Committee chair and Labor Senator Tony Sheldon called for the inquiry in January. Picture: Martin Ollman
The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Authority (TEQSA) revealed four universities are being investigated for their handling of protests and encampments at the first Quality of governance public hearing.
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US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House. Picture: Mandel Ngan
Australian researchers who receive United States funding have been asked to disclose links to China and whether they agree with US President Donald Trump’s “two sexes” executive order.
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Incoming Office for Students chair Edward Peck would have expected that many of the questions he would face at his pre-appointment Education Committee hearing would concern the precarious financial situations that are the reality at many higher education institutions.
His answer to this line of inquiry was instructive. As a part of an urgent briefing with the current chief executive he would want to know:
the extent to which those universities have done all the things you do as an organisation when you face financial pressures. There are five or six things that you routinely do. To what extent have they been done by those organisations? To what extent is the financial pressure they are facing particularly acute because they have not yet got through all the cost reduction measures that would have enabled them to balance income with expenditure?
To many with an interest in universities – as places to study, as employers, as local anchor institutions – this idea of “five or six things” would have been confusing and opaque. Is there really a commonly understood playbook for institutions facing financial peril? If there is, why would there be any doubt as to whether senior leaders were following these well-worn tracks to safety? If there genuinely is a pre-packaged solution to universities running out of money, why do so many find themselves in precarious financial situations?
It would help to take each of these “five or six things” (I’m going to go with five) in turn.
If your university is smaller than expected in terms of students or income this year, the chances are it has been this size before.
The sector has grown enormously over the last few years, and the way that funding incentives currently work (both in terms of boom and bust in international recruitment, and the demise – in England – of the old HEFCE tolerance band) has meant that the expansion needed to teach more students, run more estate, or conduct more research has had to happen quickly – taking action when the money and need is there, rather than as a part of a long term plan.
Piecemeal expansion suffers when compared against strategic growth in that the kinds of efficiencies that a more considered approach offers are simply not available. Planned growth allows you to build capacity in a strategic way, in ways that take into account the wider pressures the institution is facing, the direction it wants to head, or plans for long term sustainability.
Often senior leaders look back to the resources needed in previous years for a similar cohort or workload in determining costs at a subject area or service level of granularity. If we could teach x undergraduates with y academic staff and z additional resources in 2015–16, why do we need more now? – that’s the question.
It’s a fair question – but it is a starting point, not a fully formed strategic plan for change. You may need more resources because there is more or different work to do – perhaps your current crop of academics are bringing in research contracts that need specialist support, perhaps the module choices available to undergraduates are more expansive, perhaps the students you are currently recruiting have different support needs. There’s any number of reasons why 2024-25 is not a repeat of 2015-16, and the act of comparison is the start of the conversation that might help unpack some of these a bit.
Imagine that at your university the last few rounds of the national student survey have seen students increasingly bring up the issue of a lack of library capacity as a problem. In response, the initial plan was to increase this capacity – an extension to the existing building paid for with borrowing, refurbishment and update of the rest of the building, and more money for digital resources.
A sound plan, but three years of lower than expected recruitment, declining income elsewhere, and an increased cost of doing business (construction costs are way up, for example) mean that the idea of putting the plan into action is keeping the director of finance up at night. It may be a necessary improvement, but it is no longer affordable.
In other words some or all of this valuable work isn’t going to happen this year, as things stand. One decision might be to redesign the project – perhaps covering some of the refurbishment and the content subscriptions but not the new build (and thus not the new borrowing). Even these elements would still have a cost, and with no new finance this would be coming out of recurrent funds. And there’s not as much available as there used to be.
So the other end of this point is reprofiling existing debt. For even a moderately leveraged university the repayment of capital and interest (under 6 per cent is pretty decent for new borrowing these days) takes up a fair chunk of available recurrent funding each year. If you are able to renegotiate your repayments – extending the loan term perhaps, or offering additional covenants, or both – this frees up recurrent funding to meet other needs.
Both of these solutions are temporary ones – one day that library will need sorting out, and paying less of your loan back now inevitably means paying more back later. But sometimes suboptimal solutions are all that are available.
There may well be cases where the same thing is being done in multiple ways, by multiple teams, across a single institution. There might be benefits in every faculty having an admissions team and a research manager, but in a time of financial constraint you have to ask whether a central team might be more efficient – and whether this efficiency is more important than the benefits being realised from the current configuration.
Again – the calculus here differs from institution to institution. Where faculty autonomy is the norm, it may be that benefits are being realised that the centre doesn’t know exist, much less understand. As I am sure is becoming increasingly clear, questions like these are the start of a conversation – not the end. Even if in bald resource terms centralisation is a saving, you may not be taking all of the variables into account.
Conversely, where there are clear savings and no meaningful reduction in benefits you are still entering into a course of action that could prove hugely disruptive to individual staff members. For some, your plan may represent a long hoped for chance for progression or role redesign – for others it may be the push that means that their years of experience are lost to the university as they retire or move to another role. With campus redundancies in the news each week, staff are rightly suspicious of change – bringing people along with new structures requires a huge investment of time and effort in communication, consultation, and flexibility.
There are many, many more effective ways to run a surplus than being a university. The converse of this is that people who run universities probably have non-financial reasons to want to run universities rather than running something else. In some of the wilder us-versus-them framings of campus industrial relations we can lose sight of the fact that pretty much everyone involved wants a university to keep on being a university, despite the benefits that would come alongside a sudden pivot into, say, rare earth metal extraction or marketing generative AI.
That’s an admittedly flippant expression of something that is often forgotten in university strategising. We all have our reasons to be there. Expressing these is often the start of understanding which are the things a particular university does that are non-negotiably essential, and which are the things we do that are either generating income to subsidise these, or facilitating these things being done.
If there is something that a university is doing that is non-essential, is not helping essential activity to get done, and it is not generating income to subsidise the things that are essential, why is it being done at all?
