephens College died Sunday following a downtown shooting, KCUR and the Columbia Missourian reported.
The president’s demand to address the city’s “rampant crime rate” has gathered some support, but critics say that his characterization of the local climate is overexaggerated, pointing to data from the local police department.
The shooting, which also resulted in serious injuries to two others, took place early Saturday morning on the college town’s main street. One individual, not from the city, got into a verbal dispute and then opened fire toward the people he was confronting. The three individuals he hit, however, were bystanders.
In a letter sent the same day as the shooting, Choi called on city and county leaders to bolster the police presence and prosecute crimes to the fullest extent of the law. He also urged them to take down encampments of unhoused individuals, pass a loitering notice and repeal policies that “attract criminals to the region.”
But when asked during a press conference Monday what policies and practices he believes “attract criminals,” the MU president said he had none to cite. Neither the shooter in the Saturday incident nor any of the victims have been identified as unhoused, according to local reporting.
“That is why I am asking [local leaders] to evaluate the processes that we have and the practices,” he explained. “Are we giving the impression to potential criminals that this is a region that doesn’t take crime enforcement as well as the punishment that comes with it seriously?”
Choi later added that students and local business owners have been raising safety concerns about the city’s unhoused population. According to university data, the number of arrests and trespassing violations issued to the unhoused has “gone up dramatically” since 2019, he said.
That is different, however, from what some local police department data shows.
In a Facebook post Monday, the city’s mayor, Barbara Buffaloe, said there have been 58 gunshot incidents since the beginning of the year. That’s down from 105 in the first nine months of 2024.
Columbia Police Department chief Jill Schlude did note in a separate letter, however, that since 2019 more crimes have been concentrated downtown, occurring between midnight and 3 a.m.
“The connection between late-night social activity and violence is clear, and that is where we continue to focus our efforts,” Schlude said.
Regardless of any disputes over the data, multiple government officials—including Gov. Mike Kehoe, several members of the Columbia City Council and Mayor Buffaloe—have voiced support for Choi’s general call to improve safety. Buffaloe has also committed to forming a task force on the matter, and the CPD has outlined plans to increase the police presence downtown.
“Statistics cannot be used solely as a reason for us to move away from what needs to be done in the city of Columbia,” Choi said.
Upward transfer is viewed as a mechanism to provide college students with an accessible and affordable on-ramp to higher education through two-year colleges, but breakdowns in the credit-transfer process can hinder a student’s progress toward their degree.
A recent survey by Sova and the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board found the average college student loses credits transferring between institutions and has to repeat courses they’ve already completed. Some students stop out of higher education altogether because transfer is too challenging.
CourseWise is a new tool that seeks to mitigate some of these challenges by deploying AI to identify and predict transfer equivalencies using existing articulation agreements between institutions. So far, the tool, part of the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network, has been adopted at over 120 colleges and universities, helping to provide a centralized database for credit-transfer processes and automate course matching.
In the most recent episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Zachary Pardos, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, about how CourseWise works, the human elements of credit transfer and the need for reliable data in transfer.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Q: As someone who’s been in the education-technology space for some time, can you talk about this boom of ed-tech applications for AI? It seems like it popped up overnight, but you and your colleagues are a testament to the fact that it’s been around for decades.
Zach Pardos, associate professor at UC Berkeley and the developer of CourseWise
A: As soon as a chat interface to AI became popularized, feasible, plausible and useful, it opened up the space to a lot of people, including those who don’t necessarily have a computer science background. So in a way, it’s great. You get a lot more accessibility to this kind of application and work. But there have also been precepts—things that the field has learned, things that people have learned who’ve been working in this space for a while—and you don’t want to have to repeat all those same errors. And in many ways, even though the current generation of AI is different in character, a lot of those same precepts and missteps still apply here.
Q: What is your tool CourseWise and why is it necessary in the ed-tech space?
A: CourseWise is a spinoff of our higher education and AI work from UC Berkeley. It is meant to be a credit-mobility accelerator for students and institutions. It’s needed because the greatest credit-mobility machine in America, the thing that gets families up in socioeconomic status, is education. And it’s the two-year–to–four-year transition often that does that, where you can start at a more affordable school that gives two-year associate’s degrees and then transition to a four-year school.
But that pathway often breaks down. It’s often too expensive to maintain, and so for there to be as many pathways as possible that are legitimate between institutions, between learning experiences, basically acknowledging what a student has learned and not making them do it again, requires us to embrace technology.
Q: Can you talk more about the challenges with transfer and where course equivalency and transfer pipelines can break down in the transition between the two- and four-year institutions?
A: Oftentimes, when a student applies to transfer, they’ll have their transcript evaluated [by the receiving institution], and it’ll be evaluated against existing rules.
Sometimes, when it’s between institutions that have made an effort to establish robust agreements, the student will get most of their credit accepted. But in instances where there aren’t such strong ties, there’s going to be a lot of credit that gets missed, and if the rules don’t exist, if the institution does go through the extra effort, or the student requests extra effort to consider credit that hasn’t been considered before, this can be a very lengthy process.
