The Higher Education Inquirer (HEI) continues to show growth by appealing to students, consumers, and workers with interests in the higher education business. Our latest quarter shows approximately 132,000 views. The Higher Education Inquirer’s largest day for viewership was January 6, 2025, marking the fourth anniversary of Donald Trump’s failed attempted to overthrow the US government. While most of our views come from the US, HEI has an increasingly international reach.
When Linda Zaugg’s baby caught a high fever in January, it took an hour and a half to walk him to the hospital — a journey that usually takes 10 minutes. But this was Davos, Switzerland during the week of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Some 3,000 politicians and business leaders from all around the world had descended on the city to discuss important political and economic issues.
Zaugg is a member of the local parliament in Davos, a town in the Swiss Alps with a permanent population of about 11,000 people. She has been spearheading a campaign to raise awareness of the local impacts the conference has and find ways to mitigate them.
During the forum, traffic becomes so bad, she said, that ambulances have trouble finding their way through the streets of Davos, causing response times to increase significantly.
Traffic isn’t the only problem. During this time Davos experiences a massive influx of people, causing rent prices to explode by up to 10 times.
“This is the real problem with the WEF,” she said. “Not the conference itself, but all the people and companies that come along with it to make money and advertise.”
Albert Kruker, the tourism director of Davos, warned that these price increases may cause a price spiral which would affect the town year-round.
During the forum, local businesses go into overdrive trying to supply the politicians, journalists and other attendees with everything they require. When asked about it, the owner of a local bakery, Bäckerei Weber, said that it is one of the most profitable but also intense weeks of the year.
“During the conference you get all these catering companies coming in and the hotels are full, so we have a lot more orders,” he told us. “During the conference we work 24 hours a day. Because of the security, we usually start delivering at two o’clock in the morning.”
Many other business and house owners during this time either stock up on their goods or rent out their buildings for exorbitant prices. A banker living in Zurich with an apartment in Davos said that he can rent out his apartment for a single week during the conference for approximately three months’ rent.
In an apartment block right next to the conference hall, many inhabitants move out during the week. These apartments are then rented by journalists, attendees and large companies.
One resident of an apartment block told us that he is never home during the WEF. “I rent out my apartment and go on holiday during this time,” he said.
The housing crunch during the forum is so intense that to accommodate attendees, some renters and families are forced out of their homes for the duration of the conference.
Zaugg said that some landlords even include a clause in the renter’s agreement dictating that the renters must leave during this period. A side effect of this is that many children must live temporarily outside the city and cannot attend school.
This problem is worsened by the fact that the streets are constantly congested and filled with drivers that aren’t used to Davos.
These drivers often do not respect speed limits or pedestrian only zones, requiring even more attention by commuters, which is especially difficult and dangerous for children and the elderly as they aren’t used to this amount of traffic.
Additionally, the public transportation system is bogged down during this time, once again causing confusion among society’s most vulnerable.
Stephan Büchli, a local bus driver, said that there are no fixed schedules during this time as the traffic is simply too unpredictable. Additionally, they must use smaller buses, as the streets are too congested to allow the manoeuvring of the traditional ones.
Furthermore, the new drivers often also park in restricted zones, further impacting public transport.
“Last year I saw an old man at the local bus station during the conference. He was crying very heavily and was confused. It really made me angry,” Zaugg told us.
The level of congestion also brings other problems with it.
All this traffic creates substantial emissions. In 2023, the private jets attending the Forum alone generated 7,500 tons of CO2, roughly equivalent to the yearly emissions of 5,000 cars.
Part of the problem, Büchli said, is that limousines, trucks and taxis often leave their engines on while standing still, sometimes for upwards of half an hour. He himself has frequently witnessed cars idling with the engine running while stuck in traffic.
As a high-profile event, the WEF requires a lot of temporary structures, internal furnishings and food to function. Every year these temporary structures are erected in late December and then taken down again afterwards. Some of them only get used once and thrown away after only one week’s use.
The same is true for internal furniture such as carpets, shelves, computers and TV screens, as well as any leftover food. Several residents told us that after the WEF there are heaps of electronic equipment that gets thrown away.
Still, while many residents feel the effects, many keep their irritation to themselves out of fear of being labelled a WEF hater.
While there are several key problems with the Forum in its current form, the organisers aren’t sitting idle. Over the past few years, several steps have been taken to lessen the impact of these problems.
The most obvious of these steps is the reduction in waste. The organisers of the conference and the government of Davos have issued regulations on the number of temporary structures and their reusability. This has caused their number to noticeably decrease over the last few editions.
Old furniture and electronic devices are sold to the local inhabitants at reduced prices and spare food is offered to the residents for free, further contributing to making the WEF more sustainable.
To ensure that people can travel around in a manageable timeframe, the municipality has also set up extra trains that commute from one end of the town to the other. Entry into Davos by car was also restricted this year for visitors and tourists.
