Blog
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Bite of the Big Four: India’s deadly snakebite crisis
Every year, an estimated 5.4 million people worldwide are bitten by snakes, resulting in as many as 138,000 deaths and three times as many cases of permanent disability.
The World Health Organization classified snakebite as a neglected tropical disease in 2017 and set a target to halve related deaths by 2030.
India, home to over 300 snake species, is at the heart of this global health issue, accounting for half of all snakebite-related deaths.
While 95% of Indian snakes are non-venomous, it’s “The Big Four” species — the Indian cobra, common krait, Russell’s viper and saw-scaled viper — that cause the most harm said Dr. Sushil John, a public health doctor and amateur herpetologist from Vellore.
“These snakes cohabit in the same spaces as humans, thriving in India’s agricultural fields, forests and urban outskirts,” said John. “So, they often come into close contact with people and might bite them.”
A study conducted between 1998 and 2014, called the Million Death Study, found that almost 58,000 people in India died from snakebite each year. Second to India in recorded snakebite deaths is Nigeria, with a reported 1,460 deaths per year.
The missing data
“Though India had a severe snakebite problem, accurate data on snakebite deaths in India was elusive for a long time,” said Dr. Ravikar Ralph, a physician at the Poison Control Centre at CMC Vellore.
In 2011, the official reported number of snakebite deaths was only 11,000. The deaths reported in the Million Death Study highlighted the severe underreporting of snakebite mortality in the country.
“This is because most studies available at the time were hospital-based, which led to the gross under-reporting of this issue,” said Ralph. “We knew from grassroots work that most patients were not reaching hospitals on time.”
“Either people didn’t realize that being bitten by a snake required medical management, or they went to traditional healers, causing fatal delays in hospital-based care,” said Ralph. “The Million Death Study used community-based data collection to circumvent that barrier and document accurate numbers.”
Harvesting the cure
Snakebites are unique compared to other health issues. Snake venom, a potent mix of proteins, can destroy tissue, paralyze muscles and impair blood clotting, often leading to severe disability which is most likely loss of limbs which were bitten or death if untreated.
“Unlike diseases caused by other agents such as viruses or bacteria where one can eliminate the causing agent, a similar approach cannot be taken for snakebites,” Ralph said.
Antivenom is the only specific treatment that can prevent or reverse many of the effects of snakebite, when given early and in the right dosage.
To produce antivenom, snake venom must be first collected, or “milked,” from live snakes kept in a specialized facility. Only one facility in India, located in Tamilnadu, harvests venom for anti-venom production in India.
The venom is then diluted and injected in small doses into animals like horses, prompting their immune systems to produce antibodies. These antibodies are then harvested, purified and processed into antivenom.
But India’s only anti-snake venom treatment targets only The Big Four snakes.
“There are over 50 venomous snake species in India,” said Gnaneshwar Ch, project lead of the Snake Conservation and Snakebite Mitigation project at the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust.
“The anti-snake venom’s limited scope means bites from less common species remain inadequately treated,” he said
Despite its importance, antivenom is also not widely available, and its cost can be prohibitive for many rural families. The gaps in stocking and distribution further worsen the issue.
While many countries produce antivenom, they tend to cater to the locally available species of snakes making it impractical to import it from other countries to India in order to solve the availability crisis.
A national action plan
The WHO has called for concerted global action to reduce deaths and disability in priority nations. In 2019, the WHO launched an international strategy for preventing and controlling snakebite, which was then regionally adapted for Southeast Asia and published in 2022.
The Indian Union Health Ministry then launched the National Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Snakebite Envenoming (NAPSE) in March 2024. The NAPSE aligns strategically with the WHO’s global roadmap and its regional adaptation for Southeast Asia.
Many stakeholders need to join forces in order to balance snakebite mitigation with snake conservation, experts say.
“Snakes tend to be very important to every ecosystem they are found in,” said Dr. Sushil John. “If snake numbers fall, we would see an increase in rodents which the snakes keep in check by eating. They would then destroy crops and spread diseases to animals and people.”
While this strategy appears to be heading in the right direction, some experts caution that there might be barriers to implementation.
“While public hospitals may adopt the reporting system, many Indians seek private health care,” said Professor Sakthivel Vaiyapuri, a venom pharmacologist at the University of Reading in England. “Mechanisms to ensure private hospitals comply with reporting requirements are essential.”
Vaiyapuri helped work on the National Action Plan. He said health workers who are to report snakebite must understand the significance of their role which will motivate them to record the data accurately. He also said someone must verify the entered data independently to ensure accuracy. He suggests developing a mobile app to streamline data collection.
While Vaiyapuri worries about the logistics of implementing such a plan for massive surveillance, there are also other worries about unintended consequences for snakebite victims, according to Dr. Anand Zachariah, a toxicologist at CMC Vellore.
“When India made maternal deaths notifiable, many private clinics in India stopped treating high-risk pregnancies because they worried about the reporting process getting them in trouble if something went south,” said Zachariah. “I fear snakebite becoming a notifiable disease might trigger such defensive practices among physicians.”
But he admits that at this point, the fear is only theoretical; what will eventually happen remains to be seen.
“Despite the challenges, I think [the National Action Plan] is a pivotal initiative in tackling snakebite envenomation in India,” Vaiyapuri said.
“By fostering accurate data collection, promoting intersectoral collaboration and engaging communities, the plan holds significant potential to drive meaningful change — ensuring effective prevention, timely treatment and a significant reduction in snakebite-related deaths and disabilities,” Vaiyapuri said.
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Essays in the Transformation of Higher Education (Dan Morris and Harry Targ)
From Upton Sinclair’s ‘Goose Step’ to the Neoliberal University (lulu.com)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Macro and Micro Analyses of Higher Education
Chapter Two: Discourses On Ideology
Chapter Three: Branding
Chapter Four: What Do Universities Do?