Sometimes that decision doesn’t get made until after the student’s first or second semester, semesters in which they maybe had to decide whether or not to take such a course. So it really is a matter of not enough acknowledgment of existing courses and then that process to acknowledge the equivalency of past learning being a bit too slow to best serve a learner.
Q: Yeah. Attending a two-year college with the hopes of earning a bachelor’s degree is designed to help students save time and money. So it’s frustrating to hear that some of these students are not getting their transfer equivalencies semesters into their progress at the four-year, because that’s time and energy lost.
A: Absolutely. It’s unfortunately, in many cases, a false promise that this is the cheaper way to go, and it ends up, in many cases, being more expensive.
Q: We can talk about the transfer pipeline a lot, but I’ll say one more thing: The free marketplace of higher education and the idea that a student can transfer anywhere is also broken down by a lack of transfer-articulation agreements, where the student’s credits aren’t recognized or they’re only recognized in part. That really hinders the student’s ability to say, “This is where I want to go to college,” because they’re subject to the whims of the institutions and their agreements between each other.
A: That’s right, and it’s not really an intentional [outcome]. However, systems that have a power dynamic often have a tendency not to change, and that resistance to change, kind of implicitly, is a commitment not to serve students correctly.
Accreditors Weigh In
The Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions (C-RAC) supports the exploration and application of AI solutions within learning evaluation and credit transfer, according to a forthcoming statement from the group to be released Oct. 6. Three accrediting commissions, MSCHE, SACSCOC and WSCUC, are holding a public webinar conversation to discuss transfer and learning mobility, with a focus on AI and credit transfer on Oct. 6. Learn more here.
So what you do need is a real type of intervention. Because it’s not in any one spot, you could argue, and you could also make the argument that every institution is so idiosyncratic in its processes that you would have to do a separate study at every institution to figure out, “OK, how do we fix things here?” But what our research is showing on the Berkeley end is that there are regularities. There are patterns in which credit is evaluated, and where you could modify that workflow to both better serve the institution, so it’s not spending so many resources on manually considering equivalencies, and serve the student better by elevating opportunities for credit acceptance in a more efficient way.
That’s basically what CourseWise is. It’s meant to be an intervention that serves the institution and serves the student by recognizing these common patterns to credit acceptance and leveraging AI to alleviate the stress and friction that currently exists in affording that credit.
Q: Can you walk us through where CourseWise fits into the workflow? How does it work practically?
A: CourseWise is evolving in its feature set and has a number of exciting features ahead, which maybe we’ll get to later. But right now, the concrete features are that on the administrator side, on the staff or admissions department side, you upload an institution’s existing articulation agreements—so if you’re a four-year school, it’s your agreements to accept credit from two-year schools.
So then, when you receive transcripts from prospective transfer students, the system will evaluate that transcript to tell you which courses match existing rules of yours, where you’ve guaranteed credit, and then it’ll also surface courses that don’t already have an agreement.
If there’s a high-confidence AI match, it’ll bring that to the administrator’s attention and say, “You should consider this, and here’s why.” It’ll also bring to their attention, “Here’s peer institutions of yours that have already accepted that course as course-to-course credit.”
CourseWise compares classes in institutions’ catalogs to identify existing agreements for credit transfer and possible course-to-course transfers to improve student outcomes.
Q: Where are you getting that peer-to-peer information from?
A: We think of CourseWise as a network, and that information on what peer institutions are doing is present. We have a considerable number of institutions from the same system. California is one—we have 13 California institutions, and we’re working on more. The other is State University of New York, SUNY. We have the SUNY system central participating in a pilot. It’ll be up to the individual institutions to adopt the usage. But we have data at the system-center level, and because of that centralized data, we are able to say, for every SUNY institution that’s considering one of the AI credit acceptance requests, give that context of, “Here are other four-year peer institutions within your system that already accept this—not just as generic elective credit, but accept it as perhaps degree satisfying, or at least course-to-course credit.”
Q: That’s awesome; I’m sure it’s a time saver. But where do the faculty or staff members come back into the equation, to review what the AI produced or to make sure that those matches are appropriate?
A: Faculty are a critical part of the governance of credit equivalency in different systems. They have different roles; often it’s assumed that faculty approve individual courses. That’s true in most cases. Sometimes it’s committees; different departments will have a committee of faculty, or they may even have a campus standing committee that considers this curricular committee that makes those decisions.
But what CourseWise is doing right now to incorporate faculty appropriately is we’re allowing for the institution to define what is that approval workflow and the rules around that. If it’s a lower-division statistics class, can your admission staff make that decision on acceptability, even if it’s not existing in a current agreement?
Under what circumstances does it need to be routed to a faculty member to approve? What kind of information should be provided to that faculty member if they don’t have it, making it easy to request information, like requesting a syllabus be uploaded by the sending institution or something to that effect?
Oftentimes, this kind of approval workflow is done through a series of emails, and so we’re trying to internalize that and increase the transparency. You have different cases that get resolved with respect to pairs of courses, and you can see that case. You can justify why a decision was made, and it can be revisited if there’s a rebuttal to that decision.