One of the most impactful changes was the installation of temporary ambulance stations. These stations are scattered across Davos, allowing them to respond quickly to emergencies and save lives.
Over the last few years, both the WEF organisation and Davos itself have taken several different measures to lessen the negative impacts of the conference. However, these issues still persist and require solutions.
Only time will tell if the people who organize a conference meant to bring people together to improve the state of the world can improve the lives of the people who live in this small town in the Alps, for one week of the year.
“You truly notice how the ideological part of the WEF, the bringing together of people, gets pushed into the background in favour of economic reasons,” Zaugg said.
• What is the World Economic Forum?
• In what ways is the town of Davos negatively affected by the WEF?
• Is there an event that disrupts life near where you live? How do people deal with it?
Sonny Ramaswamy retired from his role as president of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities in February, concluding an almost seven-year run at the accrediting body.
His retirement comes after a lengthy career in higher education, which included stints at Cornell University, Mississippi State University, Kansas State University, Purdue University and Oregon State University before former president Barack Obama appointed him as director of the National Institute for Food and Agriculture in 2012. Ramaswamy also served for roughly 18 months during Donald Trump’s first presidential term before returning to higher education as the head of NWCCU, a post he held from July 2018 until earlier this year, when he stepped down.
In his retirement, he plans to continue serving on nonprofit boards, particularly those in the world of food and agriculture, an area where much of his career was focused. Ramaswamy also plans to write, starting with an illustrated book of poetry to help children learn about the environment.
Ramaswamy spoke with Inside Higher Ed about his retirement plans, his experience as an accreditor, the challenges facing the sector and the need for a robust defense of higher education.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: First, tell me about your retirement. What prompted you to step down early?
A: I came on board in 2018 and had a five-year agreement. June 2023 is when the agreement would have ended, and then our commissioners pleaded with me, saying, “You’ve got to stay on with all the uncertainties with the impending elections next year, etc., etc.” Plus we were going through our [National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity] recognition process. Well, another year comes and goes and they asked if I could stay for some more time, past the elections. We were all expecting the elections to go in a certain way, but who would have thought that the Democrats would self-destruct? But that’s another story.
I reluctantly said OK. We had talked about staying on the whole year, but they left it to me to make the determination of when I would step out. Then the 2024 elections happened and we started seeing the handwriting on the wall, and it concerned me tremendously. I thought, “I can do a lot more being outside of the system as a spokesperson for education.”
Q: What initially interested you in the NWCCU job?
A: This was not something on my radar. My life has been about food and agriculture. I’m an entomologist. My passion is hunger, being that I was hungry growing up in India at a time when India could not feed itself. And my path was through academics, food and agricultural sciences.
I was headhunted [while director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture] and went through some interviews with a couple of land-grant universities for the presidency. I was all set to become president of a land-grant university, then I was headhunted by the Northwest Commission, and [their recruiter] said, “You’ve got to do this—you bring exquisite leadership skills, and that’s what they’re looking for. I said, “But I’ve not done anything related to accreditation,” and she said, “That’s not the point—what they want is somebody that can be a leader.” What they were looking for was somebody to set the ship in the right direction and create a compelling vision.
Q: What was the hardest part about the job?
A: The hard part was the complaints that we would receive about our colleges and universities. On some of those, there’s egregiousness on the part of the institutions, ignoring their own policies and things like that. We also got complaints that basically were frivolous. We created, I think, an excellent way to handle the complaints with the processes and procedures that we put together. But the hardest part was to see policies and procedures being ignored. I don’t know if those were ignored purposefully and wantonly, or it was just that some institutions are so huge, and that the bureaucracy is so huge that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.
Q: What was the most rewarding aspect of the job?
A: What surprised me the most was how archaic the system was [at NWCCU]. It was thousands of pages of documentation being printed. I thought, “We need to come up with a way to use data to inform decisions, to look at how institutions are making progress and hold them accountable based on evidence and data, and not just the fact that they write these hundreds of pages of narrative.” It’s like the old adage that if you can’t bedazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit. So I worked with our commissioners and our staff and went around America, listening to what needs to be done [to revise] our standards. My gosh, we had eight standards and 142 substandards, and the word “student” was invoked in the very last standard. It was pathetic.
So I said, “We have to focus on the students.” We did listening sessions and people gave us an earful [including think tanks], so we brought that back and went through the listening sessions and surveys, and we went from eight standards and 142 substandards to two standards. No. 1: Students, that’s where they’re supposed to be. And No. 2 is all the other stuff about compliance and governance and other issues. We changed all of that to focus on students.
The most rewarding piece was to see those changes take place.
Q: There seems to be a changing of the guard at accrediting bodies, with turnover at the top. What advice do you have for anyone stepping into that job in the current political climate?