Chapter Five: Universities and War:
Conclusion
AppendixIntroduction
In the following pages, you are going to find a lot of specific information about what is happening at one major public research university, but we believe what is happening at Purdue is analogous to a canary in a coal mine. We believe that Purdue under Mitch Daniels, a former George Walker Bush administrator and Governor of Indiana, is becoming a high profile and influential spokesperson for the transformation of public higher education in the 21st century in directions that we find dangerous and that go against how we value higher education. We realize that, while we address extensively institutional changes and policies at Purdue, Indiana’s Land Grant University, our interest is in using this case study to illustrate larger patterns and issues that should be of concern to readers who care about the future of higher education in a broader sense.
Harry Targ’s pieces do tend towards a wider-angle perspective than do those by Dan Morris, although both of us rely on our “boots on the ground” level understanding of Purdue to counteract and contest official media versions of what is happening at Purdue. We write at a moment when there is something of a “media desert” in terms of local news coverage of higher education in small markets such as Lafayette, Indiana. We have both tried to work to rectify the “media desert” landscape in our community by contributing to the Lafayette Independent, an electronic newsletter. We appreciate efforts by local journalists such as Dave Bangert and the student staff of the Purdue Exponent to offer coverage of the university in ways that are more substantial, and, often, more critical, than what one finds in the area’s only mainstream newspaper, the Journal and Courier, and main local TV news source, and the Purdue NPR radio station, whose ownership in the last year has been mysteriously transferred to an Indianapolis corporation. Paradoxically the richest data for many of the essays below come from the official daily public relations newsletter from Purdue called Purdue Today. This public relations source celebrates Purdue’s latest connections with multinational corporations, the military, and state politics, and provides links to editorials published by Purdue’s President and other officials in the national press. Ironically, oftentimes what Purdue celebrates becomes the data for our more analytical and discursive writings.
Like alternative media sources, we see this book as another intervention in offering an alternative view of what is happening at our campus, but we also write with the hope that readers can apply the readings we bring to Purdue to begin conversations about the promise and problems of contemporary higher education on campuses. The authors wish to praise and encourage further research and activism around the transformations of higher education in general. We identify with what some scholars have referred to as Critical University Studies (CUS). The essays below, we believe, are part of this emerging tradition of critical and self-reflective scholarship.
The authors also wish to identify at least three major elements of the transformation of higher education. First, Purdue, like many other universities, is once again pursuing research contracts with huge corporations, and perhaps most importantly, the Department of Defense. As essays below suggest, Purdue research is increasingly justified as serving the interests of United States “national security.” Often this is conceptualized as helping the United States respond to “the Chinese threat,” rarely identifying what exactly is the threat, or considering the possibility that contributing to a new arms race with a perceived adversary may increase, rather than reduce, the possibility for conflict between nations.
Second, the work below and other writings in CUS, highlight the purposive transformation of the content of higher education. Universities are moving resources away from the liberal arts, creating new programs in “artificial intelligence” and “data science,” and in response to political pressures are diminishing programs that emphasize interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and the structural problems of race, class, gender, and sexual preference in history and contemporary society. Essays below on “civics literacy” suggest that leading administrators at Purdue, while refusing to defend its universally praised Writing Lab after it was ridiculed on Fox News for its recommendation that student writers select gender-neutral terms such as postal worker when writing about occupations, seek to avoid the controversaries around Critical Race Theory by requiring all students to study in some fashion “civics literacy.” President Daniels has made it clear that the study of civics literacy will illustrate the “vitality” of US political institutions (as opposed to over-emphasizing the slaughter of the original inhabitants of the North American continent or the history of slavery and white supremacy).
Third, the essays below do not dwell enough on the transformation of the university as a workplace. While there have been attacks for years on the tenure system, a system of job security which was initially designed to protect faculty from external political pressures, recent additions to the transformations of the university as a work site should be noted.
Adjunctification is a term that refers to the qualitative increase in the hiring of various forms of part time instructors: full-time instructors for a set time period, instructors to teach less than a full complement of courses, and instructors with various arrangements that limit their work life, their ability to do research and prepare for their class time, and their time to serve the many needs of students. The fundamental trend in higher education is to “cheapen” and make insecure instructors, ultimately to destroy the job security that comes with academic tenure. In many cases this impacts negatively on the quality of the educational experience. (In colleges and universities in general about 70 percent of classes now are taught by instructors who are not tenure-line faculty).
And finally, every effort is made by universities to limit and derail the workplace concerns of non-teaching staff, particularly opposing their right to form unions.
One positive development from all of this-destroying the tenure system and job security, adjunctification, increased exploitation of graduate students, and finally restricting the rights and the wages and benefits of staff has been the rise of labor militancy. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and various unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the United Electrical Workers (UE) with a history of militancy have been organizing graduate students and staff.
Finally, the authors acknowledge that in the months after we completed our manuscript, Purdue administrators and trustees have announced a series of initiatives without an appropriate level of input from university stakeholders and the wider Lafayette area community:
1. Purdue is building a housing complex near the Discovery Park part of campus to attract higher income earning technologists to relocate in West Lafayette. To encourage new high-income residents, the West Lafayette city government has authorized $5,000 cash incentives for any purchasers of these new housing units adjacent to Purdue. Such offers are not available to lower income earners or students.
2. To deal with record enrollments, Purdue has purchased a privately constructed apartment complex across from campus at a price well more than the cost of its construction.
3. Purdue officials have expanded partnerships with Saab, Rolls Royce, the Raytheon Corporation, one of the world’s five largest military contractors, and undertaken a controversial business mission with the Indiana governor to Taiwan to pursue research and production of semi-conductors, in part to respond to what Purdue officials have described as a ”Chinese threat” to national security in the United States.
4.The College of Liberal Arts has announced it will be partnering with the College of Science to develop a new interdisciplinary degree program in artificial intelligence. CLA calls its “new field” of interest, “sociogenomics.”
5. Purdue received an award recognizing its “excellence in counterintelligence,” one of only four such award recipients in 2022. Purdue joins those few universities which protect “sensitive national information from foreign adversaries.” The award announced in Purdue Today, August 24, 2022, noted that the university continues to work with the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) and the FBI.