Now, over time, what we hope the field can see as a potential is perhaps for certain students, let’s say, coming from out of state; it’s more a faculty committee who gives feedback to a kind of acceptance algorithm that is then able to make a call, and they can veto that call. But it creates a default; like with ChatGPT, there’s an alignment committee that helps give feedback to ChatGPT answers so that it is better in line with what most users find to be a high-quality response. Because there’s no way that we can proactively, manually accept or evaluate every pair of institutions to one another in the United States—there’s just no FTE count that would allow for that, which means that prospective students from out of state can’t get any guarantee if we keep it with that approach.
Faculty absolutely have control. We’re setting up the whole workflow so an institution can define that. But one of the options we want to give institutions is the option to say, “Well, if the student is coming from out of state or coming from this or that system, you can default to a kind of faculty-curated AI policy.”
Q: That’s cool. I’ve heard from some colleges that they have full teams of staff who just review transcripts every single day. Having a centralized database where you can see past experiences of which courses have been accepted or rejected—that can save so much time and energy. And that’s not even half of what CourseWise is doing.
A: Absolutely, and we work closely with leadership and these institutions to get feedback. And one of the people involved in that early feedback is Isaiah Vance at the Texas A&M University system, and he’s given us similar feedback where, if you have a new registrar or a new leadership that comes in, and they want to know how good the data is, they want that kind of transparency of how were decisions made, if you have that transparency in that organization to look that over, it can really help an institution get comfortable with those past decisions or decide how they should change in the future.
Q: What are some of the outcomes you’ve seen or the feedback you’ve heard from institutions that are using the tool?
A: Wehave a study that we’re about to embark upon to measure a before-and-after change in how institutions are doing business and how much it’s saving time or not, versus a control of not having the system when making these decisions.
We don’t have the results of that yet. We do have a paper out on where articulation officers, for example, are spending their time. They’re spending a lot of time on looking for the right course that might articulate. So we definitely have identified there is a problem. It’s an open question to what degree CourseWise is remedying that. We certainly are working nonstop to remedy it, but we’re going to measure that rigorously over the next year.
Some early feedback is positive, but also interesting that institutions, many of them, are spending a lot of time getting that initial data uploaded, catalog descriptions, articulations and the rigorousness and validity of that data. Maybe it’s spread across a number of Excel spreadsheets at some institutions—that problem is real—and so I think it’s going to take a field-level or industry-level effort to make sure that everyone can be on board with that data-wrangling stage.
Q: That was my hypothesis, that the tool has a lot of benefits once everything’s all set up and they’ve done the labor of love to hunt down and upload all these documents, find out which offices they’re hiding behind.
A: There are a number of private foundations, funders who are invested in that particular area. So I’m optimistic that there’s a solution out there and that we’ll be a part of that.
Q: I wonder if we can talk about how this tool can improve the student experience with transfer and what it means to have these efficiencies and database to lean back on.
A: Right now, most of the activity is with the four-year schools, because they’re the ones uploading the articulations. They’re the ones evaluating transcripts. But in the next four months, we’re releasing a student-facing planner, which will directly affect students at the sending institutions.
This planner will allow a student who’s at a community college to choose what destination school and major they’re interested in that’s part of the CourseWise network. Then [CourseWise provides] what courses they need to take, or options of courses to take that will transfer into the degree program that they’re seeking, such that when they transfer, they would only have to do the equivalent of two full years of academic work at that receiving school.
It would also let them know what other majors at other institutions they may want to consider because of how much of the credit that they’ve already taken is accepted into the degree programs there. So the student may be 20 percent of the way in completing their initially intended destination program, but maybe they’re 60 percent of the way to another program that they didn’t realize.
Q: What’s next for CourseWise?
A: So the student part is the navigation, the administrator articulation expansion and policy for expansion is creating the pathways; you need a GPS in order to know what the paths are and how to traverse them as a learner. But also states—I mentioned regularities—there are commonalities in how these processes take place, but there’s also very specific state-level concerns and structures, like common course numbering, credit for prior learning, an emphasis on community colleges accepting professional certificate programs and so forth.
I think the future is both increasing that student-facing value, helping with achievement from the student point of view. But then also leveraging the fundamental AI equivalency engine and research to bring in these other ways of acknowledging credit, whether it’s AP credit or job-training credit or certificates or cross-walking between all these different ways in which higher education chooses to speak about learning, right?
If you have a requirement satisfied in general education in California, how do you bring that to New York, given New York’s general education requirements? Are there crosswalks that can be suggested and established with the aid of AI? And I’m excited about connecting these different sorts of dialects of education using technology.
First-generation students are twice as likely to leave college without completing a bachelor’s degree than their peers, even if they come from higher-income backgrounds and come to college academically prepared, according to a new report from the Common App. The findings suggest these factors do make a difference for student success outcomes but don’t erase other barriers first-generation students might face.
The report, released Thursday and the fourth in a series on first-generation students, used data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center to track enrollment, persistence and completion rates for 785,300 Common App applicants in the 2016–17 application cycle. (Students whose parents didn’t complete bachelor’s degrees made up 32 percent of the sample.) The report also took into account how a range of factors could affect student outcomes, including students’ incomes, their levels of academic preparation and how well-resourced their colleges are.
Previous studies have shown that “first-generation students are certainly not a monolith,” said Sarah Nolan, lead author of the report and a research scientist at Common App. “We were hoping to give readers a sense for … which first-generation students might in particular need more support.”