Of course, this presupposes that everyone agrees on what activity fits into each category. Even posing the question can be painful. Once again, we are at the very beginning of a journey that probably took up a large part of governance and management meetings over the past few years.
A couple of years ago, my party trick at conferences involving senior university staff was to show them my “fake subject TEF”. Confronted with a by subject analysis of student progression and satisfaction at their own provider, many of the staff I talked to would give me a similar answer – and it started “ah, I know why that is…”
The problems our universities face are already known to those who work there. External datapoints only confirm things that are pretty well understood, and usually confirm an instinct to act on them sooner rather than later – a reason why OfS investigations have tended to find the smoking guns already put beyond use by the time they get on campus.
If the problems within your institution are less obvious, a well-judged comparison with a competitor could help make things clear. A lot of the data you might want to play with is closely guarded, but there are ways in which you might use HESA’s public data to make a start (my tips – Student table 37, Staff table 11, Finance table 8). Otherwise, your staff will have a rich experience of working at other universities – what are the key differences. What is special about the way your place does things – and are there ways you can learn from the way things are done elsewhere.
If you are a university governor hoping for the mythical playbook, I can only apologise. If there was an easy way to make university books balance, we wouldn’t be where we are now.
What is on offer is the hard choices and difficult conversations that will very often lead to arguments, mistrust, and conspiracy theories. At boards and councils up and down the UK, variations on the above conversations are at the root of everything you feel is going wrong on campus.
You’ll be learning just how good your senior executive and governors actually are at running large, complex, beautiful organisations like universities. Parts of the university you may never have given a second thought to – the planning team, the finance department, the data analysis directorate, internal audit, procurement – will be coming up with ever more ingenious ways to make savings while preserving the university as a whole.
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Republican politicians who accuse public school teachers of indoctrinating students with a “woke agenda” are pushing to bring religious chaplains into the same schools to provide counseling to students.
“I think Jesus is a lot better than a psychologist,” Rep. David Marshall, R-Snowflake, said during a March 11 meeting of the Arizona House of Representatives’ Education Committee.
Marshall said that he’s been a chaplain who provides counseling for 26 years.
Senate Bill 1269, sponsored by Flagstaff Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers, was modeled after similar legislation passed in recent years in Texas and Florida.
The proposal would give school districts the option of allowing volunteer religious chaplains to provide counseling and programs to public school students. Districts that decide to allow chaplains would be required to provide to parents a list of the volunteer chaplains at each school and their religious affiliation, and parents would be required to give permission for their child to receive support from a chaplain.
Despite ample concerns that the proposal violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and that it would open up schools to legal liability for any bad mental health advice a chaplain might provide, the bill has already passed through the Senate on a party-line vote. The House Education Committee also approved it along party lines.
Rogers told the Education Committee that the existence of any requirement for the separation of church and state in U.S. law “was a myth,” adding that she sees no harm in bringing religion into public schools.
Rogers, a far-right extremist, has embraced white nationalism, and in 2022 spoke at a white nationalist conference, calling the attendees “patriots” and advocating for the murder of her political enemies.
She has also said she is “honored” to be endorsed by a prominent antisemitic Christian nationalist and regularly trafficks in antisemitic tropes. And Rogers has advocated racist theories, appeared on antisemitic news programs and aligned herself with violent anti-government extremists.
Democrats on the committee raised the alarm that Rogers’ bill would violate the Establishment Clause by allowing chaplains with religious affiliations to counsel students, while not providing the same kinds of services to students who don’t follow a religion or who follow a less-common religion with no chaplains available to the school.
An amendment to the bill, proposed by committee Chairman Matt Gress, a Phoenix Republican, requires that the chaplains be authorized to conduct religious activities by a religious group that believes in a supernatural being. The amendment would also allow a volunteer chaplain to be denied from the list if the school’s principal believes their counsel would be contrary to the school’s teachings.
Both of these changes would allow districts to exclude chaplains from The Satanic Temple of Arizona, a group that doesn’t believe in a higher power but promotes empathy and has chapters across the country that challenge the intertwining of Christianity and government.
Oliver Spires, a minister with The Satanic Temple of Arizona, voiced his opposition to Rogers’ bill during a Feb. 5 Senate Education Committee meeting.
The legislation, Spires said, would disproportionately impact students from minority religions who see Christian chaplains providing support to their peers while no chaplains representing their religion are available.
“If a district listed a Satanist on their chaplain list, would they have your support?” he asked the committee members.
Gress’s amendment would preclude that.
Gaelle Esposito, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, told committee members on Tuesday that school counselors are required to undergo specialized training to prepare them to help students — requirements that religious chaplains wouldn’t have to meet, even though they’d be providing similar services.
“They will simply not be equipped to support students dealing with serious matters like anxiety, depression, eating disorders, self harm or suicidal ideation,” Esposito said. “Religious training is not a substitute for academic and professional training in counseling, health care or mental health… Even with the best intentions, chaplains may provide inappropriate responses or interventions that could harm students.”
But as Democrats on the House Education Committee argued that Arizona should provide more funding for trained counselors and social workers to help students with mental health issues, the Republicans on the panel said that students are actually struggling with mental health issues because they don’t have enough religion in their lives.
“I’ve heard that there is a mental health crisis afflicting kids,” Gress, a former school board member, said. “Now, I don’t necessarily think in many of these cases that something is medically wrong with these kids. I think, perhaps, there is a spiritual deficit that needs to be addressed.”
Rep. Justin Olson, R-Mesa, said he’s been frustrated by the federal courts’ interpretation of the First Amendment to require the separation of church and state, claiming it has made the government hostile to religion instead of protecting it.
“I heard comments here today that this is going to harm kids — harm kids by being exposed to religion? That is absolutely the opposite of what is happening here today in our society,” Olson said. “We have become a secular society, and that is damaging our society. We need to have opportunities for people to look to a higher power, and what better way than what is described here in this bill?”
Democratic Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, of Tucson, called SB1269 “outrageous” and “incredibly inappropriate.”