In short, the transformation of Indiana’s Land Grant university continues at a rapid pace. And while the essays below concentrate on the developments and forces leading to these changes, the broader point of this collection of essays is to suggest that higher education in the twenty-first century is changing in a rapid and largely deleterious way. The appended essay by Carl Davidson reflects a similar critique of the university during the height of the Cold War. What we are witnessing today is a revitalization of that trend.
For those who value the university as a site for informing students about the world and debating the value of changes occurring in it, the developments highlighted in these essays are a warning. And for faculty and students alike the antidote to the militarization of the university, the transformation of the curricula, and the disempowering of those who work in universities is organizing against those elements of change that are antithetical to the educational process.
And More:
“The Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue has created a category of its own. As part of the nation’s leading national security university, it is rapidly becoming the world’s premier institution focused on Tech Statecraft, a new model of diplomacy bridging the gap between technology experts, government officials and policymakers, and business leaders to ensure tomorrow’s tech secures our freedoms,” said (Daniel) Kurtenbach. ‘I’m excited to contribute to the Krach Institute’s already-impressive momentum by enhancing and building its innovative partnerships and relationships to achieve our shared vision of a future that prizes individual freedom through trusted technology.’ ”
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Your district’s 2025 resolution: Extreme weather resiliency
As extreme weather becomes more intense and more frequent, school districts are increasingly adding resilient solutions to their facilities. Achieving resiliency can look very different depending on regional needs, and choosing the right projects for your building portfolio can be challenging. One key element to resiliency includes strengthening your facilities wherever possible. But with budgets tighter than ever, knowing where to begin is not always straightforward.
A robust approach is to apply the principles of the hierarchy of needs to resiliency. Explore more about this concept in the Extreme Weather Prep Fact Sheet. Ranking projects this way establishes levels of risk and benefit for each school district and makes it easier to adjust to unique climates and circumstances.
The extreme weather hierarchy of needs
Level 1: Updating outdated equipment
Outdated equipment is often the weakest link, breaking first when systems are stressed. If your district is seriously behind in infrastructure updates, you are not alone. The Government Accountability Office reports that more than half of the public school districts in the U.S. need to update or replace building systems.
Systems like HVAC, electricity, plumbing and water are foundational to everything schools do. Old systems can be glitchy and fail to reboot after unplanned outages due to extreme weather. While other updates may seem more attractive, repairing and updating these systems should be the top priority. Without them, other updates may even be a waste of money if you can’t keep schools open due to unsafe conditions.
Level 2: Securing your building envelope
Water is the enemy of every building and older buildings, including many school facilities, are particularly vulnerable to its destructive nature. A small amount of water can quickly become a big problem and persist for a long time. In addition to the initial damage, humidity and mold can cause significant long-term health issues.
We also know students and staff perform better, attend more consistently and enjoy a higher quality of life when they’re not continuously exposed to hazardous air quality conditions. Science Direct published a case study in which 82% of study participants reported that their health improved after moving from a moisture-damaged school facility to a new, cleaner environment. Measurable pulmonary function returned to normal after just a few months.
Remediating water and mold damage is an important starting point when completing that maintenance to-do list. Going a step further and ensuring it doesn’t happen again is the power move to keep buildings in shape for years to come. Ensure that your roofs, windows and doors are doing their job to keep your facilities safe and weather-tight. Maintain them well and, when needed, replace them. Investment in these critical items is a much better use of funds than continuously repairing them in hopes they’ll hold when the next extreme weather event comes along… and then repairing them when they fail yet again.
Level 3: Using renewable energy for stability
The best way to avoid power outages is to implement onsite power generation – often in the form of a renewable energy microgrid system. For districts that have already updated their outdated equipment and secured all their building envelopes, renewable energy is the ultimate upgrade to equip your district to withstand extreme climate events or seasons.
Protecting your buildings from energy outages that hit your surrounding community makes your district a literal powerhouse. With a microgrid, your own on-site power generation can keep the lights on and climate controls working. Your building can serve as a safe space for providing shelter, distributing resources and educating children.
Even if you’re not able to reach the gold standard of a fully functioning microgrid, adding renewable energy to your infrastructure portfolio is a win-win for all stakeholders. Take a look at Onsted Community Schools, MI, which used renewable solar energy to unlock funding for other projects that positively impact learning outcomes. The on-site availability of this modern technology provides excellent, hands-on learning opportunities for students.
Plus, renewable energy, like solar power, can reduce a significant line item in your budget – utility costs. According to Stanford University, educational institutions account for approximately 11% of energy consumption by buildings in the United States. They state, “Taking advantage of all viable space for solar panels could allow schools to meet up to 75 percent of their electricity needs and reduce the education sector’s carbon footprint by as much as 28 percent.”
Starting where you are
As we tell students, ‘the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,’ and so does the journey toward making K12 schools energy-efficient and resilient. It’s unrealistic to think that every district will be covered with solar arrays powering microgrids tomorrow. But each step in this extreme weather hierarchy of needs has value. It’s okay to start small! Every system update, new roof and window replacement is a step in the right direction.
At Energy Systems Group, modernizing school facilities is our highest priority. We partner with K12 districts to conduct severe weather audits, develop prioritized recommendations and provide project management and execution.
Discover practical solutions to boost your district’s resilience and efficiency with our Extreme Weather Prep Fact Sheet.
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Did the Ivy League really break America? (opinion)
Are many of the ills that plague American society caused by Ivy League admission policies?
That is the premise of David Brooks’s cover story for the December issue of The Atlantic, “How the Ivy League Broke America.” Brooks blames the Ivies and “meritocracy” for a host of societal problems, including:
- Overbearing parenting
- Less time for recess (as well as art and shop) in schools
- An economy that doesn’t provide opportunities for those without a college degree
- The death of civic organizations like Elks Lodge and Kiwanis Club
- The high percentage of Ivy League graduates who choose careers in finance and consulting
- The rise of populism based on “crude exaggerations, gross generalizations, and bald-faced lies.”
Brooks somehow left the decline of small-town mom-and-pop businesses and the popularity of reality television off his laundry list.