A: Go into it thinking, “What is the value proposition we want to demonstrate?” I’m paraphrasing Pogo: I have seen the enemy and he is us. Accreditors are as much to blame as the institutions in that we have never been able to provide that compelling value proposition. To be accused by various individuals that there’s an accreditation cartel, that everything is done behind closed doors like the Wizard of Oz, that we impose diversity, equity and inclusion on these institutions—it’s all a false narrative. None of us have imposed critical race theory on our institutions. It’s a false narrative that has been grabbed by [anti-DEI activists] like Chris Rufo and Scott Yenor.
We pat ourselves on the back, saying, “We’re holding universities accountable.” But when a bit more than one out of every two students graduate, there’s something wrong with that picture.
Use your critical thinking and problem-solving skills and put the students at the core of your mission and demonstrate that value proposition, demonstrate why education is critically important for America, and the accountability piece of it that the accreditors bring to the effort.
Q: What do you think the near future holds for accreditation? Do you expect any big changes?
A: I’m reading the tea leaves, and it’s like our investment advisers tell us: Past results have no bearing on future returns. I worked in the Trump administration for a year and a half, and I saw a lot of things in there. But it means nothing, because now they’ve come in with a much better thought-out process, a blueprint. Hope springs eternal, but there’s going to be some changes.
But before whatever it is that’s coming down the pike, let us as educators, let us as accreditors demonstrate that value proposition [and] tell the story. Don’t wait. Get college presidents, students and alumni to speak to the value of higher education. All these companies—the people that are hiring our graduates—should be extolling America’s higher education system, which is why people like me came to this country from overseas. There has to be a concerted effort by everybody. The accreditors have a secondary role, since the primary role is going to be institutional leadership and alumni and board members and others to speak to why the accountability system that we have is important. Be proactive, don’t be reactive, don’t wait for the winter or fall to go to work.
And if we don’t do it, shame on us and we deserve what we get.
In the Education Department’s sweeping Dear Colleague letter last month, acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor wrote that colleges must eliminate all race-conscious programs and policies, from scholarships and admissions practices to campus cultural groups and DEI training.
One surprising mention: standardized testing policies.
Trainor wrote that test-optional policies could be “proxies for race” to help colleges “give preference” to certain groups.
“That is true whether the proxies are used to grant preferences on an individual basis or a systematic one,” he wrote. “It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”
Higher education leaders and researchers have long debated the pros and cons of standardized testing in admissions: Some believe they’re a meritocratic predictor of academic success, while others say they’re more aligned with family wealth. In recent years, those debates have become entangled with discussions of systemic racism in the American education system.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the vast majority of colleges waived test requirements for applicants. Five years later, most have retained their test-optional policies—though a year ago some selective institutions began returning to score requirements, reigniting a charged debate about the role of standardized tests in admissions.
After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in 2023, experts said test-optional policies could serve as race-neutral measures to help colleges maintain diversity in their applicant pools. They cited research showing that colleges with test-optional policies enrolled 10 to 12 percent more students from underrepresented racial backgrounds; other studies found that doing away with test requirements simplified the application process and thus removed barriers for first-generation and other underserved students. The Biden administration even included test-optional policies in its guidance for colleges adjusting to the court ruling.
If colleges cited such research in keeping their test-optional policies, Trainor’s letter implied it could be grounds for a civil rights investigation.
In a Frequently Asked Questions document meant to clarify the broad scope of the Dear Colleague letter, OCR made no mention of testing policies. But in response to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed about how the department views test-optional policies, Trainor left the door open to federal scrutiny.
“This isn’t complicated,” he wrote. “When in doubt, every school should consult the [Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard] legal test contained in the [Dear Colleague letter]: ‘If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law.’”
Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest and an outspoken critic of standardized testing, said assessments like the SAT have long been embroiled in debates about racial equity in education, but the discourse grew more prominent as attacks on DEI and affirmative action intensified.
“The SAT has racial bias baked into it from its origins as an early IQ test to keep out the riffraff,” he said. “What Republicans are now saying is, that’s an objective measure of merit, and if white and Asian kids do better on them over all, then colleges not considering those scores is a form DEI run amok.”
John Friedman, an economics professor at Brown University, has published numerous influential studies on the effects of standardized testing policies, including those cited by the majority of Ivy League institutions that decided to return to test requirements. He said he understands where the Education Department’s skepticism comes from.
“Schools might be tempted to continue test-optional policies to make it easier to maintain diverse classes, even if that makes it harder to assess students’ academic preparation,’” Friedman said. “I think that’s where some of the angst comes from, as part of a larger concern about higher education moving away from the traditional sense of meritocracy.”
At the same time, he said the department should consider how institutions use test scores in admissions, which can vary widely.
“The point is not that you can’t go test-optional. It’s that you shouldn’t if your goal is an end run around the SFFA decision,” Friedman said. “It would be bad to force institutions that decided thoughtfully that test requirements are not best for them to adopt those policies anyway.”
