Members of the public have until Sept. 15 to weigh in on the National Institutes of Health’s plan to curb how much taxpayer money goes to journals to publish some federally funded research.
The agency, which is the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research, wants to do that by capping—or potentially disallowing—the amount of money it gives to NIH-funded researchers who want to make their work publicly accessible by paying publishers article processing charges. A July 30 request for information memo outlined five potential options, which the NIH says are all aimed at balancing the “feasibility of providing research results with maximizing the use of taxpayer funds to support research.”
Jay Bhattacharya, director of the NIH, has said the policy could be a mechanism for ending what he sees as the “perverse incentives” driving the $19 billion for-profit academic publishing industry and making it “much harder for a small number of scientific elite to say what’s true and false.”
But open-information advocates and experts who have reviewed the NIH’s proposed plans for capping the amount it will pay for article processing charges said it likely won’t reform academia’s incentive structure or rein in publishers, including some that charge academic researchers as much as $12,690 per article to make their work freely accessible to the public and more likely to get cited.
“It is important to keep in mind that any cap is a cap on the amount that can be budgeted to be paid from a grant. It is not a cap on what publishers can charge. What publishers charge may be influenced by a budget cap, but many other factors will also impact on that,” said Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, a professor and coordinator for research professional development at the University of Illinois library. “It is more likely that a budget cap causes publishers that charge less to raise their fees—the ceiling will become the floor—than it is that publishers charging more will lower their fees.”
The proposal, which if adopted would go into effect Jan. 1, 2026, is aimed at addressing one of the many criticisms the Trump administration has made about federally funded academic research and the journals that publish the results.
In May, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, said he was considering preventing federally funded scientists from publishing in leading medical journals and launching in-house journals instead, claiming without evidence that pharmaceutical companies control the journals.
Then, in July, the NIH sped up the implementation of a Biden-era rule requiring federally funded researchers to immediately make their research findings publicly accessible. And earlier this month, Bhattacharya criticized academia’s “publish or perish culture” in a statement about the NIH’s strategy for advancing its mission.
“It favors the promotion of only favorable results, and replication work is little valued or rewarded,” he wrote. “We are exploring various mechanisms to support scientists focused on replication work, to publish negative findings, and to elevate replication research.”
Given all of that context, the publisher fee cap plan is “more or less a warning shot across the bow that the NIH is serious about scholarly communication reform,” said Chris Marcum, who was assistant director for open science and data policy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration. “The administration believes there’s massive market concentration held by just a few scholarly publishers, and they’re no longer going to subsidize the surplus revenues of those journals.”
While the Trump administration is far from alone in its criticism of big academic publishers—just six companies own 53 percent of academic journals—which rely on often-unpaid researchers and peer reviewers, Marcum said that even if the NIH adopted all five of the options it outlined to cap publisher fees, “it’s not comprehensive enough” to meet their stated goals.
“They could eliminate APCs and fix pricing, but the extremely useful tool that they have is influence over the universities,” he added.
For example, one of the options in the NIH’s proposal would increase limits on APCs if the journal paid peer reviewers, but Marcum said he’s concerned that could result in some peer reviewers trying to game the system to enrich themselves. Instead, he said, “if the NIH really wants to move the needle on this, they should think about other ways to compensate reviewers.” Some of those ideas could include giving peer reviewers credit toward their grant applications, including peer review as part of grant work or requiring universities that apply for NIH grants to include considerations for their researchers to engage in peer review.
Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, said that though the NIH “can’t single-handedly reform the global system of academic research incentives, they can play a leadership role.”
But capping APCs isn’t the only—or most effective—option to make that happen.
“Rather than just limiting the amount of money that the NIH provides researchers to publish in a journal, it could say, ‘If you choose not to publish in a journal and do something else, we’ll provide money to do that,’ and support other mechanisms that allow researchers to break that incentive cycle,” Joseph said. “The NIH could reward them for communicating their findings early and often, making the global conversation of science dynamic in real time so that people can really benefit from it.”
The publishing industry is also not keen on the NIH’s attempt to control article processing charges.
A “free and competitive scholarly marketplace, including not-for-profit societies and other publishers, remains the most effective means of sustaining this vital sector, and bolstering our nation’s leadership position in the sciences,” Carl Maxwell, senior vice president for public policy for the Association of American Publishers, which has opposed open access expansion, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
“Models are now changing in the face of open access mandates, and AAP is analyzing the options put forth by NIH to identify the plan that will provide authors with maximum freedom to choose how to publish and communicate their work, while at the same time supporting the indispensable publication processes that deliver best-in-class, peer-reviewed articles.”
This week marked the start of the semester for hundreds of colleges across the U.S. But many international students, plagued by difficulty getting visa appointments and unusually high rates of visa denials, are still unsure if they’ll be able to attend college in the U.S. this year.
At the University of Maryland Baltimore County, a midsize public university that has a student body composed of about 15 percent international students, international Ph.D. and undergraduate students appear to be largely unaffected by visa issues. But the rate of visa issuance for master’s students is only about half what it has been in previous years, according to David Di Maria, UMBC’s vice provost for global engagement.
Most of UMBC’s master’s students are from India, the country that now sends the most international students to the U.S.—but which experts say has had virtually no visa appointments available for the past several months.
“I think what has impacted that population the most is that you’ve got a country where … you could probably guess, it’s the highest volume in terms of students visa applications at a time when there are fewer slots available,” Di Maria said. “Hopefully it’s a blip. Hopefully, in future terms, there won’t be an extended period where students are unable to secure visa appointments.”