And Rep. Stephanie Simacek, of Phoenix, pointed out that the courts have repeatedly ruled against allowing religious leaders to be invited to share their faith with public school students. She described Rogers’ bill as indoctrination that gives preferential treatment to students who have religious beliefs over those who don’t
“No one is saying that you may not go and celebrate your God, however you see fit,” Simacek, a former teacher and school board member, said. “But this is not the place, in public education, where our students go to learn math, reading and writing and history.”
Florida’s school chaplain law, which went into effect last July and is similar to Rogers’ proposal, has received ample pushback from First Amendment advocacy groups, as well as some church groups who said that allowing untrained chaplains to provide mental health support to students would have unintended negative consequences.
The option to bring chaplains into schools in Florida has not been particularly popular, with several large school districts deciding not to implement a program allowing them.
Proposed legislation similar to SB 1269 has been introduced in red states across the country this year, including in Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, Montana and North Dakota.
The bill will next be considered by the full House of Representatives. If it passes the chamber, it will return to the Senate for a final vote before heading to Gov. Katie Hobbs.
Arizona Mirror is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arizona Mirror maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jim Small for questions: info@azmirror.com.
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With the right opportunities we can become AI makers, not takers
Michael Webb. FE Week. February 21, 2025.
The article reflects on the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, aiming to position the country as a leader in AI development rather than merely a consumer. It highlights the crucial role of education in addressing AI skills shortages and emphasizes the importance of focusing both on the immediate needs around AI literacy, but also with a clear eye on the future, as the balance moves to AI automation and to a stronger demand for uniquely human skills.
Living guidelines on the responsible use of generative AI in research : ERA Forum Stakeholder’s document
European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation. March 2024.
These guidelines include recommendations for researchers, recommendations for research organisations, as well as recommendations for research funding organisations. The key recommendations are summarized here.
OpenAI Announces ‘NextGenAI’ Higher-Ed Consortium
Kim Kozlowski. Government Technology. March 4, 2025.
OpenAI has launched the ‘NextGenAI’ consortium, committing $50M to support AI research and technology across 15 institutions, including the University of Michigan, the California State University system, the Harvard University, the MIT and the University of Oxford. This initiative aims to accelerate AI advancements by providing research grants, computing resources, and collaborative opportunities to address complex societal challenges.
A President’s Journey to AI Adoption
Cruz Rivera, J. L. Inside Higher Ed. March 13, 2025.
José Luis Cruz Rivera, President of Northern Arizona University, shares his AI exploration journey. « As a university president, I’ve learned that responsible leadership sometimes means […] testing things out myself before asking others to dive in ». From using it to draft emails, he then started using it to analyze student performance data and create tailored learning materials, and even used it to navigate conflicting viewpoints and write his speechs – in addition to now using it for daily tasks.
AI Tools in Society : Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking
Gerlich, M. SSRN. January 14, 2025.
This study investigates the relationship between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, focusing on cognitive offloading as a mediating factor. The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading. Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants. Furthermore, higher educational attainment was associated with better critical thinking skills, regardless of AI usage. These results highlight the potential cognitive costs of AI tool reliance, emphasising the need for educational strategies that promote critical engagement with AI technologies.
California went big on AI in universities. Canada should go smart instead
Bates, S. University Affairs. March 12, 2025.
In this opinion piece, Simon Bates, Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President for Teaching and Learning at UBC, reflects on how the ‘fricitonless efficiency’ promised by AI tools comes at a cost. « Learning is not frictionless. It requires struggle, persistence, iteration and deep focus. The risk of a too-hasty full scale AI adoption in universities is that it offers students a way around that struggle, replacing the hard cognitive labour of learning with quick, polished outputs that do little to build real understanding. […] The biggest danger of AI in education is not that students will cheat. It’s that they will miss the opportunity to build the skills that higher education is meant to cultivate. The ability to persist through complexity, to work through uncertainty, to engage in deep analytical thought — these are the foundations of expertise. They cannot be skipped over. »
We shouldn’t sleepwalk into a “tech knows best” approach to university teaching
Mace, R. et al. Times Higher Education. March 14, 2025.
The article discusses the increasing use of generative AI tools like among university students, with usage rising from 53% in 2023-24 to 88% in 2024-25. It states that instead of banning these tools, instructors should ofcus on rethinking assessment strategies to integrate AI as a collaborative tool in academic work. The authors share a list of activities, grounded in the constructivist approach to education, that they have successfully used in their lectures that leverage AI to support teaching and learning.
AI Will Not Be ‘the Great Leveler’ for Student Outcomes
Richardson, S. and Redford, P. Inside Higher Ed. March 12, 2025.
The authors share three reasons why AI tools are only deepening existing divides : 1) student overreliance on AI tools; 2) post-pandemic social skills deficit; and 3) business pivots. « If we hope to continue leveling the playing field for students who face barriers to entry, we must tackle AI head-on by teaching students to use tools responsibly and critically, not in a general sense, but specifically to improve their career readiness. Equally, career plans could be forward-thinking and linked to the careers created by AI, using market data to focus on which industries will grow. By evaluating student need on our campuses and responding to the movements of the current job market, we can create tailored training that allows students to successfully transition from higher education into a graduate-level career. »
This week I dug into how the Trump administration’s anti-climate blitz is hampering schools’ and colleges’ ability to green their operations, plus a new report on the California wildfires’ impact on students. Thank you for reading, and reply to this email to be in touch. — Caroline Preston
LeeAnn Kittle helps oversee the Denver public school district’s work to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2050.
In January, her job got a lot tougher.
Denver expected to receive tax credits via the Inflation Reduction Act for an additional 25 electric school buses. President Donald Trump attempted to freeze clean energy funds through the IRA in his first days in office. Kittle, the district’s executive director of sustainability, also considered applying for tax credit-like payments for energy-efficient heat pumps for the district’s older buildings that lack air conditioning. And she’d intended to apply this spring for a nearly $12 million grant through Renew America’s Schools, a Department of Energy program to help schools become more energy efficient. Staff working on that program have left and its future is uncertain.