Dominique Baker, associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, said she doesn’t believe it should matter whether colleges are considering racial diversity in deciding on their testing policies. The truth, she said, is that research on how testing policies affect applicant diversity is murky, and many of the colleges where the policies could have a demonstrable impact have already returned to requiring scores.
For her, the mention of testing policies alongside other DEI initiatives is “head-scratching.”
“The places the administration cares about have largely already returned to testing, or are certainly poised to do so soon. So who is this for?” Baker said. “It’s bananas that testing is even in here.”
So far, the letter hasn’t had any effect on institutions’ testing policies. But colleges are starting to respond to the Dear Colleague letter’s guidance in other ways, changing the names of student service offices, scrubbing mentions of race and equity from their websites, eliminating race-conscious programs, and canceling affinity group events.
“It would be naïve to believe that certain institutions wouldn’t, at the very least, strongly consider changing their testing policies in order to fly under the radar with the administration,” Baker said.
Some colleges are pushing ahead with their test-optional policies regardless. Last Thursday the University of Vermont announced that its test-optional policy, put in place during the pandemic, would become permanent.
Jay Jacobs, vice president for enrollment management at Vermont, told Inside Higher Ed the decision was based on years of research that found that removing test requirements not only had little effect on students’ academic performance and persistence, but also helped UVM achieve its goal of enrolling more local and first-generation students.
He said the university did not take racial diversity into account when measuring the policy’s enrollment impact—“we didn’t want that to be construed as the reason,” he explained—but said that whatever the rationale, he doesn’t believe the Education Department’s guidance should have any influence.
“No external party should have a say in dictating institutional policy,” Jacobs said.
Meanwhile, leaders in the assessment industry have remained largely silent about the Trump administration’s promotion of their exams as part of the war on DEI.
The College Board, which owns and administers the SAT, did not release a public statement about the letter, nor did ACT, Educational Testing Services or any other major assessment organization.
College Board communications director Holly Stepp wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the organization believes testing can promote college access, but it does not usually comment on policy matters.
“College Board provides access and opportunity to millions of students from every background through programs that are mission-driven, evidence-based, and nonpartisan,” Stepp wrote. “We do not set policies around how our exam is used by higher education institutions and scholarship providers.”
Juan Elizondo, ACT’s strategic communications director for government and public relations, told Inside Higher Ed that the company stands behind institutions’ freedom to set their own testing policies.
“ACT respects the authority of our higher education partners to decide the admission standards that are right for their institutions,” he wrote.
As colleges like Yale, Harvard and MIT returned to test requirements last year, many cited the same new research: a study from Opportunity Insights that found that test-optional policies made it more difficult for selective institutions to admit students who could succeed academically—and to find qualified applicants from diverse racial and economic backgrounds. Statements from both Yale and Dartmouth said that test scores could “help expand access” for underrepresented groups, including students of color.
So if both test-optional and test-mandatory policies can promote racial diversity depending on the institution, how will the Trump administration enforce its guidance?
When asked this question, Trainor did not respond directly but implied that any institution using racial diversity as a justification for any policy, or even citing it as a potential benefit, could be in violation of the current Education Department’s views on civil rights law.
Friedman, one of the researchers who produced the Opportunity Insights study, said his research showed that for some highly selective colleges, requiring test scores could help “a little bit” with diversity in the selection process. The argument is that by providing a standardized measure of academic preparedness, selective colleges can find a “diamond in the rough”—applicants from underresourced high schools who would struggle to stand out otherwise.
“For some schools, going back to requiring testing may help improve diversity, but my sense is that improving diversity is not the primary motivation behind this policy change,” he said.
Feder agreed but had a different prediction.
“If I’m at the OCR and an Ivy League college is saying, ‘We went back to test requirements because it’s good for diversity,’ even if that’s not really the case, I’d go investigate them,” he said. “By their own logic, they’d have to.”
Baker said there hasn’t been enough research to determine whether test-optional policies make a huge difference in promoting diversity. Many of the colleges that have kept them in place, she said, have also made more holistic changes to their admissions process that could account for diversity gains. But she believes ending the experiment early by government coercion would be a major step backward.
“Researchers in the field are doing some real deep dives to better understand the effects of test-optional policies themselves. The people writing the [Dear Colleague] letter have no clue about any of that; they just read about how these policies are part of an anti-white war on meritocracy,” she said. “They’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall.”
Counseling services are a key element of student retention in higher education due to elevated numbers of students reporting mental health conditions, but creating a sustainable practice that addresses students and staff needs remains a challenge, according to survey data from the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD).
The association’s annual report, published Feb. 25, highlights a tapering off of the increased demand for mental health services from students, but continued pressure to support clinician and nonclinical staff members through challenging work conditions.