The backlog in visa appointments dates to the Trump administration’s pause on all student visa interviews in late May, after which the government began mandating social media reviews for all F-1 visa applicants. Some experts argue that the mandatory social media reviews have also extended the visa process by adding more responsibilities to the workload of consulate staff.
Since then, experts have speculated about how significant the drop in international student enrollment will be this fall. NAFSA, the association that represents international education professionals, predicted earlier this summer that international enrollment would drop between 30 and 40 percent, resulting in $7 billion in lost revenue and 60,000 lost jobs. Experts warn that a dip that significant could have major repercussions for the economies of college towns and cities. Colleges may also have to scramble to find professors to lead low-level classes that international graduate students were slated to teach.
Stuck In a Holding Pattern
It’s difficult to tell if those projections are accurate. The Department of State hasn’t updated visa issuance numbers since May, at which point figures were already lower than they had been the previous year.
But now, the picture of what this academic year might look like is beginning to take shape as institutions and experts report that significant numbers of international students are stuck in a holding pattern, unable to find visa appointments even after the semester has begun.
“I actually joined a WhatsApp group in April … of all these Indian students who are aspiring to study in the U.S. this fall, and I [see] a lot of students saying, ‘No slots, no slots,’” said Girish Ballolla, chief executive officer of Gen Next Education, an international recruitment firm. “Basically, what they’re saying is they’re going online trying to schedule an appointment and they’re not finding any slots. Those students are, like, now talking about, ‘Oh, should I defer to spring? Should I take up my university’s offer of an online program?’”
Other countries with severely limited appointments include China, Japan and Nigeria, according to NAFSA.
Inside Higher Ed reached out to over 30 universities with significant international student enrollment to ask how many of their committed incoming students were unable to attend due to visa issues. Most did not respond; others declined to answer the question or said that data was not yet available.
A handful of institutions noted that they’ve had only a small number of students impacted by delays and denials; Grinnell College, located in Iowa, has only one international student out of 72 who was unable to come to campus due to visa delays. At Mount Holyoke College, “fewer than seven” students are still waiting on their visas, a spokesman said in an email, though he said other students had deferred until the spring. It’s not unusual for a small number of students to miss the start of the semester due to visa issues, even in a regular semester.
On the other hand, Cornell University, like UMBC, said some of its graduate students had trouble getting their visas—or were simply concerned about coming to the U.S.
“Cornell accepted roughly the same number of international students this year as in past years and roughly the same number accepted our offer as in the past, but we have experienced some melt at the graduate level as students were worried about the visa application process or chose not to come to the U.S. because of the political climate,” Wendy Wolford, vice provost for international affairs, told Inside Higher Ed in an email.
Grinnell, Cornell and Mount Holyoke, as well as UMBC, are among the 20 institutions with the highest proportion of international students in the U.S., according to The New York Times.
Visa Denials Are Up, Too
On top of having difficulty securing appointments, more students are having their visas denied, experts report.
Sudhanshu Kaushik, the director of the North American Association of Indian Students, said that students from the subcontinent are being denied at a higher rate than he’s seen in his five years leading the organization.
Many have been told the reason for their denial is because there’s not enough proof that they’re not attempting to immigrate to the U.S. That’s usual in some cases, Kaushik said, but it’s become common this year even among wealthier students from major cities with deep roots and connections in India.
“A demographic that’s never had an issue is facing lots of issues,” he said. He also noted that some students are receiving denials many weeks after their visa interview, in some cases getting the news just a few days before they were hoping to start classes.
Colleges are attempting to accommodate students facing visa delays and denials by offering them the chance to defer their admission until spring or take online classes, according to Joann Ng Hartmann, NAFSA’s senior impact officer.
“Schools are really thinking and working very hard to be flexible, because they want these international students on campus,” she said.
Cornell also devised what Wolford called a “global semester program” that will offer international students who couldn’t get their visas in time the option to spend their first semester at one of three international partner institutions before hopefully coming to Cornell in the fall.
Some students are still hoping they’ll make it to campus this semester, despite not receiving visas by orientation.
“At this point for us, the census date is Sept. 10, and that’s when we really know who’s here and who’s not,” said Di Maria of UMBC. “I do have a number of students who are still optimistic that say they would arrive later in the week, or even next week.”
The Health and Human Services Department has terminated the Minority Biomedical Research Support program, which provided colleges and universities grants to increase the number of minority faculty, students and investigators conducting biomedical research.
In a notice published Monday in the Federal Register, HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the cancellation is to comply with two anti–diversity, equity and inclusion executive orders President Trump signed in January on his first two days back in office, plus the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions decisions. The change is effective Sept. 25.
“The MBRS program prioritizes racial classifications in awarding federal funding,” including by relying on “‘minority student enrollment’ to determine applicant eligibility,” Kennedy wrote. And, though the Supreme Court ruling focused on university admissions, Kennedy wrote that “the principles identified in Students for Fair Admissions also apply to the federal government and require repeal of the MBRS program.”
STAT reported the move earlier. Rochelle Newman, a University of Maryland psychologist who used the grant to pay undergraduate researchers and train them, told STAT that “cutting of these programs means that an entire generation of students will end up being lost to science.”
Columbia’s graduate student union is in the middle of negotiating a new contract with the university.
DNY59/iStock/Getty Images
Less than a month before the start of the semester, Ph.D. students at Columbia University in New York were told with little explanation that they would no longer be teaching this fall.
The catalyst for this change is unclear. The university said it’s an effort to reduce the teaching load on Columbia graduate students and allow them to finish their degrees in six years rather than seven. The students said it’s a move to weaken the labor power of their union, which is in the middle of tense negotiations with the university to renew its contract, which expired June 30.