“I think we’re all in shock,” said Kittle. “It’s like someone put us in a snow globe and shook us up, and now we’re asked to stand straight. And it’s like I don’t know how to stand straight right now.”
Since January, the Trump administration has launched a broadside against efforts to reduce gases that cause climate change, including by freezing clean energy spending, slashing environmental staff and research, scrubbing the words “climate change” from websites, and rethinking decades of science showing the harms of global warming to human health and the planet. Experts and education leaders say those actions — some of which have been challenged in court — are disrupting, but not extinguishing, efforts by schools and colleges to curtail their emissions and reduce their toll on the planet.
Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
At the start of the year, the State University of New York was awarded $15 million to buy 350 electric vehicle charging stations. “We have yet to see the dollars,” said its chancellor, John B. King Jr. A webinar on the Department of Transportation grant program, which is funded by the bipartisan infrastructure act, was canceled. “It’s been radio silence,” said Carter Strickland, the SUNY chief sustainability officer.
The SUNY system, which owns a staggering 40 percent of New York State’s public buildings, had also planned to apply for IRA payments for a variety of projects to electrify campuses, reduce pollution and improve energy efficiency. In November, it applied for approximately $1.45 million for an Oneonta campus project that uses geothermal wells to provide heating and cooling. It still expects to get that money since the project is complete and the IRA remains law, but it can no longer count on payments for newer projects, King said.
“What the IRA did was turbocharged everything and gave many more players the ability to see themselves as part of a clean energy economy,” said Timothy Carter, president of Second Nature, a group that supports climate work in higher education. But the confusion that the Trump administration has sowed — even though the IRA has not been repealed — means both K-12 and higher education institutions are reconsidering clean energy projects.
There’s no count of how many colleges have sought funding through the IRA and bipartisan infrastructure act-funded programs, said Carter, but the work is spread across red and blue states, and some education systems have dozens of projects under construction. The University of California system, for example, filed applications for more than 70 projects, including a $1 billion project to replace UC Davis’s leaky and inefficient heating and cooling system and a project at UC Berkeley to phase out an old power plant and replace it with a microgrid.
“We remain hopeful that funding will be provided per the program provisions,” David Phillips, associate vice president for capital programs at the University of California, wrote in an email.
Sara Ross, co-founder of Undaunted K12, which helps school districts green their operations, said her group tells school leaders that for now, “energy tax credits are still the law of the land.”
But she expects those credits could be eliminated in the new tax bill that Congress is negotiating this year.
In the past, entities that begin construction on projects before any changes in a new law go into effect have been grandfathered in and still received that money, she said. “No promises,” Ross said, but historically that’s how such tax credit scenarios have worked. She said some school districts are speeding up projects to beat that possible deadline, while others are abandoning them.
There is some political movement to preserve clean energy tax credits. Roughly 85 percent of the private-sector dollars that have gone into clean energy projects are in GOP-led districts, according to a report last year. Some GOP lawmakers have advocated for maintaining that funding, which has contributed to a surge in renewable energy jobs.
Steven Bloom, assistant vice president of government relations with the American Council on Education, said that gives supporters of the IRA some hope. But he said that many higher education institutions are facing so much pain and uncertainty from other Trump administration actions, like the National Institutes of Health’s plan to slash overhead payments and investigations into alleged antisemitism, that unfortunately “climate investments may get pushed down the ladder of priorities in the near term.”
Related: How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for combating climate change
Another important vehicle for greening schools, the Renew America’s Schools grant program, was started in 2022 with $500 million for school districts. Many of the Department of Energy staff working on that effort have left, Ross said, and some school districts have not heard back about the status of funding for their projects.
In Massachusetts, the Lowell school district won a prize through the Renew America program that could unlock up to $15 million to help the district improve its aged facilities. The district’s facilities for the most part lack air conditioning and schools have been closed on occasion due to high temperatures.
Katherine Moses, the city of Lowell’s sustainability director, wrote in an email that the district had so far pocketed $300,000 that it is using for energy audits to identify inefficiencies and lay the groundwork for a larger investment. It’s unclear what could happen beyond that and if the district will receive more money. She said Lowell is proceeding according to the requirements of the grant “until we hear otherwise from DOE.”
More than 3,400 school districts have applied for money through programs created under the bipartisan infrastructure law and the IRA to electrify school buses. After a federal judge ruled against the administration’s freeze on clean energy spending, grants through those programs appear to have been unfrozen and districts have been able to access payments, said Sue Gander, director of the electric school bus initiative with the nonprofit World Resources Institute.
But rebates for electric buses are still stalled, she said. Districts are submitting forms to receive rebates, she said, “but there’s no communication coming back to them through the system about the status of their award or any indication that any payment that may have been requested is being provided.”
The Transportation and Energy departments and the Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the Clean School Bus Program, did not respond by deadline to requests for comment for this article.
King, of SUNY, noted that climate change is already negatively affecting young people and contributing to worsening disasters like floods and fires. For some faculty, staff and students, the backtracking from climate action at the federal level is stirring disappointment and fear, he said. “There is this very intense frustration that as a society we are stopping efforts to deal with what is truly an existential threat.”
Contact Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CPreston.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about clean energy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our climate and education newsletter.
What I’m reading:
My colleague Neal Morton traveled to northwest Colorado for a story on how phasing out coal-powered plants affects school budgets and career prospects for graduates. School districts haven’t done enough to plan for those changes or prepare students for alternate careers, he writes, and renewable energy projects are not popping up fast enough to smooth the financial pain.
Some 725,000 students at more than 1,000 schools faced school closures during the California wildfires in January, according to a new report from Undaunted K12 and EdTrust. The fire had a disproportionate impact on students living in poverty and from underrepresented backgrounds, the report says: Three-quarters of the affected students came from low-income households, and 66 percent were Hispanic.