You may be wondering how the Ivies contributed to or caused all these problems. The essence of Brooks’s argument is that “every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like.” His hypothesis is that America’s social ideals reflect and are determined by the qualities that Ivy League universities value in admission.
One hundred years ago, the Ivy League social ideal was what Brooks terms the “Well-Bred Man”—white, male, aristocratic and preppy, athletic, good-looking, and personable. What was not part of the ideal was intellectual brilliance or academic prowess, and in fact those who cared about studying were social outcasts. Applying to the Ivies resembled applying for membership to elite social clubs.
That changed starting in the 1930s when a group of educational leaders, the most prominent being Harvard president James Conant, worried that the United States was not producing leaders capable of dealing with the problems it would face in the future. Their solution was to move to an admission process that rewarded intelligence rather than family lineage. They believed that intelligence was the highest human trait, one that is innate and distributed randomly throughout the population. Conant and his peers believed the change would lead to a nation with greater opportunities for social mobility.
Brooks seems far from sure that the change was positive for America. He acknowledges that “the amount of bigotry—against women, Black people, the LGBTQ community—has declined” (that might be debatable given the current political climate), but observes that the previous ideal produced the New Deal, victory in World War II, NATO and the postwar world led by America, while the products of the ideal pushed by Conant have produced “quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.” Those examples seem cherry-picked.
In the essay, Brooks cites a number of troubling societal problems and trends, all supported with extensive research, but the weakness of his argument is that he tries to find a single cause to explain all of them. That common denominator is what he calls “meritocracy.”
Meritocracy, a society with opportunities based on merit, is an appealing concept in theory, but defining merit is where things get sticky. Merit may be similar to Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s description of pornography, in that you know it when you see it. Does merit consist of talent alone? Talent combined with work ethic? Talent, work ethic and character?
Merit is in the eye of the beholder. If I was admitted to an Ivy League university, it was obviously because I had merit. If someone else, especially someone from an underrepresented population, got the acceptance instead of me, factors other than merit must have been at play. If two candidates have identical transcripts but different SAT scores, which one possesses more merit? Complicating the discussion is the fact that many things cited as measures of merit are in fact measures of privilege.
For Brooks, Ivy League meritocracy involves an overreliance on intelligence and academic achievement, to the detriment of noncognitive skills that are more central to success and happiness in life. He argues that “success in school is not the same thing as success in life,” with success in school primarily being individual while success in life is team-based. He quotes Adam Grant’s argument that academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence.
Ultimately, he argues that “meritocracy” has spurred the creation of “an American caste system,” one in which “a chasm divides the educated from the less well-educated,” triggering “a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.” Yet Brooks’s beef is not so much with meritocracy as it is with a mindset that he attributes to Conant and his brethren. He equates meritocracy with a belief in rationalism and social engineering that assumes that anything of value can be measured and counted. What he is criticizing is something different from meritocracy, or at least reflects a narrow definition of meritocracy.
Even if we don’t agree with Brooks’s definitions, or the implication that Ivy League admission policies are responsible for the ills of society, his article raises a number of important questions about the college admission process at elite colleges and universities.
First, is the worship of standardized testing misplaced? The SAT became prominent in college admission at around the same time that Conant and others were changing the Ivy League admission paradigm. They believed that intelligence could be measured and latched onto the SAT as a “pure,” objective measure of aptitude. Today, of course, we recognize that test scores are correlated with family income and that scores can be manipulated through test preparation. And the “A” in SAT no longer stands for aptitude.
Do we measure what we value or do we value what we can measure? Brooks criticizes the Ivies for focusing on academic achievement in school at the expense of “noncognitive skills” that might be more important to success in life after college, things like curiosity, relationship-building skills and work ethic. He’s right, but there are two reasons for the current emphasis. One is that going to college is going to school, so an admission process focused on scholastic academic achievement is defensible. The other is that we haven’t developed a good mechanism for measuring noncognitive skills.
That raises a larger question. What do we want the admission process to accomplish? The SAT is intended to predict freshman year college GPA (in conjunction with high school grades). Is that a satisfactory goal? Shouldn’t we have a larger lens, aiming to identify those who will be most successful at the end of college, or after college? Should we admit those with the greatest potential, those who will grow the most from the college experience, or those who will make the greatest contribution to society after college?
Brooks questions elite colleges’ preferences for “spiky” students over those who are well-rounded. Is a student body full of spiky students really better? An even more important question arises from a distinction Brooks made some years ago between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”
Does the elite college admission process as currently constituted reward and encourage students who are good at building résumés? A former student attending an elite university commented that almost every classmate had done independent academic research and started a nonprofit. Do students aspiring to the Ivies choose activities because they really care about them or because they think they will impress admission officers, and can admission officers tell the difference? What is the consequence of having a student body full of those who are good at playing the résumé-building game?
There is one other issue raised by Brooks that I find particularly important. He argues that those who are successful in the elite admission process end up possessing greater “hubris,” in that they believe their success is the product of their talent and hard work rather than privilege and luck. Rather than appreciating their good fortune, they may believe they are entitled to it. That misconception may also fuel the populist backlash to elites that has increased the division within our country.
I don’t buy Brooks’s definition of meritocracy or his contention that the Ivy League “broke” America, but his article nevertheless merits reading and discussion.
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Biology syllabi lack learner-centered principles
A course syllabus serves as a road map for navigating the upcoming term and content that will be covered, but researchers believe it could support students’ self-directed learning as well.
A November study published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, authored by a team of faculty from Auburn University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, shows few introductory biology syllabi engage students in effective study habits or encourage help-seeking behaviors, instead favoring content.
The research highlights opportunities to address the hidden curriculum of higher education and support success for historically marginalized students.
What’s the need: Some college students lack effective study habits, and these gaps are often a piece of larger equity concerns for marginalized groups, highlighting limited opportunities or resources for underprivileged communities.
Introductory science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses, in particular, often serve as gatekeepers, limiting which students can pursue these degree programs and resulting in less diverse STEM degree attainment.