The students, who are members of the graduate student union Student Workers of Columbia, will still be paid. However, instead of receiving a biweekly teaching stipend, they’ll get a lump sum at the start of the semester. To pay both the Ph.D.s and their replacements, “the cost to the university likely runs to millions of dollars,” estimated Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor at Columbia and vice president and acting president of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors. In July, Columbia agreed to a $221 million settlement with the federal government in order to restore hundreds of millions in federal research funding.
Columbia has traditionally tapped sixth- and seventh-year graduate students to teach foundational courses and some of the undergraduate college’s Core Curriculum classes, which includes courses, like University Writing and Frontiers of Science, that all first-year students are required to take. The work is more time-consuming than a regular TA job; as the so-called instructors of record, the Ph.D. students must teach two two-hour lectures and attend a pedagogy seminar each week, on top of all of the reading and prep time that goes on behind the scenes. The workload sidelines their research and writing, a representative from SWC explained. But it offers valuable teaching experience, and Ph.D. candidates are usually guaranteed a seventh year of funding when they sign on to teach a core class.
But this teaching expectation is unusually large for graduate students, according to Columbia officials.
“Columbia doctoral students have typically been required to teach more than Ph.D. students at peer institutions, which often means delays in their time to degree,” a university spokesperson wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “After discussions with some departments about teaching requirements and instructional staffing, we have released some graduate students from teaching obligations for the fall—while continuing to offer them the same funding and benefits. These students will have more time to complete academic requirements or advance their dissertation research and writing.”
Neither the students nor some faculty buy this explanation. Students say they didn’t receive any formal communication about changes to the graduate student teaching structure and that the move to dismiss or deny Ph.D.s from the teaching positions is an effort to undermine the labor power of the union, which had been planning a strike for the fall. As TAs and members of SWC, the students would still be able to participate in a work action, but it wouldn’t have as big an impact as lecturers walking out of class.
More than 100 students are affected by this change, according to the union. Columbia officials said the figure was much lower but declined to share an exact figure and noted that the number of Ph.D. core instructors varies year to year.
Columbia’s AAUP chapter denounced the university’s action in an Aug. 19 statement.
“We do not agree with the claim that this step has been taken to help graduate students. Rather, it clearly has to do with the looming contract negotiations. The timing makes this clear,” said Thaddeus. “Students applied for preceptor positions back in November, and then they heard nothing at all for many months. If this were being done to help graduate students, then it would have made sense to notify them promptly.”
The move will also damage the quality of Columbia’s doctoral and M.F.A. programs, Thaddeus argued.
“Practical experience with setting assignments and exams, giving final grades, and so on is invaluable to those graduate students who pursue a career in teaching,” he added.
One sixth-year Ph.D., who wished to remain anonymous to prevent retaliation from the university for speaking out, applied for a core teaching position in December. Over the next eight months, she received no communication about the position and finally received an offer for a TA position July 30. It wasn’t until Aug. 6, the day she was originally supposed to sign and return the teaching assistant appointment letter, that she heard back about the core position. She’d been rejected, the email said, and it included no explanation or information about the widespread changes to graduate teaching duties at Columbia.
The abrupt change is “really disrupting people in the later stage of the program, like myself, who thought that this was not going to be my last year,” says the Ph.D. student. “Now I’m having to go on the academic job market basically at the last minute.”
To fill the now-vacant teaching jobs, Columbia is recruiting for one-year lectureships and advertising the roles to adjuncts, postdocs and New York–based graduate students at other universities.
“I wanted to share with you a posting we’ve just made for full-time lecturer positions teaching all across our Core curriculum—in Art, Music, Literature, and Contemporary Civilization—where we are expecting a larger entering class that we’d originally thought,” Columbia officials wrote in a message that was passed along to faculty at the University of Chicago and obtained by Inside Higher Ed. Columbia has also sent the position to Yale University.
I am a lifetime member of the American Association of University Professors. It is an organization that has done remarkable work in defending academic freedom for people who teach in this nation’s colleges and universities.
But as I contemplate returning to teaching this fall, I worry that the AAUP’s understanding of academic freedom is dangerously behind the times. The AAUP’s understanding of academic freedom urgently needs updating to take account of dangers that could not have been contemplated in 1940 when its statement on academic freedom was issued.
It is time for the organization to think anew about what academic freedom means and what must be done to protect it in an era when the federal government and some state governments are seeking to curtail it. We can understand why its failure to do has been problematic by taking a look at lawsuits filed by the AAUP and its campus-based chapters at universities that have been attacked by the Trump administration.
But before looking at those suits, let me say a bit about the 1940 statement.
The AAUP tells the story of its “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” this way: “In 1915 the Committee on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure of the American Association of University Professors formulated a statement of principles on academic freedom and academic tenure known as the 1915 Declaration of Principles … In 1940 … representatives of the American Association of University Professors and of the Association of American Colleges agreed on a restatement of the principles. This restatement is known to the profession as the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.”
Thirty years later, the AAUP considered updating the 1940 statement but ultimately decided not to undertake a wholesale revision. Instead, it added a series of “Interpretive Comments” to the existing document. Those comments, the AAUP explains, were intended to update the document in light of “the experience gained in implementing and applying it for over thirty years and of adapting it to current needs.”
This history reminds us that the thinking guiding that statement goes back more than a century, to a time when the modern university was just taking shape. As Yale Law School professor Robert Post notes, “The American concept of academic freedom was forged early in the 20th century. It emerged from struggles between the newly professionalizing American professoriate and the governmental, business, and parochial powers that controlled American universities.”