The survey includes responses from 367 counseling center directors from the U.S. and its territories and 14 from other countries. The majority of respondents work at four-year institutions and urban campuses. The reporting period ranges from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2024.
Student engagement: While students continue to report high levels of mental health concerns, some counseling centers are seeing a decline in student demand.
The majority of respondents at four-year institutions reported a decline or no change in the number of unique clients seen (68 percent) and the number of appointments provided (58 percent). Among two-year colleges, 33 percent reported a decrease in the number of unique clients seen and 43 percent reported a decrease in overall appointments provided.
One in four counseling center directors (24 percent) indicated their centers did not have trouble meeting demand for services.
Around 11 percent of students at four-year institutions accessed counseling services, and just under 5 percent of students at community colleges received counseling center support. “Centers at smaller schools served, on average, much larger proportions (8 to 19 percent) of their enrolled populations than centers at larger schools (7 to 8 percent),” according to the report.
Student data indicated a correlation between student success and counseling center usage: 73 percent of clients reported that counseling services positively impacted their academic performance, and 71 percent said it helped them stay in school.
Staffing: The four-year college had 9.2 full-time-equivalent clinical employees, while the average for community colleges was 4.5 employees. Around 2 percent of centers were staffed by only one person, but this was a decline compared to the year prior, when 3.5 percent of directors indicated they were a one-person center.
Diversity of directors who completed the survey continues to rise, with 30 percent of respondents identifying as a person of color, up from 16 percent in the 2012–13 survey.
Staff turnover remains a concern for college counseling centers, with 12 percent of all nontrainee clinical positions and 10 percent of all nontrainee positions turning over in the past fiscal year. The top reasons staff left their roles were low salary (48 percent) and work conditions (32 percent), though fewer staff cited leaving the field as a reason for departure this year, compared to prior surveys.
Embedded counseling services remain limited, with around 30 percent of institutions utilizing counselors assigned to work within other departments. Athletics was the most frequently reported area where embedded clinicians work, followed by a specific school, student affairs office and residence life.
Services: Most clinical sessions were delivered in person (81 percent), followed by video (15 percent) and phone (3 percent). This mirrors the Center for Collegiate Mental Health’s data, published earlier this year, which found 64 percent of clients received exclusively in-person counseling and 13 percent received video-only care.
While a slight majority of centers do not have formal session limits (55 percent), 43 percent of institutions limit the number sessions a student can access by year, with some flexibility in the model. Only 0.6 percent of respondents indicated their campus has a hard session limit with no exceptions.
Teletherapy continues to be a popular offering among institutions, with 53 percent of four-year institutions and 35 percent of community colleges employing a third-party vendor to provide services. Use by students varies widely, even among similarly sized institutions, but the average number of participating students was 453.
“Overall, regardless of the type of service provided by a third-party vendor, the majority of directors reported utilization was less than hoped for or met their expectations,” according to the report.
The number of unique students who attended a crisis appointment averaged across centers was 125, and the average number of crisis appointments was 166. A majority (65 percent) offered psychiatric services within the counseling center, elsewhere on campus or in both locations.
In addition, a majority of respondents indicated their center provides formal or informal consultation services to the community.
Looking ahead: While the report focuses on the previous fiscal year, there remains a need to continue to provide accessible and high-quality counseling services, says Cindy M. Bruns, survey coordinator for AUCCCD. “By fostering a supportive campus culture and ensuring that mental health resources are available, colleges can help students navigate political and social environments while promoting resilience and well-being.”
Some counseling directors have noticed students are experiencing “elevated levels of anxiety, uncertainty, threats to their sense of safety and belonging on campus” due to federal action under the second Trump administration, Bruns says, which could prompt an increase in the number of students seeking services.
Get more content like this directly to your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
Last Thursday 6th March, TASO shared its report on Pathways into and through higher education for young people with experience of children’s social care. It found that young people with experience of care are four times less likely to attend higher education by age 22 and more than twice as likely to drop out as their peers without experience of care.
It builds on a growing body of literature in this area, including analysis by the Unite Foundation and evaluations of its own scholarships with Jisc.
Through the annual Student Academic Experience Survey (SAES), HEPI and Advance HE collect data on the experiences and attitudes of care-experienced students. We are in a constant process of iterating and improving the SAES, and in 2024, a close reading of our data from previous years suggested a higher number of respondents than expected were saying they had experience of care. To make sure we were capturing the right students, we refined the question as follows:
Have you been in care? Select yes if you’ve ever lived in public care or as a looked-after child, including:
- with foster carers under local authority care
- in a residential children’s home
- being ‘looked after at home’ under a supervision order
- living with friends or relatives in kinship care
Note: This does not refer to time spent in boarding schools, working in a care or healthcare setting, or if you are a carer yourself.
