When a group of researchers at Northwestern University uncovered evidence of widespread—and growing—research fraud in scientific publishing, editors at some academic journals weren’t exactly rushing to publish the findings.
“Some journals did not even want to send it for review because they didn’t want to call attention to these issues in science, especially in the U.S. right now with the Trump administration’s attacks on science,” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, an engineering professor at Northwestern and one of the researchers on the project. “But if we don’t, we’ll end up with a corrupt system.”
Last week Amaral and his colleagues published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. They estimate that they were able to detect anywhere between 1 and 10 percent of fraudulent papers circulating in the literature and that the actual rate of fraud may be 10 to 100 times more. Some subfields, such as those related to the study of microRNA in cancer, have particularly high rates of fraud.
While dishonest scientists may be driven by pressure to publish, their actions have broad implications for the scientific research enterprise.
“Scientists build on each other’s work. Other people are not going to repeat my study. They are going to believe that I was very responsible and careful and that my findings were verified,” Amaral said. “But If I cannot trust anything, I cannot build on others’ work. So, if this trend goes unchecked, science will be ruined and misinformation is going to dominate the literature.”
Luís A. Nunes Amaral
Numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, have already written about the study. And Amaral said he’s heard that some members of the scientific community have reacted by downplaying the findings, which is why he wants to draw as much public attention to the issue of research fraud as possible.
“Sometimes it gets detected, but instead of the matter being publicized, these things can get hidden. The person involved in fraud at one journal may get kicked out of one journal but then goes to do the same thing on another journal,” he said. “We need to take a serious look at ourselves as scientists and the structures under which we work and avoid this kind of corruption. We need to face these problems and tackle them with the seriousness that they deserve.”
Inside Higher Ed interviewed Amaral about how research fraud became such a big problem and what he believes the academic community can do to address it.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
Q: It’s no secret that research fraud has been happening to some degree for decades, but what inspired you and your colleagues to investigate the scale of it?
A: The work started about three years ago, and it was something that a few of my co-authors who work in my lab started doing without me. One of them, Jennifer Byrne, had done a study that showed that in some papers there were reports of using chemical reagents that would have made the reported results impossible, so the information had to be incorrect. She recognized that there was fraud going on and it was likely the work of paper mills.
So, she started working with other people in my lab to find other ways to identify fraud at scale that would make it easier to uncover these problematic papers. Then, I wanted to know how big this problem is. With all of the information that my colleagues had already gathered, it was relatively straightforward to plot it out and try to measure the rate at which problematic publications are growing over time.
It’s been an exponential increase. Every one and a half years, the number of paper mill products that have been discovered is doubling. And if you extrapolate these lines into the future, it shows that in the not-so-distant future these kinds of fraudulent papers would be the overwhelming majority within the scientific literature.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Q: What are the mechanisms that have allowed—and incentivized—such widespread research fraud?
A: There are paper mills that produce large amounts of fake papers by reusing language and figures in different papers that then get published. There are people who act as brokers between those that create these fake papers, people who are putting their name on the paper and those who ensure that the paper gets published in some journal.
Our paper showed that there are editors—even for legitimate scientific journals—that help to get fraudulent papers through the publishing process. A lot of papers that end up being retracted were handled and accepted by a small number of individuals responsible for allowing this fraud. It’s enough to have just a few editors—around 30 out of thousands—who accept fraudulent papers to create this widespread problem. A lot of those papers were being supplied to these editors by these corrupt paper mill networks. The editors were making money from it, receiving citations to their own papers and getting their own papers accepted by their collaborators. It’s a machine.
Science has become a numbers game, where people are paying more attention to metrics than the actual work. So, if a researcher can appear to be this incredibly productive person that publishes 100 papers a year, edits 100 papers a year and reviews 100 papers a year, academia seems to accept this as natural as opposed to recognizing that there aren’t enough hours in the day to actually do all of these things properly.
If these defectors don’t get detected, they have a huge advantage because they get the benefits of being productive scientists—tenure, prestige and grants—without putting in any of the effort. If the number of defectors starts growing, at some point everybody has to become a defector, because otherwise they are not going to survive.