And it has been more than half a century since the AAUP’s influential statement on academic freedom was refreshed at all.
The 1940 statement imagined that the main threat to the “full freedom” in research, teaching and extramural speech would come “from institutional censorship or discipline.” The statement was, in that sense, addressed not just to teachers and scholars, but to university administrators.
That is why if they do not follow the principles laid out in the AAUP statement, they can be subjected to censure. As the AAUP explains it, censure is reserved for institutions “that, as evidenced by a past violation … are not observing the generally recognized principles of academic freedom and tenure approved by this Association.”
I searched the censure list, looking for the Trump administration. Alas, it was nowhere to be found.
Not surprising, because by the AAUP’s standards, the Trump administration cannot violate academic freedom except indirectly by pressuring higher educational institutions to do so on its behalf.
To be fair, the AAUP has not been silent about what the administration has done since Jan. 20. In February, it joined a suit seeking to prevent the Trump administration “from using federal grants and contracts as leverage to force colleges and universities to end all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, whether federally funded or not, and from terminating any ‘equity-related’ federal grants or contracts.”
In March, it sued the Trump administration for “unlawfully cutting off $400 million in federal funding for crucial public health research in an attempt to force Columbia University to surrender its academic independence.” As the AAUP noted, “This move represents a stunning new tactic: using cuts as a cudgel to coerce a private institution to adopt restrictive speech codes and allow government control over teaching and learning. “
But here again, consonant with its existing approach to academic freedom, the focus was on what Columbia would do to its faculty.
Also in March, the AAUP joined a lawsuit “seeking to block the Trump administration from carrying out large-scale arrests, detentions, and deportations of noncitizen students and faculty members who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and other protected First Amendment activities.” But note, the primary claim is about freedom of speech, not academic freedom.
In April, the AAUP and its chapter at Harvard University sued “to block the Trump administration from demanding that Harvard University restrict speech and restructure its core operations or else face the cancellation of $8.7 billion in federal funding for the university and its affiliated hospitals.”
Like the suit brought on behalf of Columbia University, it focused on what Harvard might do to restrict the academic freedom of those who teach and do research there.
In one sense, this is a remarkable record for which the AAUP deserves enormous credit. But, as I pointed out in January, there are new threats to individual faculty members “to intimidate them into silence,” as Darrell M. West put it. It is time that the AAUP acknowledged them in its foundational statement on academic freedom.
Protecting academic freedom now requires that colleges and universities not only refrain from abridging it themselves but that they take measures to protect and support members of their faculties in the face of governmental or other external threats targeting them directly. The AAUP should revise its 1940 statement to make clear that higher education institutions have an affirmative obligation to advance and protect academic freedom. Doing so would encourage recognition of academic freedom as a positive good in which the universities and their faculties have a joint interest.
For colleges and universities, implementing that affirmative obligation requires, among other things, that they stand ready to provide legal assistance, make public statements of support and offer help in devising crisis communication strategies for faculty whose freedom in research, in teaching or in their use of academic expertise as citizens is threatened or abridged by external forces.
That’s a big ask.
It calls on universities to provide resources, spend reputational capital and stand behind faculty whose views administrators might not share. The university, in this new understanding, has to put itself more at risk to promote and protect academic freedom.
Universities won’t do this easily, which is why the AAUP would play such an important role in advancing this goal. Redrafting the 1940 statement is a good place to start.
As the history of its current statement suggests, the AAUP does not move easily or quickly to reconsider its principles. But the need is great, and the time for action is here. By meeting the challenge of the moment, the AAUP will once again demonstrate its essential role in the world of American higher education.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
Anthony Gallonio has spent most of his career working in higher education admissions and financial aid, watching young people select, apply to and enroll in colleges. But when his daughter Grace received a cancer diagnosis 14 years ago, when she was a year old, he realized there was an underserved group of teens who needed support in college exploration: cancer patients.
“I remember looking at these kids coming in [to the hospital] thinking, ‘How are they doing it?’” Gallonio said. “Their lives are still going on, high school is taking place, college is still in the future. We know one missed application or one missed form or one missed deadline could mean the difference between getting into a school or not or getting tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships or not.”
In 2011, Gallonio established the National GRACE Foundation, a nonprofit that offers free information and advice on higher education for families of young people who survived childhood cancer. The group is supported by volunteers across the country who work in higher ed, illuminating the hidden curriculum to encourage student success.
The background: GRACE, named after Gallonio’s daughter and short for Growing, Recovering and Achieving a College Education, is designed to break down barriers to enrollment for childhood cancer survivors and support parents and caregivers navigating college applications and beyond.
“The whole goal has been to take the stress out of the college admissions and financial aid process for families who have a lot of stress going on and try to help them avoid the mistakes that I have seen over the years,” Gallonio said.
A 2019 study of 16,700 childhood cancer survivors found that about half graduated from college; those reporting chronic conditions were even less likely to complete a degree by age 25.
Many pediatric cancer survivors Gallonio works with aspire to careers in helping roles, including in health care, social services or research, he said. Getting into and through college is just the first step in that journey.
How it works: GRACE provides a range of services, including offering advice on financial aid, tracking upcoming deadlines, explaining confusing terminology or jargon, and highlighting various colleges and programs that might be a good fit for the student. A majority of the students and parents come from low- or middle-income families, and they often find the foundation through word of mouth or through partnerships with hospitals.