The U.S. Coast Guard Academy removed the words “climate change” from its curriculum, reports Inside Climate News. The academy falls under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, whose new director, Kristi Noem, issued a directive in February to “eliminate all climate change activities and the use of climate change terminology in DHS policies and programs.”
Schools with satisfactory heating systems reduce student absences by 3 percent and suspensions by 6 percent, and record a 5 percent increase in math scores, according to a study by researchers at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Schools with satisfactory cooling systems see an increase of 3 percent in reading scores.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CPreston.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story about clean energy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our climate and education newsletter.
Among the universities being investigated are both public and private institutions that include Clemson University, Cornell University, Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Kentucky.
An article from the Courier Journal reported that University of Kentucky spokesperson Lindsey Piercy said, “We have not received any official notification of this review. However, the university complies with both the constitution and Title VI. Our graduate programs are open to all qualified applicants. We will continue to monitor and review this issue, cooperate with any official inquiries and, as always, comply with the law.”
Montana State University-Bozeman (MSU) is also among the 45 institutions under investigation. MSU vice president for communications Tracy Ellig released a statement which reads in part: “MSU strictly adheres to all federal and state laws in the hiring of its faculty and staff. … Montana State University strictly adheres to all applicable laws with regard to its students. MSU has well-established processes and procedures in place to investigate any claim of discrimination by students, faculty, staff or the public.”
The ED press release noted that the investigations were prompted by these institutions having partnered with The PhD Project, an organization founded in 1994 with the goal of creating more role models leading business classrooms. It endeavors to improve diversity in the business world by encouraging people from underrepresented backgrounds to attain doctoral degrees in business. ED asserted that The PhD Project “limits eligibility based on the race of participants.”
The PhD Project issued the following statement: “For the last 30 years, The PhD Project has worked to expand the pool of workplace talent by developing business school faculty who inspire, mentor, and support tomorrow’s leaders. Our vision is to create a broader talent pipeline of current and future business leaders who are committed to excellence and to each other, through networking, mentorship, and unique events. This year, we have opened our membership application to anyone who shares that vision. The PhD Project was founded with the goal of providing more role models in the front of business classrooms, which remains our goal today.”
OCR is also investigating six universities that have allegedly awarded race-based scholarships, which it asserts is not allowed, and one university that allegedly administers a program that “segregates students on the basis of race.” Among those schools are Grand Valley State University, Ithaca College and the University of Tulsa School of Medicine.
“The Department is working to reorient civil rights enforcement to ensure all students are protected from illegal discrimination,” noted U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudiced by the color of their skin.”
Kelly Benjamin, media and communications strategist for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), noted that AAUP was a plaintiff in a case for which the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland has granted a preliminary nationwide injunction on parts of two executive orders issued by President Donald J. Trump that sought to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs among federal government grantees and contractors, which includes most colleges and universities.
“Unfortunately, the Office of Civil Rights within the Education Department has…intensified the clamp down on speech and expression related to race and identity, and they’ve moved beyond censorship into a true weaponization of federal civil rights law,” said Benjamin. “It’s fundamentally at odds with what the mission of higher education should be, which is the search for knowledge that serves the common good.
“They’re trying to remake higher education into their own agenda, where they can control not only who has access to higher education but what is taught in the classroom, what can be researched, what can be written about,” he added. “It’s an assault on the very core mission of higher education.”
The defendants, which include President Trump and ED, filed for a stay of the injunction pending appeal, which the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit granted. “Having reviewed the record, the district court’s opinion, and the parties’ briefing, we agree with the government that it has satisfied the factors for a stay under Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 426 (2009).” Entered at the direction of Chief Judge Albert Diaz, with the concurrence of Judge Pamela Harris and Judge Allison Rushing.
EdTrust issued a statement from Augustus Mays, vice president of partnerships and engagement, condemning the investigations. He noted: “By using federal investigations as a weapon to intimidate institutions committed to racial equity, the Trump administration is not only undermining the fundamental mission of higher education but is also jeopardizing student success. These attacks are grounded in a false narrative that DEI initiatives are about exclusion. The reality is the opposite: these programs are designed to expand access, increase opportunity, and strengthen institutions by ensuring that all students, particularly underserved students, can thrive.”
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights launched investigations into 51 colleges on Friday, accusing them of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and flouting guidance put forth in the department’s Dear Colleague Letter last month, which warned colleges that all race-conscious programs and policies would be considered unlawful.
“The Department is working to reorient civil rights enforcement to ensure all students are protected from illegal discrimination,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote in a statement. “Today’s announcement expands our efforts to ensure universities are not discriminating against their students based on race and race stereotypes.”
According to the department’s statement, all but six of the investigations revolve around colleges’ partnerships or support for The PhD Project, a nonprofit organization that connects prospective business doctoral candidates from underrepresented backgrounds with academic networks and hosts recruitment events for business school faculty. In its statement, the Education Department said the organization “limits eligibility based on the race of participants.”
A spokesperson for the PhD Project told Inside Higher Ed the organization works “to create a broader talent pipeline of current and future business leaders…through networking, mentorship, and unique events.”
The spokesperson also said they changed their membership requirements “this year” to include “anyone who shares that vision,” but did not say exactly when the change was made. Snapshots of the organization’s website, captured on the WayBack Machine, show different language as recently as two weeks ago, including a section on the homepage titled “we believe inclusion is critical,” which has since been scrubbed.
The OCR is also investigating five additional colleges for allegedly using race in scholarship eligibility requirements. One institution, the department said, was included for “administering a program that segregates students on the basis of race.”
Representatives for the education department did not respond to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed in time for publication.
Inside Higher Ed also contacted the two dozen institutions under investigation, and their responses varied. The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Carnegie Mellon University said they had yet to be formally notified of any complaint by the OCR, and were awaiting more information to determine how to comply with an investigation.
A spokesperson for the University of Notre Dame, which is still listed as a PhD Project partner, said the university “follows the law and in no way practices or condones discrimination.”
“As a Catholic university, we are fully committed to defending the dignity of every human person and ensuring that every person can flourish,” the spokesperson added.