Today’s college students also demonstrate less college readiness in their academic skills, due in part to remote instruction as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Often, colleges or universities will create co-curricular interventions such as workshops to teach these skills or introduce best practices in a first-year seminar course. While these can be effective, institutions may lack the resources or time to deliver the interventions, which researchers say underscores a need for alternative strategies that reach students.
Researchers theorized that embedding within the syllabus explicit instruction to promote three skills—study behaviors, metacognitive evaluation or academic help-seeking—could impact student success.
Methodology: Researchers evaluated 115 introductory biology syllabi from 94 unique institutions, including 48 percent research-intensive institutions, 29 percent minority-serving institutions, 72 percent publics and 61 percent with enrollment over 10,000 students.
A Deeper Look at STEM Syllabi
A Worcester Polytechnic Institute study found instructors could help create a more inclusive learning environment in STEM courses through tailoring their syllabus to feature elements like materials from diverse scholars and accessibility statements. Read more here.
One engineering professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst redesigned her syllabus as a zine, or miniature magazine, to promote student engagement and build community in the classroom.
Syllabi were categorized by having the presence of study behaviors, academic help-seeking and metacognition suggestions; the type of suggestions of those three factors; and the quality of these recommendations (effective or ineffective).
Further syllabus analysis covered four factors to gauge how learner-centered they were, including having clear and appropriate learning goals and objectives, aligned and define assessment activities, a logically sequenced course schedule, and a positive and organized learning environment. Each syllabus was awarded between zero and 48 points, with higher scores indicating they were more learner-centered.
The findings: Among the 115 syllabi evaluated, only 14 percent earned a score of at least 31 to be considered learner-centered. Around three in 10 syllabi were considered “content-centered,” earning a score of 16 or less. Researchers theorized faculty may lack time or interest when creating their own syllabi, instead relying on templates from the institution or previously generated documents.
Design by Ashley Mowreader
Only 3.5 percent of syllabi showed evidence of reducing opportunity gaps in STEM courses, which researchers defined as de-emphasizing course rules, encouraging the use of external resources for continued learning outside the classroom and emphasizing the role of students in their own learning.
“Most of the syllabi in our sample provided learning resources but focused primarily on course policies and did not address students as engaged learners,” according to the study.
A majority of syllabi did offer suggestions for study behaviors, metacognition or approaches for academic help-seeking (61 percent), although the greatest share of these only addressed help-seeking (45 percent). When the syllabus did share advice to seek help, many just provided a list of resources, and fewer encouraged students to utilize them.
“Only 17.9 percent of syllabi provided a listing of academic help-seeking resources, encouragement to use those resources, and an explanation on how to use those resources,” researchers wrote, with the explanation piece critical for addressing equity gaps and the hidden curriculum of higher education.
Of the syllabi that provided recommendations for students’ study behaviors, a significant number gave students unhelpful advice or shared practices that are not affirmed with research.
“We found that most biology syllabi endorsed effective study strategies such as self-testing and spacing,” researchers wrote. “However, we also found that syllabi recommended strategies that have been described as ineffective for long-term learning (e.g., re-reading textbooks and re-writing notes).”
Twenty-nine percent of syllabi recommended only effective, evidence-based study habits. A greater share (42 percent) offered both effective and ineffective techniques, and 24 percent only offered ineffective behaviors.
Just because the syllabus was lacking details on how to study or practice metacognition doesn’t mean it was absent from the class entirely, researchers noted, as instructors may discuss these topics in class or provide additional resources with this information. This presents an opportunity for instructors to make themselves more aware of evidence-based practices to close equity gaps and bring the syllabus into better alignment with their pedagogy, according to the study.
Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.
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Exporting Degrees, Importing Responsibility: Rethinking Careers Support for International Graduates
By Professor Amanda J. Broderick, Vice-Chancellor & President at the University of East London.
It wasn’t so long ago that universities across the UK were rallying to preserve the graduate visa route, a vital lifeline for international students and higher education. When the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) concluded there was no significant abuse of the pathway and recognised its immense value, the sector exhaled a collective sigh of relief. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) underscored this conclusion: 80% of international students leave the UK within five years of arrival.
But amidst this hard-fought victory, a critical oversight emerged. In our defence of the graduate visa, we inadvertently highlighted the transient nature of international students in the UK, risking the perception of them as only economic contributors rather than showcasing the profound, enduring responsibilities we owe to them as alumni – and their broad value. The reality is, universities have a far greater role to play in empowering international graduates to thrive – not just within the UK, but globally.
A Broader Vision for Graduate Support
International students arrive with diverse ambitions. Some envision building careers in the UK, while others plan to apply their skills back home. Regardless, the implicit promise of higher education remains the same: their degree must unlock opportunities and enable them to succeed, whether they are in Hyderabad, Atlanta, Cairo or Athens. But how effectively are we fulfilling this promise?
We are getting better as a sector at having frank conversations about support for international students while at university – HEPI and Uoffer Global’s recent report on integration challenges facing Chinese students by Pippa Ebel is a good example of this. But as these students graduate, their needs evolve.
Economic growth is the mantra of the UK government, but this will remain a distant dream if we do not focus on global skills as part of the solution. Business and industry are competing internationally for talent and innovation, and as such, global employability and enterprise are an integral part of the education agenda.
To truly fulfil our responsibilities, universities must look beyond the campus experience and address the evolving, global needs of their international alumni. This involves building a bridge between academic learning and the economic, cultural, and professional landscapes of not only the UK but our alumni’s home countries too.
UEL’s Global Employability Model
At the University of East London (UEL), this principle is central to our mission. My recent visit to India for the UEL 2024 India Summit offers a case study in how universities can redefine global graduate support. With over 8,000 Indian students in 2024, UEL’s commitment to fostering long-term success is clear. The Summit – spanning Chennai, Hyderabad, and Vadodara – brought together leaders from academia, government, and industry to explore partnerships that align a UEL education with India’s economic and societal needs.