The good news is the report found first-generation applicants enroll in college at rates on par with their peers. Over 90 percent of Common App applicants, first-generation and otherwise, enrolled in college within six years of applying.
But first-generation students were slightly more likely to not enroll immediately (17 percent) or to enroll at a two-year college (12 percent) compared to other applicants (14 percent and 4 percent, respectively). That gap mostly closed when comparing students with strong academic records, defined as having SAT or ACT scores or GPAs in the top quartile. According to the report, that finding may be because a higher share of first-generation students may need extra coursework before enrolling in a four-year institution.
Students might also work to save up for college first or opt for community colleges’ more affordable tuition rates, the report suggested. Lower-income first-generation students, who qualified for application fee waivers, were also less likely to immediately enroll at four-year institutions and more likely to first enroll at a community college compared to similar students not from first-generation backgrounds.
Over all, “we are really heartened to see that there’s really not very strong differences in college enrollment,” Nolan said.
Completion rates, however, are another story. While about 70 percent of first-generation students do complete a bachelor’s degree within six years of enrolling, the report found stark disparities between them and their peers.
About half of first-generation students completed a bachelor’s degree within four years, compared to 68 percent of continuing-generation students, a gap of 18 percentage points. And that disparity persisted when looking at six-year graduation rates. About 69 percent of first-generation students graduated within six years, compared to 86 percent of continuing-generation students, a 17-percentage-point difference.
These gaps shrank but didn’t disappear for first-generation students with strong academic records and higher incomes. Academically prepared first-generation students were twice as likely to disenroll with no degree than their continuing-generation counterparts, 14 percent and 6 percent, respectively. In a similar vein, 24 percent of higher-income first-generation students left college without a degree within six years compared to 12 percent of their continuing-generation counterparts. Even for first-generation students who were both academically prepared and relatively well-off, these gaps remained.
Differences in the institutions first-generation and continuing-generation students attend—and the levels of supports they offer—didn’t account for completion-rate gaps, either.
Even when attending the exact same institutions, first-generation students were 10 percentage points less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years than continuing-generation students.
However, higher per-student expenditures did seem to contribute to better student success outcomes. At institutions that spent at least $20,000 per student, 84 percent of first-generation graduated within six years, compared to 94 percent of continuing-generation students. The gap between first-generation and continuing-generation students’ completion rates widened to 15 percentage points at colleges that spent more moderately, $10,000 to $15,000 per student, and 17 percentage points at colleges with low per-student expenditures, less than $7,500.
These findings suggest that, while first-generation students disproportionately face financial constraints and barriers to college prep, it doesn’t explain away their graduation rate gaps. And students attending less resourced institutions isn’t a full explanation, either. Other obstacles must be at play.
What those barriers are may be “best answered by speaking with first-generation students themselves and unpacking what’s happening at the individual level,” Nolan said. But first-generation students likely struggle with limited access to information about higher ed and its “hidden curriculum” of expectations, regardless of income, high school performance or which college they attend.
“Having the right resources at the right time on the pathway—that’s really critical for student success,” Nolan added.
The stakes of success are high—the report found many first-generation students spent considerable time and money on college with no degree to show for it. Almost a third of first-generation students who didn’t earn a degree were enrolled for at least four years.
But a hopeful finding is that “additional investment can be quite positive for helping these students really actualize their potential,” Nolan said.
In today’s rapidly evolving workforce landscape, higher education institutions face mounting pressure to demonstrate value, relevance and return on investment. Amid this challenge lies an underutilized strategy with remarkable potential: credit for prior learning.
We’ve long recognized CPL’s benefits for students. Learners who receive CPL credits are more likely to complete their degrees (49 percent vs. 27 percent for those without) and, on average, they earn 17.6 additional credits, finish nine to 14 months sooner and save between $1,500 and $10,200 in tuition costs (CAEL). But what’s often overlooked is CPL’s power to transform relationships between educational institutions and employers—creating a win-win-win for students, institutions and industry.
Beyond a Student Benefit
The traditional narrative around CPL emphasizes student advantages: increased enrollment, improved completion rates and reduced time to graduation. These metrics matter tremendously, but they tell only part of the story.
CPL can serve as a bridge between academia and industry, creating powerful new partnerships. When colleges and universities embrace robust CPL programs, they send a clear message to employers: We value the training and development you provide. Recognizing corporate training as creditworthy learning demonstrates respect for workplace knowledge and underscores higher education’s commitment to real-world relevance.
Employer and Workforce Gains
For employers, CPL validates that their internal training programs have academic merit. This recognition strengthens recruitment and retention efforts, as workers see clear pathways to advance their education without duplicating learning they’ve already mastered. Companies that invest in employee development also gain educational partners who understand industry needs and value the attributes that drive employee success.
The benefits extend further: Organizations with tuition remission or reimbursement programs can reduce costs while enhancing employee motivation and persistence.
Deeper Collaboration Between Higher Ed and Industry
As institutions evaluate workplace training for credit equivalency, they gain invaluable insights into industry practices and skill needs. This exchange allows colleges to refine curricula to better meet market demand, ensuring graduates possess the competencies employers seek—not just those defined within academic silos.