Q: [Your] paper found a surge in the number of fraudulent research papers produced by paper mills that started around 2010. What are the conditions of the past 15 years that have made this trend possible?
A: There were two things that happened. One of them is that journals started worrying about their presence online. It used to be that people would read physical copies of a journal. But then, only looking at the paper online—and not printing it—became acceptable. The other thing that became acceptable is that instead of subscribing to a journal, researchers can pay to make their article accessible to everyone.
These two trends enabled organizations that were already selling essays to college students or theses to Ph.D. students to start selling papers. They could create their own journals and just post the papers there; fraudulent scientists pay them and the organizations make nice money from that. But then these organizations realized that they could make more money by infiltrating legitimate journals, which is what’s happening now.
It’s hard for legitimate publishers to put an end to it. On the one hand, they want to publish good research to maintain their reputation, but every paper they publish makes them money.
Q: Could the rise of generative AI accelerate research fraud even more?
A: Yes. Generative AI is going to make all of these problems worse. The data we analyzed was before generative AI became a concern. If we repeat this analysis in one year, I would imagine that we’ll see an even greater acceleration of these problematic papers.
With generative AI in the picture, you don’t actually need another person to make fake papers—you can just ask ChatGPT or another large language model. And it will enable many more people to defect from doing actual science.
Q: How can the academic community address this problem?
A: We need collective action to resist this trend.We need to prevent these things from even getting into the system, and we need to punish the people that are contributing to it.
We need to make people accountable for the papers that they claim to be authors of, and if someone is bound to engage in unethical behavior, they should be forbidden from publishing for a period of time commensurate with the seriousness of what they did. We need to enable detection, consequences and implementation of those consequences. Universities, funding agencies and journals should not hide, saying they can’t do anything about this.
This is about demonstrating integrity and honesty and looking at how we are failing with clear eyes and deciding to take action. I’m hoping that the scientific enterprise and scientific stakeholders rise to that challenge.
A recent hack of Columbia University’s computer system compromised the personal information of hundreds of thousands of people, including students and applicants, new documents show. Over all, about 870,000 individuals were affected by the breach.
The university provided draft notices to officials in Maine and California that it intends to send to affected parties in their states, according to the state attorneys general’s websites. Both states require that their residents be swiftly informed of any breach that includes their data, according to Bloomberg, which reported on the notices.
The notices said a technical outage disrupted some of the university’s IT systems in June, which led university leaders to suspect a possible cybersecurity attack. An investigation revealed that a hacker had taken files from Columbia’s system in May.
The stolen data includes any personal information prospective students provided in their applications or current students gave Columbia over the course of their studies, including their contact details, Social Security numbers, birthdays, demographic information, academic history, financial aid information, insurance details and health information. No patient data from the Columbia University Irving Medical Center seems to have been compromised, according to the notices. The university encouraged those affected to monitor account statements and credit reports to keep an eye out for any fraudulent activity. It also offered them two years of free credit monitoring and identity restoration services from a financial and risk advisory firm.
“We have implemented a number of safeguards across our systems to enhance our security,” the letters read. “Moving forward, we will be examining what additional steps we can take and additional safeguards we can implement to prevent something like this from happening again.”
A public statement from the university’s Office of Public Affairs last week said that since June 24, Columbia has seen no evidence of any further unauthorized access to the university’s system. Starting Aug. 7, the university promised to begin notifying affected students, employees and applicants on a rolling basis via mail.
“We recognize the concern this matter may have raised and appreciate your ongoing patience during this challenging time,” the statement read. “Please know we are committed to supporting the University community.”
A Columbia official previously toldBloomberg that the hacker seemed to be trying to further a “political agenda.” The investigation into the matter also found that the hacker was “highly sophisticated” and “very targeted.”
The alleged hacker, who got in contact with Bloomberg, gave the news outlet 1.6 gigabytes of data, claiming it contained decades’ worth of applications to Columbia. That application data included New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who applied to Columbia but didn’t get in.