A key outcome of the Summit was the launch of the UEL India Industry Advisory Board. This pioneering collaboration between alumni, industry leaders, and academic experts provides strategic direction on UEL’s curriculum development and enterprise initiatives aligned to India’s workforce demands, while also offering alumni robust post-graduation support. Another important engagement took place at T-Works Innovation Centre in Hyderabad, where we worked with international stakeholders on the practical steps UEL can take to bridge the gap between academia and industry. The result: stronger industry ties, better-prepared graduates, and increased support for retaining high-value talent, reducing brain drain and supporting local innovation.
These efforts are not isolated. UEL has long been engaged in projects that foster international employability, including partnerships with Tamil Nadu’s government, where we hosted a hackathon and work placement initiative for computer science and engineering students. This initiative resulted in work placements for alumni based in Chennai, opening up career pathways in sectors such as robotics and AI.
UEL’s forward-thinking approach also extends beyond such events – our international employability offer begins during a student’s degree, with Careers in India mentoring panels and an employer webinar series, opportunities for students to connect with industry professionals and gain insights into fields such as business, HR product design, and digital marketing in India. This support does not finish after graduation; our offer to global alumni includes post-graduation employability boosters, lifelong access to career support portals with free resources, and business incubation and acceleration.
Perhaps most importantly, we also offer a programme of peer-to-peer mentoring, facilitated by our India alumni chapter and bolstered by our Industry Advisory Board, creating a supportive network that fosters continuous learning and career advancement. Unlike many universities, where alumni engagement is viewed primarily through a philanthropic lens, at UEL it is integral to our mission of creating real-world impact. By empowering our international alumni to ‘pay it forward’, we generate a virtuous cycle of mentorship, opportunity, and success. Through our alumni’s success, we amplify the value of a UK degree, not just for the individual, but for their home countries and the global economy too.
Rethinking Metrics of Success
Alongside universities’ own work to ensure they support global graduate employability, we must also look to the role of other stakeholders in this endeavour. As policymakers and universities work together to shape the future of higher education, we must advocate for more nuanced metrics to capture the true global success of our graduates. The Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS), while valuable, is insufficient to capture the global impact of UK higher education. Refined metrics that capture the contributions of international students to both the UK and their home countries could better highlight the profound influence of UK higher education on a global scale. This data is critical not only for refining university strategies but also for safeguarding the UK’s reputation as a global leader in higher education.
David Willetts’ recent report with the Resolution Foundation also raises issues with the GOS, pointing out that ‘many graduates are on a long and not necessarily straightforward route to a career,’ and that ‘assessing where they are at 15 months is premature’. This is surely even more pertinent for many of our international graduates, whose circumstances may not be accurately captured by a one-size-fits-all survey. Our support for these students must be based on their specific contexts as much as possible – including how we measure success.
Above all, the responsibility to support international graduates does not end at graduation. The world is changing, and the future workforce demands new skills and global collaboration. By supporting international graduates throughout their careers, we help them not only succeed but also lead the way in shaping the jobs the world needs tomorrow. In partnership with business, government, and stakeholders beyond, we can ensure that our international graduates are equipped to thrive in a rapidly evolving global economy – both for their own success and for the benefit of communities worldwide.
At UEL, we are committed to this vision. By nurturing a cycle of mentorship and opportunity, we aim to empower our alumni to transform their communities and industries. Their success is our success – and a testament to the enduring value of UK HE. It’s time for the sector to embrace its role as a global enabler, ensuring that every graduate not only thrives but becomes a beacon of the UK’s educational excellence around the world.
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As diversity rates at elite colleges hang in the balance, some students still face increased exclusion and barriers
Diversity rates at several elite colleges and universities have plummeted, a little over a year after the Supreme Court’s restriction on race-conscious admissions. It’s a divisive but unsurprising blow to historically underrepresented students seeking educational opportunity and access.
While demographic data is still forthcoming, the challenges these students face to attend certain colleges continue to build. MIT, Amherst College, and Tufts have already seen sharp declines in the diversity of their student populations.
But not all is lost. Ethnically diverse students have options to express their full identities, and organizations providing services to them have options to support these students’ overall success through postsecondary pathways.
While assessing the state of race in higher education admissions, we cannot ignore its historical context in colleges in America. Colleges and universities were built by and explicitly served the educational needs of wealthy white men. For too long, the only people of color on campus were the (often enslaved) servants of white students.
We should also bear in mind that, at elite universities today, the students who are overlooked in favor of race-neutral policies are not the only ones who miss out — students already on campus lose out on the richness that having a diverse array of educational experiences can provide, with their opportunities to encounter alternative viewpoints limited.
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Oftentimes, first-generation, Black, Hispanic and Native American students experience an inherent and often unspoken isolation on campus at predominantly white institutions.
As a Black Chicana, I vividly remember being the singular student of color in my freshman-year seminar at Michigan State. My experience was not without the awkwardness of questioning my own merit and if I belonged there in the first place. We traveled to Ireland, and due to the humidity, I put on my silk bonnet to protect my hair. It was met with questions and stares.
Here we are in 2025, discussing the all-too-familiar concept of racial bias in America, while institutions are bound by new laws that result in restricted access for the students whose right to educational access has historically been systematically denied. So what can we do?
While it requires creativity, students can still highlight who they are in their applications by foregrounding their lived experiences outside of their grades, test scores and academic histories. For example, students can share the intricacies of being a historically marginalized person in America — from being asked to speak English to being pulled over for driving while Black. They can write about their experiences and identities in personal statements and on their resumes and through discussions of their community involvement. Students owe it to themselves to share their personal moments of overcoming barriers in everyday life.
Related: What’s a college degree worth? States start to demand colleges share the data
Institutions can ask essay questions that provoke such responses and allow students to share without prejudice or fear of reprisal. Students’ insightful perspectives should be applauded by educational institutions, and the power of their words should be respected.
Underrepresented students also have options other than the traditional elite universities. Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) are an alternative to predominantly white institutions like the ones mentioned above. Students can make the college experience what they want and need, and it is no different at smaller institutions like Lane College, an HBCU, or Colorado State University, Pueblo, an HSI.
At these schools, a student’s culture and identity are revered and shared. Educational institutions that see the value in diversity should be reconsidered as the best option for ethnically diverse students.