The hard but necessary conversations—between faculty and corporate training leaders—help ensure CPL evaluations are rigorous and relevant. Key questions include: Why include certain topics but not others? How do we know participants can demonstrate knowledge? Does the training align with broader disciplinary or leadership needs, or is it niche? These discussions strengthen both educational and workplace outcomes.
Reimagining CPL
The future of higher education lies in breaking down artificial barriers between academic and workplace learning. By embracing CPL as a cornerstone strategy—not only for student success but also for employer partnerships—institutions can position themselves at the nexus of education and employment.
This approach doesn’t diminish academic rigor; it expands our understanding of where and how meaningful learning occurs. Done well, CPL creates pathways that honor all learning, regardless of where it happens. And for learners, the message is clear: Your hard work counts.
In recent weeks, the plight of Gazan students and scholars accepted to UK universities has gained attention in British and international media. These individuals are recipients of highly competitive scholarships such as Chevening, as well as other academic awards. They have earned their place at some of the most prestigious institutions in the United Kingdom. Their achievements are remarkable by any standard, but especially so given that they were reached under the harshest conditions imaginable: the collapse of Gaza’s educational infrastructure under bombardment, the absence of functioning universities, and the daily struggle for survival amidst man-made famine and starvation, displacement, and violent death.
Yet despite this extraordinary resilience, these students faced the risk of losing their places before they could even set foot in the UK. The obstacle was not academic performance or funding but rather a bureaucratic and logistical impasse deriving from the Home Office requirement to provide biometric data. Following the brutal assault by Hamas and other armed organisations on Israeli civilians and military bases on October 7th, 2023 and the horrific devastation Israel has unleashed on the Palestinians in Gaza since, the Visa Application Centre (VAC) in Gaza has been closed, thus preventing biometric processing.
Support for Gazan Students
As Israeli academics organised under the banner of the Black Flag Action Group, opposed to the ongoing war in Gaza, we mobilised in support of these students. Over 140 signatories, including Israeli students and scholars at British universities as well as Israeli graduates from British universities, urged the UK government to act decisively and inclusively. In our open letter, we stressed that no administrative hurdle should prevent prospective students from taking up the places they have already earned. When laboratories, libraries, lecture halls and archives lie in ruins, the opportunity to study abroad is not just a personal achievement; it constitutes a lifeline for the ongoing intellectual and professional life of Gazan Palestinians. To have denied these students their places would have been to contradict the UK’s own commitments under schemes like Chevening, which are premised on the idea that education can foster leadership, dialogue, and international understanding.
Window of Hope and Future Implications
On 3 September 2025, the UK government announced that it would expedite visas for Chevening scholars and others to travel to a third country for biometric processing. We were also very relieved to hear that a group of 34 Palestinian students with places at UK universities have safely arrived in the UK to begin their studies after being evacuated from Gaza last week. These are surely welcome steps, but urgent policy questions for higher education in the UK still remain, including what seem to be the remaining rules preventing students from Gaza from bringing family members with them. In fact, as recently reported by the BBC at least four mothers and one father have so far declined places because they would not leave their children behind. As the recent public discussion shows, these go beyond the immediate emergency and touch on structural issues that universities and government alike must confront:
Visa and Mobility Frameworks: Current biometric requirements are ill-suited to situations of war and humanitarian crisis. Universities and advocacy groups must press the Home Office to establish flexible, transparent, and accountable procedures for students from conflict zones.
Equity of Access: Scholarship schemes such as Chevening are designed to promote global leadership. Yet their credibility is undermined if access is contingent not only on merit but also on whether students can survive a war zone and navigate opaque visa procedures.
Moral Responsibility of universities to students and their dependents: UK institutions that have offered places to Gazan students cannot treat their admission as symbolic. They must actively lobby the government, provide legal and financial assistance, and ensure that students’ right to education is not hollow.
The plight of Gazan students is not an abstract problem. It is about gifted men and women who have already demonstrated courage, brilliance, and commitment. Universities, civil society, and policymakers have an ethical obligation to work together to ensure that the promise of higher education for Gazan students in the British system of higher education will not be abandoned at the very moment it is most needed.
With 18 per cent of students reporting mental health difficulties, a figure which has tripled in just seven years, universities are navigating a crisis.
The student experience can compound many of the risk factors for poor mental health – from managing constrained budgets and navigating the cost of learning crisis, to moving away from established support systems, and balancing high-stakes assessment with course workload and part-time work.
In response, universities provide a range of free support services, including counselling and wellbeing provision, alongside specialist mental health advisory services. But if we’re honest, these services are under strain. Despite rising expenditure, they’re still often under-resourced, overstretched, and unable to keep pace with growing demand. With staff-student ratios at impossible levels and wait times for therapeutic support often exceeding ten weeks, some students are turning to alternatives for more immediate care.
And in this void, artificial intelligence is stepping in. While ChatGPT-written essays dominate the sector’s AI discussions, the rise of “pastoral AI” highlights a far more urgent and overlooked AI use case – with consequences more troubling than academic misconduct.