At least one university on the list has already terminated its partnership with the PhD Project. A spokesperson for Arizona State University said the business school “would not be supporting [faculty] travel to the upcoming PhD Project Conference.”
“The school also this year is not financially supporting the PhD Project organization,” the spokesperson added.
A spokesperson for Ithaca College, one of the five institutions accused of limiting scholarship eligibility based on race, denied that the scholarships the department cited violated Title VI. The department targeted two scholarships, the spokesperson said: the African Latino Society Memorial Scholarship and the Rashad G. Richardson “I Can Achieve” Memorial Scholarship. Both recognize students who work with the college’s BIPOC Unity Center, but don’t list any racial eligibility requirements on their respective webpages.
The Dear Colleague Letter released by the OCR last month aimed to greatly expand the scope of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, from one squarely focused on the policies and practices of admission offices to a sweeping decree on the illegality of all educational programs that consider race.
In its aftermath, colleges have struggled to understand how to comply with such a broad mandate—or whether they are even legally required to. Many have made surface-level changes, altering the names of programs and scrubbing websites of language associated with diversity, equity and inclusion. Some have gone further, eliminating DEI offices, shuttering residential housing for student groups or cutting race-based scholarships.
Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education, said the investigations were “cause for concern” among higher ed institutions that may have thought they were in compliance with the Dear Colleague Letter. But he said institutions shouldn’t panic yet.
“This is very clearly [the administration’s] first effort to try and enforce their interpretation of SFFA, as opposed to what most legal scholars accept that case means,” Fansmith said. “I think that schools understand, especially post-SFFA, what constitutes an impermissible benefit to a student based on race…it seems to me that they will probably be on solid ground defending their actions in these cases.”
The PhD Project has been a target of conservative activists in the past. In January, Christopher Rufo—a stalwart anti-DEI crusader who Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the board of New College in 2023—brought attention to institutions attending the organization’s annual recruiting conference.
In a tweet, Rufo showed screenshots of the organization’s eligibility requirements for attendance, which stated that applicants had to be Black, Hispanic or Indigenous. Shortly after, Texas A&M University announced it would not send business faculty to the conference, following a threat by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to fire the university president. Rufo did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment.
On Friday morning, the PhD Project website included a list of all university partners, accessible via drop-down menu. By that evening, the list had disappeared from the site. A spokesperson for the organization did not say why it was removed.
Inside Higher Ed catalogued the list before its removal. Of the 45 institutions that the department alleges violated civil rights by partnering with the PhD Project, 31 were listed as partners on the organization’s website Friday morning, including ASU. It’s not apparent what connection the other 14 institutions have to the PhD Project, and the education department did not respond to requests for clarification. But more than half of the 97 U.S. partner colleges the organization had listed on its website are not included in the OCR’s investigation. Its unclear why some PhD Project partners are under investigation while others are not.
A spokesperson for Boise State University, which is under OCR investigation but not on the PhD Project’s list of partners, told Inside Higher Ed the institution is “working with our general counsel’s office to look into the matter.” A spokesperson for the California State University system, which has two campuses under investigation—CSU San Bernadino and Cal Poly Humboldt—said the system “continues to comply with longstanding applicable federal and state laws.” A spokesperson from the University of North Texas, also under investigation, said they are “fully cooperating” with investigations but are “not affiliated with the PhD Project.”
The PhD Project’s annual conference is set to start next week in Chicago. A spokesperson for the organization did not say how many universities have pulled their support for attendees, or if they’d seen an uptick in requests to cancel registrations.
Fansmith said that initiatives to recruit a more diverse applicant pool shouldn’t be viewed as discriminatory—especially in academic fields that have struggled to diversify. Only 35 percent of doctoral candidates in business, and 26 percent of business school faculty, are people of color, according to a 2023 report from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
“There’s lots of admissions initiatives seeking to put institutions in front of groups of students so they become aware of the programs they offer. Those are not discriminatory,” Fansmith said. “The reason these programs exist is because there are categories of students who are underrepresented in many fields… it would be a shame to see schools walk away from them.”
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On a recent rainy day, several dozen students sat in a UC Riverside classroom, planning their path to college.
These weren’t high school seniors. They were seventh graders getting a jump-start on the competitive university application process. They’re part of a university program called the Middle School Initiative that aims to get Inland Empire students thinking about higher education long before they take their first AP class or submit an application.
With a four-year college graduation rate about half the state average of 35%, the Inland Empire is falling behind in educating students for well-paid, professional jobs, limiting the economic prospects of the region’s youngest inhabitants. In an effort to raise that ceiling, educators are trying to get tweens to envision their potential for a college education and career.
The students from Riverside middle schools discussed how to write college application essays, toured the university campus and learned about admission standards for California universities.
“I like that there’s something you can do in middle school so you can do more in high school,” said 13-year-old Simone Reid, a seventh-grader at Villegas Middle School who wants to major in business. “I want to get started early so I have more opportunities.”
UC Riverside Dean of Education Joi Spencer said she introduced the program this year to reach students who might not consider attending a university, or know how to prepare for it. Middle grades “are where kids get sorted into who’s going to go to college and who’s not,” she said.
The initiative aims to change that pattern. With an annual budget of $15,200, the program launched has so far reached 500 students, including more than 300 who joined campus tours at UC Riverside.
“Our first goal is to invoke a conversation across the Inland Empire related to university access and eventual success,” Spencer said. “First and foremost, too many youngsters do not even see university attendance as a possibility for them. This is our fault as adults and educators. We keep producing the same winners and losers in education and we need to break this cycle.”
The Middle School Initiative is open to students throughout Riverside and San Bernardino counties, with Jurupa, Moreno Valley, Alvord and Riverside Unified school districts among the first participants. Any students in the Inland Empire can participate, but in the early days of the program, administrators have prioritized students who have fallen through the cracks in class.
“Some of the students are high flyers, but are somehow overlooked in their school setting,” Spencer said. “Others may have average achievement, but high aspirations.”