In 2024, nearly 900 of the roughly 10,300 respondents to the SAES – still quite a high number, but significantly fewer than the previous year – said they had experience of care. What do the data say about their experiences in higher education? (Note that the margin of error for any subset will be higher than the margin for the whole survey sample, which is around 1%.)
On subject choices, care-experienced students in the SAES were somewhat more likely to be studying Medicine and Dentistry and subjects allied to Medicine, which is consistent with sector-level data. They were also more likely to be studying Engineering and less likely to be studying Business, Social Studies and creative subjects.
In addition to the challenges faced by having experienced care, these students were also less likely to come from the highest quintiles of participation in higher education (POLAR) than other students and more likely to have a disability (45%, compared to 30% of other students) but less often described themselves as first in family (25%, compared to 32% of other students).
This probably informs many of their responses throughout the survey. For example, like other students taking courses like these, care-experienced students have more contact hours and do more hours of independent work (a total of 41.5 hours) than students without experience of care (36 hours on average). Likewise, more than half of care-experienced students use AI at least once a week, compared with less than a third (30%) of other students. This is as expected, given that saving time is a primary reason students use AI tools.
Perhaps surprisingly, care-experienced students report higher scores on wellbeing measures, like happiness and life satisfaction. (For example, they average 7.08 out of 10 for whether the things they do are worthwhile, compared to 6.74 for other students.) However, they also report higher rates of anxiety and loneliness than students without experience of care, averaging 5.29 out of 10 for feeling anxious compared with 4.48 for other students.
Care-experienced students are more likely to have considered withdrawing: 38% compared with 24% of all students. When asked for their main reason why, they cite mental health as the primary challenge, but at a lower rate than students without experience of care. Instead, they were more likely to mention workload – either a higher or lower volume than expected – or their physical health.
These data also suggest that care-experienced students face an altogether more challenging context. Some 58% of care-experienced students say they travel 10 miles or more to get to university, compared with only 31% without experience of care travelling the same distance. This may be because the benefits some care-experienced students get can be contingent on living within a particular local authority. Care-experienced students reported living alone or with family at higher rates than other students.
Additionally, care-experienced students may need to remain at home to provide for family members at higher rates. Almost all care-experienced students (80%) do some paid work during term-time, compared with 55% of other students. This is most often to supplement their income. But more than one-third of care-experienced students (35%) work to support friends or family financially.
A third (33%) say the cost-of-living crisis has affected them ‘a lot’, compared with 27% of other students. Care-experienced students are also nearly twice as likely to depend on scholarships or bursaries to cover their costs, which could also show that such funds are being effectively targeted towards students who need them.
In summary, care-experienced students are more likely to take certain Health and Science subjects, live further from their institution, are more likely to be working to support their families and are affected more by cost-of-living difficulties. These challenging findings help to explain why care-experienced students withdraw from higher education at higher rates.
Clearly there is more that institutions and government can do to support this group of students. The TASO report recommends, for example, working closely with local authorities to ensure care-experienced students have reliable access to accommodation, both during and outside of term-time. And as Paige Mackenzie wrote for us in 2022, the holidays can be a ‘really lonely time’ for care-experienced and estranged students and it helps when staff reach out.
Impact in the arts is fundamentally different from other fields. It is built on relationships, trust, and long-term engagement with communities, businesses, and cultural institutions.
Unlike traditional research models, where success is often measured through large-scale returns or policy influence, impact in the creative industries is deeply personal, embedded in real-world collaborations, and evolves over time.
For specialist arts institutions, impact is not just about knowledge transfer – it’s about experimental knowledge exchange. It emerges from years of conversations, interdisciplinary convergence, and shared ambitions. This process is not transactional; it is about growing networks, fostering trust, and developing meaningful partnerships that bridge creative research with industry and society.
The AHRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) has provided a vital framework for this work, but to fully unlock the potential of arts-led innovation, it needs to be bigger, bolder, and more flexible. The arts sector thrives on adaptability, yet traditional funding structures often fail to reflect the reality of how embedded impact happens – rarely immediate or linear.
At the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), we have explored a new model of knowledge exchange—one that moves beyond transactional partnerships to create impact at the convergence of arts, business, culture, and technology.
At UCA, IAA impact has grown not through top-down frameworks, but through years of relationship-building with creative businesses, independent artists, cultural organisations, and museums. These partnerships are built on trust, long-term engagement, and shared creative exploration, rather than short-term funding cycles.
Creative industries evolve through conversation, experimentation, and shared risk-taking. Artists, designers, filmmakers, and cultural institutions need time to test ideas, adapt, and develop new ways of working that blend creative practice with commercial and social impact.
This approach has led to collaborations that demonstrate how arts impact happens in real-time, to name a few:
These projects are creative interventions that converge research, industry, and social change. We don’t just measure impact; we create it through action.
The AHRC IAA has provided an important platform for arts-led impact, but if we are serious about supporting creative industries as a driver of economic, cultural, and social transformation, we must rethink how impact is funded and measured. Traditional funding models often overlook the long-term, embedded collaborations that define arts impact.