Affective conversations
For the uninitiated, the landscape of “affective” or “pastoral” AI is broad. Mainstream tools like Microsoft’s Copilot or OpenAI’s ChatGPT are designed for productivity, not emotional support. Yet research suggests that users increasingly turn to them for exactly that – seeking help with breakups, mental health advice, and other life challenges, as well as essay writing. While affective conversations may account for only a small proportion of overall use (under three per cent in some studies), the full picture is poorly understood.
Then there are AI “companions” such as Replika or Character.AI – chatbots built specifically for affective use. These are optimised to listen, respond with empathy, offer intimacy, and provide virtual friendship, confidants, or even “therapy”.
This is not a fringe phenomenon. Replika claims over 25 million users, while Snapchat’s My AI counts more than 150 million. The numbers are growing fast. As the affective capacity of these tools improves, they are becoming some of the most popular and intensively used forms of generative AI – and increasingly addictive.
A recent report found that users spend an average of 86 minutes a day with AI companions – more than on Instagram or YouTube, and not far behind TikTok. These bots are designed to keep users engaged, often relying on sycophantic feedback loops that affirm worldviews regardless of truth or ethics. Because large language models are trained in part through human feedback, its output is often highly sycophantic – “agreeable” responses which are persuasive and pleasing – but these can become especially risky in emotionally charged conversations, especially with vulnerable users.
And it’s young people who are engaging with them most. More than 70 per cent of companion app users are aged 18 to 35, and two-thirds of Character.AI’s users are 18 to 24 – the same demographic that makes up the majority of our student population.
The potential harm here is not speculative. It is real and affecting students right now. Yet “pastoral” AI use remains almost entirely absent from higher education’s AI conversations. That is a mistake. With lawsuits now spotlighting cases of AI “encouraged” suicides among vulnerable young people – many of whom first encountered AI through academic use – the sector cannot afford to ignore this.
Paint a clearer picture
Understanding why students turn to AI for pastoral support might help. Reports highlight loneliness and vulnerability as key indicators. One found that 17 per cent of young people valued AI companions because they were “always available,” while 12 per cent said they appreciated being able to share things they could not tell friends or family. Another reported that 12 per cent of young people were using chatbots because they had no one else to talk to – a figure that rose to 23 per cent among vulnerable young people, who were also more likely to use AI for emotional support or therapy.
We talk often about belonging as the cornerstone of student success and wellbeing – with reducing loneliness a key measure of institutional effectiveness. Pastoral AI use suggests policymakers may have much to learn from this agenda. More thinking is needed to understand why the lure of an always-available, non-judgemental digital “companion” feels so powerful to our students – and what that tells us about our existing support.
Yet AI discussions in higher education remain narrowly focused, on academic integrity and essay writing. Our evidence base reflects this: the Student Generative AI Survey – arguably the best sector-wide tool we have – gives little attention to pastoral or wellbeing-related uses. The result is, however, that data remains fragmented and anecdotal on this area of significant risk. Without a fuller sector-specific understanding of student pastoral AI use, we risk stalling progress on developing effective, sector-wide strategies.
This means institutions need to start a different kind of AI conversation – one grounded in ethics, wellbeing, and emotional care. It will require drawing on different expertise: not just academics and technologists, but also counsellors, student services staff, pastoral advisers, and mental health professionals. These are the people best placed to understand how AI is reshaping the emotional lives of our students.
Any serious AI strategy must recognise that students are turning to these tools not just for essays, but for comfort and belonging too, and we must offer something better in return.
If some of our students find it easier to confide in chatbots than in people, we need to confront what that says about the accessibility and design of our existing support systems, and how we might improve and resource them. Building a pastoral AI strategy is less about finding a perfect solution, but more about treating pastoral AI seriously, as a mirror which reflects back at us student loneliness, vulnerabilities, and institutional support gaps. These reflections should push us to re-centre these experiences, to reimagine our pastoral support provision, into an image that’s genuinely and unapologetically human.
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” declared the 47th president in a post earlier this year on Truth Social. To lure more film productions back to America, Trump ordered the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade Representative to place a 100% tariff on foreign films.
Hollywood went into panic mode. But the summer months passed without any update from the White House. Then, on Monday, Trump renewed his calls for a foreign-film tariff.
Much has been made about the financial implications of Trump’s shocking movie mandate. But beyond the economic concerns, both the industry and elected officials alike have failed to consider the broader constitutional implications of the president’s chaotic posts, should the tariffs actually be implemented.
Nestled in his posts, declaring offshore film productions a “National Security threat,” Trump further justified the tariffs this year by labeling foreign films as “propaganda.” For any American who cares about free speech, that should be the cue to jump up and holler, “Cut!”
“Propaganda” carries an ominous connotation, one that those in power have often used to censor speech they dislike. But no matter what the president declares to be propaganda, whether movies or any other medium, it is still protected speech. That protection extends to both making and watching films, regardless of where they were produced, as the First Amendment safeguards not only the right to speak, but also the right to receive information and ideas.
Artists have the right to express their ideas, even when such ideas irk those in power.
Details are incredibly murky, and the White House clarified in May that “no final decisions” have been made on what the policy would look like. But Trump’s threats to use the government’s might to financially punish Hollywood for working with foreign filmmakers, while limiting Americans’ access to those films, are deeply worrying.