“I think about our services in the way that a family might hire college consultants, but we do it all for free,” Gallonio said. “That’s the group that we’re seeing—those folks who need help but also don’t have necessarily the resources to pay for [a consultant].”
GRACE volunteers also provide in-person and webinar events for parents and caregivers on topics like college costs and scholarships.
Once students are enrolled, GRACE supports their persistence by working as a liaison between institutions and families. They might appeal for more financial aid, for instance, or advocate for student supports through disability services offices. “We know what [families] are going through, we know what these school are going through, we kind of speak their language,” Gallonio said.
The organization has up to 30 volunteers at any point in the academic year, but “we are always looking for volunteers in the higher ed landscape—anywhere in the country, at any type of institution,” to provide counseling to pediatric cancer survivors, Gallonio said.
Building better: Since launching in 2011, GRACE has assisted over 300 young people in their pursuit of a college degree, and Grace, the foundation’s namesake, is “a happy and healthy 15-year-old,” Gallonio said. Families have also secured over $3 million in scholarships through the foundation’s advocacy work.
Olivia Falzone, a rising first-year student at the College of Charleston and cancer survivor, receives the Isabel Helen Farnum Scholarship from the National Grace Foundation.
Anthony Gallonio/National GRACE Foundation
Over the years, GRACE has expanded services beyond the Northeastern U.S., where Gallonio is located, to support prospective students from coast to coast. As the foundation’s reach has grown, so has its perspective on postsecondary education.
Initially, the focus was to help cancer patients have a good shot at a competitive institution. It has since expanded to highlight the value of higher education in any capacity and offer vocational or alternative pathway support as well.
“A lot of it has to do with breaking down that [college] can be done, that it can be affordable,” Gallonio said. “The stories that we hear about debt, about the $90,000 colleges—that’s not every college, and there are colleges in every state that a family can afford to go to.”
Gallonio is considering changing GRACE’s acronym to “Growing, Recovering and Continuing Education,” to reflect the wider range of pathways available to young people.
This fall, GRACE will launch a mobile application and webpage so prospective students and parents can explore colleges and universities’ disability services, careers and trades, financial aid information, and selectivity rates. The app also includes a personalized scholarship search service, allowing individuals to put in their information and receive tailored suggestions for scholarships to apply for.
“We try to make it a one stop,” Gallonio said. “We’re not charging them for usage or anything like that. Hopefully it saves our volunteers and us time.”
ELYRIA, Ohio —Nolan Norman had no idea what microelectronic manufacturing entailed when his adviser at Midview High suggested he take the school’s new class on it last year.
Yet once he started fusing metal to circuit boards, he says he was hooked. “When I was little, I thought that wizards made these things,” the 18-year-old joked of the electronics he’s now able to assemble. Despite long “hating” the idea of college, he was motivated to enroll in the microelectronic manufacturing bachelor’s degree program at nearby Lorain County Community College this fall. He’s spent the summer working in a job in the field that gives him both college credit and pays $18 an hour. Said Norman: “Now I’m seeing the path to get to be one of these wizards.”
Norman’s path wasn’t accidental: Two years ago, Lorain County Community College partnered with Midview High to create the course, one of several ways the college is trying to recruit and train more young people for jobs in manufacturing.
Nationally, more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs are going unfilled, many of them in advanced manufacturing, which requires the sort of high-tech skills and postsecondary credentials that Norman is working toward. President Donald Trump is leveraging tariffs in part, he has said, to grow manufacturing jobs in the United States, including those that involve machinery or robotics and training after high school.
Nolan Norman, 18, an incoming freshman at Lorain County Community College, observes a circuit board under a microscope on Aug. 6 in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
Yet as it is, colleges have struggled to add and revise their training based on employer input and prepare students for tomorrow’s jobs, not just today’s. In the area surrounding Lorain County Community College, officials estimate that they’d have to teach four times the number of students to meet today’s unfilled manufacturing jobs.
Gogebic Community College, in rural Michigan, suspended its 22-year-old manufacturing technology program this spring because of low enrollment. “We could not get people into it,” registrar Karen Ball said, speaking in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the institution. “The needs in manufacturing are evolving so quickly, that to stay on top of it is too difficult.”
And then there is the history of manufacturing in communities like Norman’s, where so many factories moved to other countries in recent decades. The manufacturing workforce in the Great Lakes region shrunk by 35 percent between 2000 and 2010, a loss of 1.6 million jobs. But nationwide manufacturing has seen some recovery since then, rising from 11.5 million manufacturing jobs in 2010 to 12.9 million today, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group.
“If your family experienced tumultuous layoffs in steel or automotives, they may see manufacturing as a risky pathway rather than a solid pathway,” said Marisa White, vice president for enrollment management and student services at Lorain County Community College. “Individuals are like, ‘I don’t want my kids to go into something like that.’”
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White and other Lorain officials, though, have been slowly making strides in adding more students in recent years — and in trying to keep up with the needs of companies.
Printed circuit boards before components are attached in a lab at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
In addition to partnering with Midview High, staff from the college set up tables at food banks and Boys and Girls Clubs where they answer questions about its manufacturing degree and certificate programs, and even partner with a nearby manufacturing nonprofit that uses holograms and a robot dog to get the attention of high school students. That is paying off, officials say. The college now produces 120 graduates each year in advanced manufacturing — a category that includes industrial engineering tech, mechanical engineering tech, welding, automation and microelectronics — compared to 43, a decade ago.