To make the impact funding more effective, we need to:
In academic teaching and training, knowledge exchange must be reconsidered beyond the REF framework. Rather than focusing solely on individual research outputs, assessment frameworks should value collective impact, long-term partnerships, and iterative creative inquiry. Funding models should support infrastructure that enables researchers to develop skills in knowledge exchange, ensuring it is a fundamental pillar of academic and professional growth.
By embedding knowledge exchange principles into creative education, we can cultivate a new generation of researchers who are not only scholars but also creative change makers, equipped to collaborate with industry, drive cultural innovation, and shape the future of the creative economy.
UCA’s approach demonstrates how arts institutions are developing a new model of impact—one rooted in collaboration, creativity, and social change. However, for this model to thrive, impact funding must evolve to recognise and support the unique ways in which creative research generates real change.
To keep pace with the evolving needs of cultural, creative, and technology industries, research funding must acknowledge that impact in the arts is about stories, communities, and the human connections that drive transformation. It’s time to expand our vision of what impact means – and to build a funding model that reflects the true value of the arts in shaping business, culture, and society.
SAN FRANCISCO, March 10, 2025 — Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of Lars Jensen, a math professor unconstitutionally punished for criticizing what he believed was his college’s decision to water down its math standards.
Reversing a federal district court, the Ninth Circuit held Jensen suffered wrongful dismissal of his claims against Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada, and that he should have his day in court to prove college administrators violated his First Amendment rights. The court also held Jensen’s right to speak out about the math standards was so clearly established that the administrators were not entitled to dismissal on qualified immunity grounds.
“This decision is a major victory for the free speech rights of academics,” said Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression attorney Daniel Ortner, who argued the case before a Ninth Circuit panel in November 2024. “This decision will protect professors from investigation or threats of termination for their speech, and promote accountability for administrators who violate the First Amendment.”
The dispute began in 2020, when Jensen planned to comment at a TMCC conference about what he perceived to be diminishing academic standards at the college. After administrators prohibited Jensen from sharing his views at a Q&A session, he printed out his planned comments critiquing the college for allowing for “a student graduating from college” while only being “ready for middle school math,” and handed them out to his colleagues during the break. TMCC Dean Julie Ellsworth told Jensen not to circulate his fliers during the break, but he continued to do so without interrupting the session.
Ellsworth then accused Jensen of “disobeying” her and warned him he had “made an error” defying her. Following through on her veiled threats, Ellsworth sent Jensen an official reprimand. Over the next two performance reviews, Jensen’s department chair suggested he receive an “excellent” rating, but Ellsworth retaliated by giving him “unsatisfactory” ratings for “insubordination.” As a result, Jensen automatically had to undergo review for possible termination.
“The college’s actions tarnished my reputation and chilled my speech,” said Jensen. “The Ninth Circuit’s decision vindicates my First Amendment rights and allows me to have my day in court.”
COURTESY PHOTOS OF PROFESSOR JENSEN AND HIS ATTORNEYS
TMCC might have fired Jensen if not for the speedy intervention of FIRE, which wrote a letter objecting that the administrators were violating the First Amendment, which protects faculty at public colleges in commenting as citizens on matters of public concern. TMCC announced that Jensen would not be fired, but the damage to his First Amendment rights was already done, especially with the negative performance evaluations remaining on his file.
Jensen sued Ellsworth and other TMCC administrators in 2022, arguing the college’s retaliatory actions violated his First Amendment rights as well as his right to due process and equal protection. A district court dismissed the case in 2023.
The Ninth Circuit ruled today that the district court erred in dismissing Jensen’s First Amendment claim, because his speech about the college’s academic standards involved a matter of public concern related to scholarship or teaching, and thus receives First Amendment protection.
The Court also held the university’s retaliatory actions were likely to chill Jensen’s speech, and that a university’s “interest in punishing a disobedient employee for speaking in violation of their supervisor’s orders cannot automatically trump the employee’s interest in speaking.” The Court warned, in fact, that if an employer could fire an employee solely for refusing to obey an order to stop speaking, a university could unconstitutionally enjoy “carte blanche to stifle legitimate speech.”
The Court further held the district court erred when it held that claims against the college administrators were barred by qualified immunity, a doctrine that requires plaintiffs to show a government official violated their “clearly established right” before they can hold those officials accountable for damages. The Ninth Circuit held that at the time Jensen spoke out, “it was clearly established that a professor has a right to speak about a school’s curriculum without being reprimanded, given negative performance reviews, and put through an investigation and termination hearing.”
The ruling remands the case back to the District Court of Nevada, where Jensen’s First Amendment claims can proceed. He may also choose to amend his other claims as necessary to proceed alongside them. Jensen is also represented by Nevada attorney John Nolan, who brought the lawsuit and wrote the briefs filed with the Ninth Circuit.