Any directive that aims to suppress movies based on their content or filmmakers’ creative choices would violate both the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment. The president claims these tariffs would strengthen American industry, but doing so by targeting filmmakers and their art, based on their place of origin or viewpoint, is as un-American as it gets. It’s less Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and more The Manchurian Candidate.
America’s proud free speech tradition is built on protecting speech critical of those in power. Because of this, the arts have historically been a potent force for social and political change in this country. One just has to look at the history of cinema to see that.
‘So to Speak’ Podcast: ‘The Trials of Lenny Bruce’
His trials began with a police bust at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco in 1961, and ended with an obscenity conviction in New York in 1964.
Since the medium’s advent over a century ago, movies have been a dominant form of artistic expression in the United States. Not only that, but it’s historically been used to push back against the status quo.
During the studio system’s heyday, Meet John Doe shone a spotlight on the rising threat of fascism on domestic soil. Later, Casablanca tackled the dangers of isolationism. At the height of the Cold War, the Gary Cooper western High Noon challenged the Red Scare. Heralding the start of New Hollywood, Easy Rider rebelled against the prudish, white-picket-fence America of Eisenhower and Kennedy, while They Live! condemned the Reagan-era capitalism of the late 80s and early 90s. During the War on Terror, The Dark Knight questioned the morality of the Patriot Act surveillance state.
Not only that, but courts have consistently repelled government efforts to suppress artistic expression, reaffirming that artists have the right to express their ideas, even when such ideas irk those in power.
In a free society, the government, regardless of who is in power, cannot dictate what films we can watch or what books we can read.
In the 1948 Supreme Court case Winters v. New York, a 6-3 majority explained that “one man’s amusement teaches another’s doctrine.” The First Amendment protects everything from highbrow political commentary to sensational entertainment. Artistically, the line between high- and low-value expression is too subjective, too paper-thin to entrust the government with policing it. This free speech principle still rings true today, but the president seems willing to cast it aside to exert greater control over the film industry.
The nation’s highest court also has much to say on why taxing speech is unconstitutional because, let’s be clear, Trump’s tinseltown tariffs are just another tax. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the First Amendment protects us against government taxing expression it dislikes.
Like all art, movies both provoke and inspire. They are, in the words of the late film critic Roger Ebert, “empathy machines.” In the darkness of a movie theater, we sit with strangers from different backgrounds. We gravitate to those cathedral-like spaces to share in one singular experience that is more than likely foreign to our own. We watch movies to be swept up in something different. At the very least, movies can challenge our ideas, much like a thriving free speech culture. At their best, movies change us.
In a free society, the government, regardless of who is in power, cannot dictate what films we can watch or what books we can read. And when we encounter a film that we may disagree with, the way we respond is our own speech, our own art, our own expression. As the nation’s chief executive, Trump cannot use the force of the presidency to target filmmakers and their artistic expression in the name of “national security” or “propaganda.” That’s unconstitutional. And that’s to say nothing of the other legal roadblocks to his plan.
The president’s vague, broad call for speech-retaliatory tariffs against foreign films has the potential to silence storytellers, chill the efforts of studios, and prevent American audiences from participating in the international exchange of ideas movies provide.
That doesn’t “Make Hollywood Great Again.” It makes it worse.
Nick Hillman, HEPI Director, bottles his thoughts about this year’s Labour Party Conference.
As multiple fringe events showed, when it comes to higher education the Labour Conference was very busy, with notably more vice-chancellors in attendance than in days of yore.
My Conference sojourn started on Saturday with a trip to Liverpool’s famous Cavern Club to watch the brilliant in-house Beatles tribute band. At the time, I mused about which fab-four song might best sum up the next few days. ‘Taxman’ perhaps?
(If you drive a car) I’ll tax the street
(If you try to sit) I’ll tax your seat
(If you get too cold) I’ll tax the heat
(If you take a walk) I’ll tax your feet
In fact, when it came to higher education, the big news was a giveaway rather than a new tax. I’ll always remember where I was when Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister (in the Manchester University Students’ Union shop). Perhaps education policy wonks will similarly always remember where they were when they heard maintenance grants were on their way back (albeit for a second time – they were last reintroduced in the mid-2000s before being abolished a decade later).
In my case, I was with dozens of others in a fascinating HEPI fringe event on students’ cost of living, chaired by my colleague Rose Stephenson and featuring Alex Stanley (NUS), Gavan Conlon (London Economics) and Nic Beech (University of Salford). This came hot on the heels of two other HEPI fringe events – one on public opinion and higher education featuring a bevy of vice-chancellors and another with Cambridge University Press and Assessment on ‘Quality Matters’.
It was no surprise the news about maintenance grants won a spontaneous round of applause. It reminded me of the cheer I got during a speech to the University of Derby in 2016, when I read out the breaking news that UKIP’s Leader had just stood down (‘Nigel Farage resigns’, the Guardian reported, ‘after “achieving political ambition”’).
In both instances, the initial reaction was premature. Brexit was not the end of Faragism and it quickly became clear in Liverpool that the return of maintenance grants is not quite what it first seemed either.
Access to our colleges and universities shouldn’t just be for a wealthy few.