It has also cultivated a large network of local employers and a system to do market research before launching certificate programs. In some cases, it partners with companies that pay for employees to get training at Lorain college. In a classroom on a recent Wednesday, one of those electrician apprentices, Tyler Tector, 25, had rigged a series of plastic tubes to a small air pump. He hoped it would generate enough suction to keep its grip on his lab partner’s smartphone, which dangled precariously in the air (and already had a cracked screen from some previous misadventure).
The assignment was part of a class in practical applications of fluid power. Tector’s employer, Ford Motor Co., was sending him and a small group of other apprentice electricians to take this class once a week, so they could better work with the growing number of robots at the local engine plant.
Nick Wade, an electrical apprentice for Ford Motor Co., works on a circuitry exercise during professor Brian Iselin’s practical applications of fluid power course at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
“Robots are the best co-workers,” joked Tector, who added that he’s not worried about bots putting him out of a job because so many humans are needed to fix them. “They do exactly what you tell them to do. They don’t ask questions. They don’t yell and complain.” They are finicky though, he added. If anything in a robot’s area gets bumped out of place even a fraction of an inch, that could throw the machine off and require reprogramming.
So many employers told college officials they need technicians with basic knowledge across a range of trades that the college is starting a new associate degree program in the fall called Multicraft Industrial Maintenance that will include lessons like the one Tector is doing but in a condensed format.
“Because of the high-tech nature of things, employers don’t want students siloed into trades anymore,” said Brian Iselin, an assistant professor in manufacturing who is leading the effort.
Johnny Vanderford, who leads the college’s microelectronic manufacturing degree program, often spends part of his lunch break scouring LinkedIn for the latest job postings by local employers to see what skills they are looking for. His program’s model involves finding every student a paid internship, and students can take classes two days a week or in the evening to have the rest of the time free for paid work in the field.
Professor Brian Iselin teaches a course to employees of Ford’s Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
Vanderford pointed to a PowerPoint slide showing more than 90 manufacturing companies in the area he said the college has worked with: “We basically tailor our curriculum to meet their workforce needs.” In some cases that means wedging into a class syllabus training on some specialized machine that might be used at only a handful of employers.
Rather than simply having advisory committees with a few large companies that meet occasionally, today Lorain and many other colleges follow a model that involves frequent discussions with company leaders, instructors directly participating in those meetings and a greater focus on the skills employers need.
“Those relationships take time,” said Shalin Jyotishi, managing director of the Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative at the think tank New America. He says that it is hard for other community colleges to replicate best practices from Lorain because they are labor-intensive to enact.
Employers also have a tendency to change their plans. For instance, when Tesla pledged to build an electrical vehicle plant in Flint, Michigan, the local Mott Community College started an EV program, said Jyotishi. But the plant never came. “The college still has a Tesla sign,” he said.
The numbers no longer add up at Gogebic Community College, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
When the college suspended its program in manufacturing technology in May, it had just three students.
As with many programs at the college, a single employee was charged with administering and teaching. Doing all that plus staying on top of nearby companies’ workforce needs was “unsustainable,” said Ball, the registrar.
The few small manufacturers in the area all say they have different needs, rather than one clear set of skills, she said, noting that “you can’t be a generalist in manufacturing.” Even when the college does identify a needed skill to teach, it takes at least six months to a year to get the program approved by college leaders and the accreditor. By then, companies might need something different.
And the pay offered by small manufacturers is often low, despite an expectation of training beyond a high school diploma, said Ball.
The Richard Desich SMART Center at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio, houses the microelectronic manufacturing systems program, which teaches students about the manufacture of semiconductors. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
Nationwide, automation has reduced the earning power for many manufacturing jobs, said Jyotishi of New America. “For a long time manufacturing was the bedrock of the middle class,” said Jyotishi. “That wage premium for manufacturing has actually gone away.”
And there’s a danger that as colleges aim to please employers, they will create programs that are too narrow, argues Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. (Editor’s note: The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Columbia’s Teachers College.) “You don’t want specific skills training — you don’t want to just train students to work in a fab,” he said, referring to a facility where microchips and other electronics are produced. “Whenever schools buy a lot of specific equipment for training, I worry a lot. What students really need are broader skills.”
Even Lorain doesn’t always find the right fit. During the pandemic, the college started what it calls fast-track programs, which typically run 16 weeks, across a range of professional fields (not just manufacturing). But because of mixed success attracting students, officials recently slimmed the list from 60 to 13, said Tracy Green, vice president of strategic and institutional development at Lorain County Community College. And the college recently started winding down a program in industrial safety because of a lack of student interest, even though there are still a large number of job postings by local companies for jobs with those skills, said Iselin.
One provision in Trump’s new “one big, beautiful bill” promises a boost to manufacturing education, however. For the first time, the law will allow low-income students to use federal Pell Grants for short-term certificate programs, in what is known as Workforce Pell. It’s a change many community college leaders have been calling for for years as they have created more short-term programs in response to demand by students and employers who want to quickly gain new skills in fast-changing areas, including manufacturing. But that program won’t be up and running until the 2026-27 academic year.
The promise of a big new employer moving to town can galvanize student interest in manufacturing.
In Ohio, the talk for years has been a $28 billion Intel chip manufacturing plant under construction in Columbus. The facility is expected to bring some 3,000 jobs to the area, and the company has committed $50 million to workforce education in the state, including $2 million to Lorain County Community College, which it used to buy new classroom equipment, support student scholarships, and pay for program development and instructor training.
Chris Dukles, 36, an electrician apprentice for Ford Motor Co., takes notes during a course taught by Brian Iselin at Lorain County Community College. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
The top graduates in Lorain County Community College’s microelectronic manufacturing program each year typically get internships at Intel’s closest existing plant, which is in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. It’s a motivator to work hard in their classes, some students say.