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; media@thefire.org
Protesting in public parks is as American as apple pie. It’s at the heart of our First Amendment — and one of our nation’s most time-honored principles. That right does not disappear merely because a private entity operates the public park on the government’s behalf.
That’s why FIRE and the Law and Religion Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law are appealing a district court ruling that weakens this First Amendment right. And we are proud to be backed by a broad coalition of prominent organizations as “friends of the court.”
Here’s what happened. Several years ago, animal welfare advocates Daraius Dubash and Dr. Faraz Harsini took to Houston’s largest public park to raise awareness about the harms of industrialized farming. For Dubash, this activism is rooted in his Vedantic Hindu faith, which compels him to promote the teaching of ahimsa, or nonviolence. To communicate their message, Dubash and Harsini serve as co-organizers for an international nonprofit animal-rights group. Their signature event involves volunteers showing muted documentary footage of farming practices to passersby, while others remain available to answer questions.
Dubash and Harsini’s right to peacefully advocate on this issue in a public park is beyond dispute. But on three separate occasions, the public park’s private management ordered them to leave. The fourth time, park management had Houston police arrest Dubash for criminal trespass and banned them both from showing their video footage in the park in the future. Why? Because the park’s private managers and city police deemed their message “offensive.”
With the help of FIRE and the Law and Religion Clinic, Dubash and Harsini filed suit in 2023 against the City of Houston, the park management corporation, its then-president, and the arresting officers. But in September, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas dismissed their claims, ruling that none of the defendants were responsible for violating Dubash and Harsini’s constitutional rights in a public park.
We disagree.
FIRE and the Clinic appealed to the Fifth Circuit, arguing that the ruling effectively lets the government bypass the First Amendment by delegating the management of public spaces to private organizations. And the court’s limited interpretation of governmental liability would make it nearly impossible for anyone to challenge violation of their constitutional rights by municipalities or law enforcement.
Last week, 12 prominent organizations from across the ideological spectrum filed nine amicus curiae briefs in support of Dubash and Harsini:
The ACLU of Texas argues the park management company was acting as a state actor and public-private partnerships “cannot serve as an end run around the First Amendment.” The brief also argues the district court erred by failing to hold the arresting officers accountable based on their “mistaken belief” that the park was private. As the brief explains, probable-cause findings must be based on “objective facts and circumstances rather than subjective beliefs.”
Young America’s Foundation, Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, and Advancing American Freedom explain that Houston cannot bypass its duty to protect free speech in its public spaces by granting oversight authority to a private third party. The brief also emphasizes the sweeping implications of the district court’s decision, including in the academic context where state universities are increasingly attempting to evade First Amendment protections by outsourcing park management to nominally private entities like student governments.
Liberty Justice Center argues the district court’s decision “blurs the line between state and private actors,” allowing Houston to “contract out of its constitutional obligations.” We could not agree more.
The Center for American Liberty, in a brief submitted through Reeves Law LLC, argues that maintaining a public park is a traditional and exclusive government function, with public parks serving “as public forums for the expression of speech,” whether or not they are managed by a private entity.
The National Press Photographers Association, in a brief submitted through the First Amendment Clinic at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, explains how the district court’s ruling “threatens the sanctity of the spaces where speech is deserving of the highest protection.”
Law Enforcement Action Partnership and the National Police Accountability Project explain that accountability for law enforcement officers and municipalities is crucial to preserving public confidence in the police and the government, and that failing to hold police officers accountable “undermines public trust in law enforcement.” The brief also argues that municipalities should know their police officers “need training and guidance to appropriately respond” to peaceful expressive activity, and failing to provide that training is sufficient to establish municipal liability.
Protect the First Foundation, in a brief submitted through the Religious Freedom Clinic at Harvard Law School and Schaerr Jaffe LLP, highlights that Dubash was motivated to proselytize nonviolence by his deeply held religious beliefs, and describes the long history and tradition of public proselytization, from the persecution of religious minorities in the colonies through the legal protections established by First Amendment jurisprudence.
The Hindu American Foundation, in a brief submitted through Jackson Walker LLP, explains that Dubash’s religious motivation to advocate for nonviolence towards animals is consistent with Hindu teachings. The brief also argues that his “arrest, detention, and the ongoing prohibition on his method of proselytizing” do not pass constitutional muster.
The American Hindu Coalition, in a brief submitted through the Free Exercise Clinic at Yale Law School, emphasizes the history of public parks and streets as centers of religious activity, how marginalized faiths rely on these spaces to exercise their faith, and that Dubash’s activism is rooted in his religious beliefs.
Our clients and their counsel are grateful for the support of this impressive and diverse amicus coalition. This case will play a critical role in protecting the rights of other protesters and religious minorities to engage in protected expression as guaranteed under the First Amendment.