That’s why I’m bringing back maintenance grants for those who need them most.
Labour is ambitious for all our young people, no matter their background. I’m putting our values into action.
Most people who have calculated the cost of reintroducing grants have assumed it would cost something in the region of £2 billion a year. However, Ministers plan to fund the new grants via the proposed levy on international students’ fees, which is expected to raise around £600 million. So entitlement to the new means-tested grants will, it turns out, be limited by students’ course choice. You will be quids in only if you are studying what the politicians want you to study.
As I noted at the King’s College London Policy Institute fringe meeting on Wednesday afternoon, funding the new grants from the new levy may seem like clever politics, at least inside Number 10 and the Treasury and also perhaps by anyone seeking election as the Labour Party’s Deputy Leader.
Students and vice-chancellors have been desperate for grants to return and rightly so – for the reasons why, see our recent report on a Minimum Income Standard for Students with TechnologyOne and Loughborough University. But the levy / tariff / tax on international students is hated by those same students and vice-chancellors, putting them in something of a bind when it comes to responding to the Government’s announcement.
Not only do international students typically come from countries that are poorer than the UK, but they are already subsidising UK research and the teaching of domestic students. Now they are expected to contribute towards the day-to-day living costs of poorer home students too (just so long as those UK students are studying courses deemed to be of most economic value). Just how broad do Ministers think international students’ shoulders are?
Many of them come from wealthy backgrounds but some do not have very deep pockets and none is obliged to study in the UK rather than elsewhere. So our higher education institutions are unlikely to be able to pass on the full 6% without seeing a drop in demand.
It was great to witness so many backbench Labour MPs, like Alex Sobel, Daniel Zeichner, Abtisam Mohamed and Dr Lauren Sullivan, advocating for UK universities across the conference fringe programme. But more generally, there were parts of the Conference that felt flat as well as parts that were presumably in line with what the organisers wanted – including the Leader’s big set-piece speech. Starmer’s big reveal was the rejection of the ancient 50% target for young people’s participation in higher education in preference for a new target ‘That two-thirds of our children should go either to university… Or take a gold standard apprenticeship.’
The Prime Minister would be unlikely to welcome the comparison but this reminded me of nothing so much as David Cameron’s pledges as Prime Minister. In 2013, for example, Cameron said: ‘I want us to have as a new norm the idea that in school, everybody, everyone who can, either takes that path on to university, or takes that path on to an apprenticeship. You should be doing one or the other.’
The challenge is not coming up with such commitments; it is delivering them. Fewer adults are doing apprenticeships now than when David Cameron spoke, despite the introduction of an Apprenticeship Levy. Perhaps Starmer can succeed where Cameron and his successors failed…
At the end of the Conference, I was left feeling the biggest omission compared to past Labour Conferences was a clear and broad narrative about His Majesty’s Official Opposition: the Conservative Party. If the choice facing the country really is between ‘division’ and ‘decency’, as Keir Starmer says, then might not the best way to defeat division be, as with Le Pen in France or the AfD in Germany, for centre-right and centre-left parties to act together?
If Tony Blair and William Hague can work together, surely this is not impossible? But – and this is a personal opinion only – I left Liverpool wondering if the main problem for today’s Labour leadership is that they have spent the last 15 years making such strong criticisms of their bedfellows in the mainstream centre of British politics that they are unable to admit they may now need to work with the centre-right to stave off their worst fears.
Then again, perhaps today’s Tory Party also cannot see that the opposite of division is not so much ‘decency’ (however much we might want that) as collaboration. We’ll find out for certain next week as the policy caravan moves across the north-west to Manchester for the Conservative Party Conference. Do come to HEPI’s event there if you can – it is outside the secure zone so no expensive pass is needed.
Carole Cox, HEPI’s Events and Communications Administrator (and HEPI’s biggest Beatles’s fan) explains why Liverpool is the perfect place for day-trippers and long-stayers.
The City of Liverpool has the biggest single collection of Grade One listed buildings than any other English city outside London and it was named the European Capital of Culture in 2008. A football mecca, it also boasts a plethora of museums, including the World Museum, the International Slavery Museum, the Museum of Liverpool, Tate Liverpool and the Merseyside Maritime Museum.
It is also an interestingly quirky place, which harbours some amazing public toilets (you read that right). For example, if you ever happen to drop into the Philharmonic Dining Rooms in the Georgian Quarter, feel free to admire the famous Grade I-listed urinals in their pink marble splendour.
And then, there is the deservedly famous Mersey Beat. Liverpool and The Beatles, these are words that go together well.* The Liverpudlian group are considered the best-selling band in music history, hailed as pioneers who revolutionised the music industry and popular culture.
In summary, Liverpool is a ‘blast’ in more ways than one: a city which does not shy away from its heritage, a city with so much to offer culturally, but also a windy city open to the strong maritime winds gusting from the docks. Which may be why the French translation of the 1964 Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night is Les Quatre Garçons Dans Le Vent, a French colloquial idiom for their growing popularity – which, when translated word-for-word, awkwardly reads as ‘the four boys in the wind’.
* ‘these are words that go together well’ are lyrics from the 1965 Beatles song Michelle (Lennon/McCartney).