The program isn’t just an introduction to college readiness. Program administrators plan to follow students along their academic journey, meeting with them throughout middle and high school and during the transition to college. They will also track college enrollment of students who participate in a related summer program called the STEAM Academy, which increases exposure to the fields of science, technology, education, art and math.
“This middle school period is the pivotal period to prepare for college,” said Elizabeth Benitez, Middle School Initiative coordinator.
For instance, she said, many middle schools have foreign language options. Taking that early, in seventh or eighth grade, can pave the way for advanced placement language classes in high school, which boost students’ grade point averages and allow them to earn credits for college.
Some students may be a step ahead because of their family background, Frances Calvin, director of the university’s Early Academic Outreach Program, told the group. During the campus workshop she asked seventh graders to raise their hands if they spoke a second language. Several responded that they spoke Spanish, Portuguese or other languages at home.
“If you speak a second language you are becoming marketable because the world is getting smaller and smaller,” Calvin said.
Students at the campus event said they clearly heard the message about academic achievement and vowed to work on raising their grade-point averages.
“I personally think I should focus more on my GPA,” said Dike Okeke, 12. “Then when I have that figured out I could find work to save for college.”
Money matters loom large for many of the students, especially those hoping to be the first in their family to attend a university. The initiative offers instruction on how to fill out financial aid forms and tips on finding scholarships. Students can come back to the program later in high school to seek help with that process, Benitez said.
“My family didn’t have the resources to experience college,” said Jeremiah Stinson, 12, who aims to study business and play college football. “I think I need to start saving money to afford this. I need to focus on a scholarship. Debt lasts forever. I don’t want to struggle with that.”
Interestingly, the seventh graders also discussed personal discipline, and almost universally acknowledged that they needed to curtail electronics use and pay attention to school.
“I also need to get rid of all my devices because I spend a lot of time on social media,” said Tatum Tobios, an aspiring fashion designer who favors Victorian Gothic styles and plans to go to art school.
Her peers nodded in agreement. How will they scale back their TikTok and Instagram habits?
Some of their solutions: “Delete the apps,” “Lock them away,” “Give it to my mom,” “Hide it from myself.”
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Emma Bittner considered getting a master’s degree in public health at a nearby university, but the in-person program cost tens of thousands of dollars more than she had hoped to spend.
So she checked out master’s degrees she could pursue remotely, on her laptop, which she was sure would be much cheaper.
The price for the same degree, online, was … just as much. Or more.
“I’m, like, what makes this worth it?” said Bittner, 25, who lives in Austin, Texas. “Why does it cost that much if I don’t get meetings face-to-face with the professor or have the experience in person?”
Among the surprising answers is that colleges and universities are charging more for online education to subsidize everything else they do, online managers say. Huge sums are also going into marketing and advertising for it, documents show.
Universities and colleges “see online higher education as an opportunity to make money and use it for whatever they want to make money for,” said Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at the left-leaning think tank New America.
Online higher education is projected to pass an impressive if little-noticed milestone this year: For the first time, more American college students will be learning entirely online than will be learning 100 percent in person.
Bittner’s confusion about the price is widespread. Eighty percent of Americans think online learning after high school should cost less than in-person programs, according to a 2024 survey of 1,705 adults by New America.
After all, technology has reduced prices in many other industries. And online courses don’t require classrooms or other physical facilities and can theoretically be taught to a much larger number of students, creating economies of scale.
Yet 83 percent of online programs in higher education cost students as much as or more than the in-person versions, an annual survey of campus chief online learning officers finds. About a quarter of universities and colleges even tack on an additional “distance learning fee,” that survey found.
In addition to using the income from their online divisions to help pay for the other things they do, universities say they have had to pay more than they anticipated on advising and support for online students, who get worse results, on average, than their in-person counterparts.
Bringing down the price of a degree “was certainly a key part of the appeal” when online higher education began, said Richard Garrett, co-director of that survey of online education managers and chief research officer at Eduventures, an arm of the higher education technology consulting company Encoura.
“Online was going to be disruptive. It was supposed to widen access. And it would reduce the price,” said Garrett. “But it hasn’t played out that way.”
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Today, online instruction for in-state students at four-year public universities costs $341 a credit, the independent Education Data Initiative finds — more than the average $325 a credit for face-to-face tuition. That adds up to about $41,000 for a degree online, compared to about $39,000 in tuition for a degree obtained in person.
Two-thirds of private four-year universities and colleges with online programs charge more for them than for their face-to-face classes, according to the survey of online managers. The average tuition for online learning at private universities and colleges comes to $516 per credit.
And community colleges, which collectively enroll the largest number of students who learn entirely online, charge them the same as or more than their in-person counterparts in 100 percent of cases, the survey of online officers found (though Garrett said that’s likely because community college tuition overall is already comparatively low).
Social media is riddled with angry comments about this. A typical post: “Can someone please explain to me why taking a course online can cost a couple $1000 more than in person?”
Online education officers respond that online programs face steep startup costs and need expensive technology specialists and infrastructure. In a separate survey of faculty by the consulting firm Ithaka S+R, 80 percent said it took them as much time, or more, to plan and develop online courses as it did in-person ones because of the need to incorporate new kinds of technology.
Online programs also need to provide faculty who are available for office hours, online advisors and other resources exclusively to support online students, who tend to be less well prepared and get worse results than their in-person counterparts. For the same reasons, many online providers have put caps on enrollment, limiting those expected economies of scale.
“You still need advisers, you still need a writing center, a tutoring center, and now you have to provide those services for students who are at a distance,” said Dylan Barth, vice president of innovation and programs at the Online Learning Consortium, which represents online education providers.
Related: The number of 18-year-olds is about to drop sharply, packing a wallop for colleges — and the economy
Still, 60 percent of public and more than half of private universities are taking in more money from online education than they spend on it, the online managers’ survey found. About half said they put the money back into their institutions’ general operating budgets.