And, as educational institutions grapple with the effects of the Supreme Court ruling, they should support the students from historically marginalized populations already on their campuses to ensure that they feel welcome, supported and valued. Building robust affinity groups not only provides current students with communities they can co-create and adapt to their needs, but also demonstrates that the institutions are committed to creating spaces for all students.
Scholarship providers and organizations that support underrepresented students will continue to play a vital role in fostering diversity on college campuses. Mission-driven organizations like the one I work for, the Sachs Foundation, still help Black students who lack the financial capacity or easy access to attend elite schools like MIT and Brown.
Students deserve to have their whole selves valued, welcomed and supported when applying for higher education.
Pamela Roberts-Mora is the chief operations officer at the Sachs Foundation, serving Black youth from Colorado through educational and community programs. She was a first-generation college student.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about college diversity 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.
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An early look at 2023–24 financial returns shows providers working hard to balance the books
In most larger UK providers of higher education, the 2023–24 financial year ended on 31 July 2024.
Five months and two weeks after this date (so, on or before 14 January 2025) providers are obliged to have published (and communicated to regulators) audited financial statements for that year.
I’ve got a list of 160 large, well known, providers of higher education who should, by now, have made this disclosure – 43 of them are yet to do so. Of the 117 that have, just 15 (under 13 per cent) posted a deficit for that financial year (to be fair, this includes eight providers in Wales, where the deadline – for bilingual accounts – is the end of the month). This was as of the data of publication, there’s been a few more been discovered since then and I have added some to the charts below.
If you’ve been aware of individual providers, mission groups, representative bodies, trade unions, regulators, and politicians coming together to make the case that the sector is severely underfunded this may surprise you. If you work in an institution that is curtailing courses, making staff redundant, and undergoing the latest in a long series of cost-cutting exercises, the knowledge that your university has posted a surplus may make you angry.
But these results are not surprising, and a surplus should not make you angry (there are plenty of other reasons to be angry…) Understanding what an annual account is for, what a surplus is, why a university will pull out all of the stops to post a surplus, and what are the more alarming underpinning signals that we should be aware of will help you understand why we have what – on the face of it – feels like a counter-intuitive position in university finances.
Why are so many results missing?
There’s a range of reasons why a provider may submit accounts late – those who are yet to publish will already be deep in conversation with regulators about the issues that may have caused what is, technically, a breach of a regulatory condition. In England, this is registration condition E3. which is underpinned by the accounts direction.
If you are expecting regulators to get busy issuing fines or sanctions for late submissions – you should pause. There’s a huge problem with public sector audit capacity in the UK – the big players have discrete teams that move on an annual cycle between higher education, NHS, and local government audit. You don’t need to have read too much into public finances to know that our councils are under serious pressure right now – and this pressure results in audit delays, hitting the same teams who will be acting as external university auditors.
That’s one key source of delay. The other would be the complexities within university annual accounts, and university finances more generally, that offer any number of reasons why the audit signoff might happen later than hoped.
To be clear, very few of these reasons are going to be cheerful ones. If a provider has yet to publish its accounts because they have not signed off their accounts, it is likely to be engaging with external auditors about the conditions under which they will sign off accounts.
To give one example of what might happen – a university has an outstanding loan with a covenant attached to it based on financial performance (say, a certain level of growth each year). In 2023–24, it did not reach this target, so needs to renegotiate the covenant, which may make repayments harder (or spread out over a longer period). The auditor will need to wait until this is settled before it signs off the accounts – technically if you are in breach of covenant the whole debt is repayable immediately, something which would make you fail your going concern test.
We’ve covered covenants on the site before – a lender of whatever sort will offer finance at an attractive rate provided certain conditions are met. These can include things like use of investment (did you actually build the new business school you borrowed money to build?), growth (in terms of finances or student numbers), ESG (are you doing good things as regards environment, society, and governance?) and good standing (are you in trouble with the regulator?) – but at a fundamental level will require a sense that your business is financially viable. If covenant conditions are breached lenders will be keen to help if they hear in advance, but your cost of borrowing (the interest rate charged, bluntly) will rise. And you will find it harder to raise finance in future.
This is an environment where it is already hard to raise finance – and in establishing new borrowing, or new revolving credit (kind of like an overdraft facility) many universities will end up paying more than in previous years. This all needs to be shown in the accounts.
Going concern
When your auditor signs off your accounts, you would very much hope that it will agree that they represent a “going concern” – simply put, that in most plausible scenarios you will have enough money to cover your costs during the next 12 months. If your auditor disagrees that you are a going concern you are in serious trouble – all of the 117 sets of accounts I have read so far have been agreed on a going concern basis.
This designation tells everyone from regulators to lenders to other stakeholders that your business is viable for the next year – and comes into force on the day your accounts are signed off by the university and external auditor. This is nearly always for a specific technical reason – additional information that is needed in order to make the determination. For some late publications, it is possible that the delay is a deliberate plan to make the designation last as far into the following financial years as possible. This year (2024–25) is even more bleak than last year – anything that keeps finance cheaper (or available!) for longer will be helpful.
Breaking even and beyond
So your provider had a surplus last year – that’s good right? It means it took in more money than it spent? Up to a point.
In 2023–24 we got the very welcome news that Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) has been revalued and contributions reduced for both members and employers. From the annual accounts perspective, this will have lowered staff costs (very often one of the most significant costs, if not the most significant cost, for most) in USS institutions. Conversely, the increase in Teachers Pension Scheme (TPS) contributions will have substantially raised costs in institutions required by law (yes, really!) to offer that scheme to staff.
That’s some of the movement in staff costs. However, for USS, the value of future contributions to the current calculated scheme debt (which is shared among all active employers in the scheme) has also fallen. Indeed, as the scheme is currently in surplus, it shows as income rather than expenditure This is not money that the university actually has available to spend, but the drop shows out in staff costs – though most affected separate this out into a separate line it also shows up in the overall surplus or deficit (to be clear this is the accounting rules, there’s no subterfuge here: if you are interested in why I can only point you to BUFDG’s magisterial “Accounting for Pensions” guidelines).