Lia Douglas, a student in the microelectronic manufacturing program at Lorain, scored one of those slots and headed to Arizona last summer. The experience, though, was sobering.
“My plan really was to make a good impression with my internship, get a job maybe in Arizona even if it was for a year or two, and then try to move back to Ohio when they have an Ohio plant,” she said.
But one day last July, all the employees were unexpectedly summoned to an all-hands call where the company announced a wave of layoffs and reductions in some benefits that had interested Douglas, including a sabbatical program. This year, Intel announced that the opening of the Ohio plant has been delayed until 2030.
“I learned I had a little too much faith in a company and the promises of a company,” she said. “And it reminded me that at the end of the day, the company has to make money.”
She’s still glad she chose Lorain’s program, which has landed her several local internships and opened her eyes to the many small and mid-sized manufacturers in the area.
Lia Douglas is a student in the microelectronic manufacturing program at Lorain County Community College. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
And she has been hooked on a career in making things ever since she was in middle school and a family friend taught her a bit of welding. Her hero was Adam Savage, co-host of the TV show “MythBusters,” who she even got to meet at a comic book convention in Cleveland.
Douglas complains that students are told in high school that they either have to choose a trade for hands-on work or an academic track to prepare for a career behind a desk that might involve design and project management. She says that as manufacturing changes, there’s plenty of room to do both. In fact, she says, when a group of doctoral students from Kent State University recently visited the college’s clean room, she was amused to see them struggle with some of the tools the students routinely use in the microelectronic manufacturing program.
“It takes as much brainpower to figure out what is the right tool for the right process as getting a Ph.D.,” she said.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Rubrics are a valuable tool that supports student growth and facilitates instructor grading and feedback (Suskie, 2018). As instructors, we see this value; unfortunately, many of our students, especially first-year students, are unfamiliar with the concept. This presents an opportunity to raise their awareness of a tool that will benefit them as they master concepts and seek course success.
The Context
During a two-week mathematics-focused summer bridge program, I teach a segment called Behind the Scenes, which highlights various success strategies students will need to leverage to be successful in college. One lesson exposes these students to the concept of rubrics, covering everything from their purpose, structure, and application.
The Illustration
As noted by Doyle and Zakrajsek (2018), “The human brain is constantly looking for connections. Connections help you use prior knowledge to build bridges to the new material, creating a more meaningful understanding of the new material” (p. 15). Building off this idea, the lesson begins with an illustration about desserts, specifically cake, a concept which will resonate with most if not all students. The following instructions are given:
I took a vote and decided that math is out, cake is in. Cake has much more bearing on your future than math. Your assignment is to design the cake I want to eat for lunch today. You will be graded on this, and it will be worth a lot of points. Take a couple of minutes to sketch out your design, making note of the details. You will not be graded on your artistic ability or lack of materials.
As students are working, I’m walking around the room. Sometimes, they will ask me questions about my preferences. Much to their dismay, I tell them I am not answering questions at that time, but that they will understand why in a few minutes.
The Discussion
I ask for volunteers to share their designs with me. As the student shares, I find a reason why I do not want to eat their cake. Perhaps there are not enough layers, or it’s not my favorite flavor. I will then subjectively give them a grade, loosely based on the rubric I will eventually show them, but with an element of randomness to aid the discussion. Finally, I’ll show them a picture of the right answer: a three-layer lemon cake decorated with pale yellow frosting, lemon slices, and a few small flowers.
I then pose a series of questions for discussion:
What did you think of my grading?
Was it subjective or objective? Why?
If we repeated this assignment, what would you want to know to meet my expectations?
Understandably, students are not a fan of how I graded, correctly identifying the subjective nature. Based on the grading and feedback they heard me give the volunteers, they can identify several criteria that would be helpful to know in advance. As we talk through these ideas, I make the connection that in higher education the tool we use to be transparent about expectations and objectively grade assessments is called a rubric. Of course, I also backtrack and tell them, “FYI, math is back in – turns out it is useful.”
Once we have defined a rubric, we talk about the structure. I present to them a sample cake rubric, and talk about the grid format, with rows representing the criteria we will be evaluating (layers, flavor, decoration); columns representing the performance rating (needs improvement, proficient, advanced); and the cells containing descriptions of performance and point values (0, 5, 10).
The Application
After we establish what a rubric is and how instructors use it, we turn towards application of rubrics as a way for them to pre-grade their assignments before submitting. Each student in the program will be enrolled in a first-year seminar their first term, which becomes the example from which they can practice. I pass out the first-year seminar rubric along with the assignment prompts, which are consistent throughout the course. I also provide two sample responses, one that clearly does not meet expectations (43 words total), and one that does meet expectations (270 words total). I ask them to work in pairs to review the submissions and grade them using the given rubric, which includes four criteria and two performance levels.
Pairs are then asked to report out their score for the first submission, and we talk through their decisions. I share with them my grade as well. This process is repeated for the second submission. We also discuss what they liked about the experience and what they found challenging. In all, this lesson takes about thirty minutes but could be shortened or lengthened as needed.
Doyle and Zakrajsek (2018) further identified that “when learning something new, it helps to be interested in it, see a value to it, pay attention to it, associate it with something you already know, and practice it a lot” (p. 100). The cake illustration is something they already know, and let’s be honest, if it relates to food, college students are very interested. Through the absurd example, they see the value which piques their curiosity and attention. The hands-on practice, while maybe not sufficient in and of itself, at least provides some experience with a new idea from which they can build their confidence.