Such cross subsidies have long been a part of higher education’s financial strategy, under which students in classes or fields that cost less to teach generally subsidize their counterparts in courses or disciplines that cost more. English majors subsidize their engineering classmates, for example. Big first-year lecture classes subsidize small senior seminars. Graduate students often subsidize undergrads.
“Online education is another revenue stream from a different market,” said Duha Altindag, an associate professor of economics at Auburn University who has studied online programs.
Universities “are not trying to use technology to become more efficient. They’re just layering it on top of the existing model,” said New America’s Carey, who has been a critic of some online education models.
“Public officials are not stopping them,” he said. “They’re not coming and saying, ‘Hey, we’re seeing this new opportunity to save money. These online courses could be cheaper. Make them cheaper.’ This is just a continuation of the status quo.”
Another page that online managers have borrowed from higher education’s traditional pricing playbook is that consumers often equate high prices with high quality, especially at brand-name colleges and universities.
“Market success and reputation can support higher prices,” Garrett said. It’s not what online courses cost to provide that determines the price, in other words, but how much consumers are willing to pay.
Related: Apprenticeships are a trending alternative to college — but there’s a hitch
With online programs competing for customers across the country, rather than for those within commuting distance of a campus or willing to relocate to one, universities and colleges are also putting huge amounts into marketing and advertising.
An example of this kind of spending was exposed in a review by the consulting firm EY of the University of Arizona Global Campus, or UAGC, which the university created by acquiring for-profit Ashford University in 2020. Obtained through a public-records request by New America, the report found that the university was paying out $11,521 in advertising and marketing for every online student it enrolled.
The online University of Maryland Global Campus committed to spending $500 million for advertising to out-of-state students over six years, a state audit found.
“What if you took that money and translated it into lower tuition?” asked Carey.
While they’re paying the same as or more than their in-person counterparts, meanwhile, online students get generally poorer success rates.
Online instruction results in lower grades than face-to-face education, according to research by Altindag and colleagues at American University and the University of Southern Mississippi — though they also found that the gap is narrowing. Students online are more likely to have to withdraw from or repeat courses and less likely to graduate on time, these researchers found, which further increases the cost.
Another study, by University of Central Florida Institute of Higher Education Director Justin Ortagus, found that taking all of their courses online reduces the odds that community college students will ever graduate.
Lower-income students fare especially poorly online, that and other research shows; scholars say this is in part because many come from low-resourced public high schools or are balancing their classes with work or family responsibilities.
Students who learn entirely online at any level are less likely to have graduated within eight years than students in general, who have a 66 percent eight-year graduation rate, data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows.
Graduation rates are particularly low at for-profit universities, which enroll a quarter of the students who learn exclusively online. In the American InterContinental University System, for example, only 11 percent of students graduated within eight years after starting, federal data shows, and at the American Public University System, 44 percent. The figures are for the period ending in 2022, the most recent for which they have been widely submitted.
Several private, nonprofit universities and colleges also have comparatively lower eight-year graduation rates for students who are online only, the data shows, including Southern New Hampshire University (37 percent) and Western Governors University (52 percent).
Related: Some colleges aim financial aid at a declining market: students in the middle class
If they do receive degrees, online-only students earn more than their entirely in-person counterparts for the first year after college, Eduventures finds — perhaps because they tend to be older than traditional-age students, researchers speculated. But that advantage disappears within four years, when in-person graduates overtake them.
For all the growth in online higher education, employers appear to remain reluctant to hire graduates of it, according to still other research conducted at the University of Louisville. That study found that applicants for jobs who listed an online as opposed to in-person degree were about half as likely to get a callback for the job.
How strongly consumers feel that online higher education should cost less than the in-person kind was evident in lawsuits brought against universities and colleges that continued to charge full tuition even after going remote during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Students had part of their payments refunded under multimillion-dollar settlements with the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Maine System and others.
Yet students keep signing on. For all the complaining about remote learning at the time, its momentum seems to have been speeded up by the pandemic, which was followed by a 12 percent increase in online enrollment above what had been projected before it hit, according to an analysis of federal data by education technology consultant Phil Hill.
Online students save on room and board costs they would face on residential campuses, and online higher education is typically more flexible than the in-person kind.
Sixty percent of campus online officers say that online sections of classes tend to fill first, and nearly half say online student numbers are outpacing in-person enrollment.
There have been some widely cited examples of online programs with dramatically lower tuition, such as a $7,000 online master’s degree in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (compared to the estimated nearly $43,000 for the two-year in-person version), which has attracted thousands of students and a few copycat programs.
There are also early signs that prices for online higher education could fall. Competition is intensifying from national nonprofit providers such as Western Governors, which charges a comparatively low average $8,300 per year, and Southern New Hampshire, whose undergraduate price per credit hour is a slightly lower-than-average (for online courses) $330.
Related: Fewer students and fewer dollars mean states face closing public universities and colleges
Universities have started cutting their ties with for-profit middlemen, called online program managers, who take big cuts of up to 80 percent of revenues. Nearly 150 such deals were canceled or ended and not renewed in 2023, the most recent year for which the information is available, the market research firm Validated Insights reports.
Another thing that could lower prices: As more online programs go live, they no longer require high up-front investment — just periodic updating.
“It is possible to save money on downstream costs if you offer the same course over a number of years,” Ortagus said.
While that survey of online officers found a tiny decline in the proportion of universities charging more for online than in-person classes, however, the drop was statistically insignificant. And as their enrollments continue to plummet, institutions increasingly need the revenue from online programs.
Bittner, in Texas, ended up in an online master’s program in public health that was just being started by a private, nonprofit university, and was cheaper than the others she’d found.
Her day job is at the national nonprofit Young Invincibles, which pushes for reforms in higher education, health care and economic security for young Americans. And she still doesn’t understand the online pricing model.
“I’m so confused about it. Even in the program I’m in now, you don’t get the same access to stuff as an in-person student,” she said. “What are you putting into it that costs so much?”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556 or jmarcus@hechingerreport.org.
This story about the cost of online higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.