For this reason, many USS providers show a much healthier balance than accurately reflects a surplus they can actually spend or invest. This gives them the appearance of having performed as a group much better than TPS institutions, where the increase in contributions has made it more expensive to employ staff.
Here I show the level of reported surplus(deficit) after tax, both with and without the USS valuation effect. Removing the impact of valuation puts 35 providers (including big names like Hull, Birmingham, and York) in deficit based on financial statements published so far.
And here I show underlying changes in staff costs (without the USS valuation effect). This is the raw spend on employing staff, including pay and pensions contributions. A drop could indicate that economies have been sought – employing fewer staff, employing different (cheaper) staff, or changes in terms and conditions. But it also indicates underlying changes in TPS contributions (up) or USS contributions (down) with respect to current employees on those schemes.
Charts updated 11am 27 January to remove a handful of discrepancies.
Fee income
For most universities the main outgoing is staff costs, and the main source of income is tuition fees. Much has been made of the dwindling spending power of home undergraduate fees because of a failure to uprate with inflation, but this line in the accounts also includes unregulated fees – most notably international fees and postgraduate fees. The full name of the line in the accounts is “tuition fees and educational contracts”, so if your provider does a lot of bespoke work for employers this will also show up here.
Both of these areas of provision have seen significant expansion in many providers over recent years – and the signs are that 2023–24 was another data point aligned with this trend for postgraduate provision. For this reason, the total amount of fee income has risen in a lot of cases, and when we get provider level UCAS data shortly it will make it clear that just how much of this is due to unregulated fees. International fees are another matter, and again we need the UCAS end of cycle data to unpick it, but it appears from visa applications and acceptances that from some countries (China, for example) demand has remained stable, while for others (Nigeria, India) demand has fallen.
Here I show fee income for the past two years, and the difference. This is total fee income, and does not discriminate between types of fees.
One very important thing to bear in mind is that these are figures for the financial year, and represent fees relating to that year rather than the total amount of fees per student enrolled. For example, if a student started in January (an increasingly common start point for some courses at some institutions) you will only see the proportion of fees that had been paid by 31 July shown in the accounts. If you teach a lot of nursing students who start at non-traditional times of the year this will have a notable impact, as will a failure to recruit as many international students as you had hoped to do in January 2024 (though this will also show up in next year’s accounts).
And it is also worth bearing in mind that income from fees paid with respect to students registered at the provider but studying somewhere else via an academic partnership, or involved in a franchise arrangement (something that has seen a lot of growth in some providers) shows up in this budget line.
Other movements
Quite a number of providers have drawn down investments or made use of unrestricted reserves. This is very much as you would expect, these are very much “rainy day” provisions and even if it is not actually raining now the storm clouds are gathering. Using money like this is a big step though – you can only spend it once, and the decision to spend it needs to link to plans not to need to spend it in the near future. So even if your balance looks healthy, a shift like this speaks eloquently of the kinds of cost-saving measures (up to and including course closures and staff redundancy) that you may currently see happening around you.
Similarly, a provider may choose to sell assets – usually buildings – that it does not have an immediate or future use for. The costs of running and maintaining a building can quickly add up – a decision to sell releases the capital and can also cut running costs. Other providers choose to hang on to buildings (perhaps as assets that can be sold in future) but drastically cut maintenance and running costs for this reason. Again, you can (of course) only sell a building once, and a longer term maintenance pause can make it very expensive to put your estates back into use. I should note that the overall condition of university estates is not great and is declining (as you can read in the AUDE Estates Management Report) , precisely because providers have already started doing stuff like this. If the heating seems to be struggling, if the window doesn’t open, that’s why.
In some cases we have seen decisions to pause capital programmes – not borrowing money and not building buildings as was previously planned. Here, the university makes an on-paper saving equivalent to the cost of finance if it was going to borrow money, or frees up reserves for other uses if it was using its own funds. Capital programmes don’t just include buildings – perhaps investment in software (the kind of big enterprise systems that make it possible to run your university) has been paused, and you are left struggling with outdated or unsuitable finance, admissions, or student record systems.
Where we are talking about pausing building programmes it is important to remember that these exist to facilitate expansion or strategic plans for growth. The “shiny new building” is often perceived as a vice chancellor’s vanity project – in reality that new business school and the recruitment it makes possible may represent the university’s best hope of growing home fee income faster than inflation.
What’s next?
We see financial information substantially after the financial year ends – and for most larger providers this comes alongside the submission of an annual financial return to their regulator. We know for instance that the Office for Students is now looking at ways of getting in year data in areas where it has significant concerns, but financial data (by dint of it being checked carefully and audited) is generally historic in nature.
For this reason what is happening on your campus right now is something that only your finance department has any hope of understanding, and there may be unexpected pressures currently driving strategy that are not shown (or even hinted at) in last years’ accounts. Your colleagues in finance and planning teams are working hard to forecast the end of year result, to calculate the KFIs (Key Financial Indicators) that others rely on, and to plan for the issues that could arise in the 2025 audit. The finance business partners or faculty accountants – or whatever name they have where you work – will be gathering information, exploring and explaining scenarios, and anticipating pressures that may require a change in financial strategy.
The data I have presented here is drawn from published accounts – the data submitted to regulators that eventually ends up on HESA may be modified and resubmitted as understanding and situations change – for this reason come the early summer figures might look very different than what are presented here (I should also add I have transcribed these by hand – for which service you should absolutely buy me a pint) – so although I have done my best I may have made transcription errors which I will gladly and speedily correct.
However scary your university accounts may be, I would caution that the next set (2024–25 financial year) will be even more scary. The point at which the home undergraduate fee increase in England kicks in for those eligible to charge it (2025–26) feels a long way off, and we have the rise in National Insurance Contributions (due April 2025) to contend with before then.
There are a small but significant number of large providers looking at an unplanned deficit for 2024–25, as you might expect they will already be in contact with their regulator and their bank. Stay safe out there.
If you are interested in institutional finances, I must insist that you read the superb BUFDG publication “Understanding University Finance” – it is both the most readable and the most comprehensive explanation of annual university accounts you will find.