This rubric lesson not only raises awareness of a grading technique they will encounter over their time in college, but they get practice with an actual rubric that will be used in their first term. Further, their review of poor and exemplary submissions can help frame the direction they need to take when it comes to their own assignments. As McGuire (2015) pointed out, one way “to help your students gain competence is giving them targeted feedback, rubrics, and exemplars” (p. 88).
When students understand the purpose of the rubric, they are better positioned to achieve success in their courses. Proactively, it allows them to assess whether they are meeting assignment expectations before the due date. Reactively, it allows them to understand why they missed points, leveraging the feedback as formative assessment and making corrections for future assignments.
Sarah A. Forbes, PhD, is the Student Academic Success Director and a first-year seminar instructor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. In these roles, she helps students learn new strategies for academic success. Sarah also serves as a first-year seminar instructional designer, summer bridge program director, and academic advising program administrator.
References
Doyle, T., & Zakrajsek, T. D. (2018). The new science of learning: How to learn in harmony with your brain. Stylus Publishing.
McGuire, S. Y. (2015). Teach students how to learn. Stylus Publishing.
Suskie, L. (2018). Assessing student learning: A common sense guide. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
The Australian National University (ANU) admitted its has “much work to do” regarding its management and culture in a report it produced for the sector regulator’s ongoing investigation into its governance.
The Self-Assurance Report, completed for the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), is the first step in TEQSA’s current compliance assessment of the university’s leadership, council culture and financial position, which started in October, 2024.
“The report makes clear that we’re on a journey and that we still have much work to do in the areas of risk management, governance and culture,” vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell said in a statement.
“We recognise that ANU is at a critical point in its history – one where we need to reset not only our finances but also our operating and structural model.”
The university has reported an operating deficit every year since 2020, except 2021, and has forecast a $110 deficit for 2025 and a break-even for 2026.
The recurring deficits caused a major restructure, known as Renew ANU, that aims to save $250 million in yearly spending; $100 million in salary costs and $150m in non-salary costs.
There has 135 voluntary separations and 83 staff redundancies so far, which has saved $13 million, and $37 million has been saved from spending cuts.
From this point, there will be no more forced redundancies that haven’t already been announced, management has said. More salary savings will come from natural attrition.
It has also restructured its teaching operations, causing entire schools, such as its School of Music, to close.
“While the program of work has taken a strategic, phased approach to organisational change, guided by clear principles and extensive consultation, it has been a significant cultural shift and has caused anxiety and uncertainty in the university community,” the report said.
“Council has been regularly briefed about the progress of the work; and an internal governance board has maintained appropriate oversight … council has identified and is addressing the risks that led to the university’s current financial position, however, there remains work to be done to bring the whole university community along on this journey.
“Given the complexities with the university’s finances, this involves continuing to work with the university community in an enhanced way to ensure the finances are more easily understood.”
Vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell. Picture: Andrew Meares
The university’s ongoing deficits were not the result of one factor, the report said, but multiple, including the 2017-2021 strategic plan that called for an overall reduced, but more diverse, student base, and a had a projected increase in philanthropic donations. There were also costs associated with hailstorm and fire damage throughout 2019 and 2020.
The strategic plan initiated an ambitious philanthropic campaign that aimed to produce $1bn in donations over 10 years, which would make up for budget shortfalls relating to the overall reduction in student headcount.
The Self-Assurance Report said the philanthropic campaign “never eventuated and was quietly abandoned in late 2022.”
Professor Bell said the university council was very open to reflecting on its own practices and culture when it was discussed at a meeting in early August.
The Cover Letter, which was submitted alongside the Self-Assurance Report, also said ANU will set up an independent investigation into matters raised by academic Liz Allen, who alleged she was bullied and intimidated by ANU chancellor Julie Bishop at the Quality of governance at Australian higher education providers inquiry.
Dr Allen initially lodged a workplace complaint about the incident and the university agreed to appoint an external investigator, who eventually terminated the investigation on ethical grounds of ANU interference.
Professor Bell was absent with the flu on the day of the inquiry hearing, although she responded to the claims on the same day in a statement.
“Although we cannot address individual allegations publicly [due to ongoing investigations], I was really saddened to see members of our university in such distress, both those who appeared at the inquiry and those on our campus who have been impacted,” she said.
“Here on campus, I have now hosted nine ‘Facing the Future’ conversations and I want to thank staff who have made themselves available … I have been encouraged that people have been frank in their feedback, and most have turned up with a spirit of optimism and passion for the university which is a wonderful thing to hear in moments of change.”
The Self-Assurance Report assured TEQSA that ANU has a competent leadership team.
ANU’s executive leadership team. Source: ANU
“While the majority of the Executive Leadership Team are relatively new to their positions, they bring extensive experience to their roles from both within, and external to, ANU and the sector,” it said.
Only three out of nine members of its executive leadership team started their term before February, 2024.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) on Tuesday launched a petition urging the council to sack chancellor Julie Bishop and vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell and reverse the job and course cuts. It follows a vote of no confidence in the leadership pair by 800 ANU staff in March.
“We don’t need a new investigation, we need new leadership,” NTEU ACT division secretary Lachlan Clohesy said of the independent investigation into Dr Allen’s allegations.
“The matters raised during the Senate hearing are already being investigated by the regulator, TEQSA, and that is appropriate.
“This investigation is a distraction at a time when over one hundred people still face forced redundancies.”
The tertiary education union will take the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to the Fair Work Commission over the university’s decision to pause enrolments to 140 courses.
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