Bloomberg confirmed with eight Columbia students and alumni, who applied between 2019 and 2024, that the information about them contained in the data was accurate. They verified that details such as their university-issued ID codes, citizenship statuses and admissions decisions were all correct. The data provided to Bloomberg didn’t contain names, Social Security numbers or birth dates.
The person claiming to be the hacker, who didn’t provide their name, texted Bloomberg that the purpose of the stolen data was to prove the university continued affirmative action in admissions after the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against such practices. They claimed to have hacked about 460 gigabytes of data total from the university—including 1.8 million Social Security numbers of employees, students and their family members—after spending more than two months ensuring their access to Columbia’s computer systems.
The accreditor’s new public-facing dashboards will include data on how long it takes for graduates from different programs to recover educational costs.
Nuthawut Somsuk/iStock/Getty Images
The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges is launching new tools to give members of the public more insights into student outcomes at the institutions under its purview.
Those tools include dashboards with different student achievement data points as well as a new metric to gauge return on investment. Like the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission, ACCJC is planning to measure ROI using price–to–earnings premium. Developed in part by Third Way and the College Futures Foundation, the earnings premium tracks how long it takes for graduates from different programs to recover educational costs.
The accreditor wrote in a white paper on different value metrics that the earnings premium is an “approachable and understandable way for students and their families to discuss the value education adds to earnings potential. It also allows for institutions, reviewers, and policy makers to contemplate a measurable target and drive improvement.”
ACCJC chair Kathleen Burke said in a news release that a key takeaway from developing the white paper and dashboards is that federal policy leaders want institutions to demonstrate their value.
“These efforts by ACCJC help policy makers and the public understand the incredible value proposition offered by ACCJC member institutions,” Burke added.
As a first-year student at Emory University, Leia Marshall walked into the Pathways Center to receive advice on her career goals.
She was a neuroscience and behavioral biology major who thought she might go to medical school. But after meeting with a peer mentor, Marshall realized she was more interested in optometry. “I didn’t really know a lot about the prehealth track. I didn’t really know if I wanted to do medicine at all,” she said. “Getting to speak to a peer mentor really affected the way that I saw my trajectory through my time at Emory and onwards.”
Emory opened the Pathways Center in August 2022, uniting five different student-facing offices: career services, prehealth advising, undergraduate research, national scholarships and fellowships, and experiential learning, said Branden Grimmett, associate dean of the center.
“It brings together what were existing functions but are now streamlined to make it easier for students to access,” Grimmett said.
The pre–health science peer mentor program engages hundreds of students each year through office hours, advising appointments, club events and other engagements, helping undergraduates navigate their time at Emory and beyond in health science programs.
The background: Prehealth advising has been a fixture at Emory for 20 years, led by a team of staff advisers and 30 peer mentors. The office helps students know the options available to them within health professions and that they’re meeting degree requirements to enter these programs. A majority of Emory’s prehealth majors are considering medicine, but others hope to study veterinary medicine, dentistry or optometry, like Marshall.
How it works: The pre–health science mentors are paid student employees, earning approximately $15 an hour. The ideal applicant is a rising junior or senior who has a passion for helping others, Grimmett said.
Mentors also serve on one of four subcommittees—connect, prepare, explore and apply—representing different phases of the graduate school process.
Mentors are recruited for the role in the spring and complete a written application as well as an interview process. Once hired, students participate in a daylong training alongside other student employees in the Pathways Center. Mentors also receive touch-up training in monthly team meetings with their supervisors, Grimmett said.
Peer mentors host office hours in the Pathways Center and advertise their services through digital marketing, including a dedicated Instagram account and weekly newsletter.
Peer-to-peer engagement: Marshall became a peer mentor her junior year and is giving the same advice and support to her classmates that she received. In a typical day, she said she’ll host office hours, meeting with dozens of students and offering insight, resources and advice.
“Sometimes students are coming in looking for general advice on their schedule for the year or what classes to take,” she said. “A lot of the time, we have students come in and ask about how to get involved with research or find clinical opportunities in Atlanta or on campus, so it really ranges and varies.”
Sometimes Marshall’s job is just to be there for the student and listen to their concerns.
“Once I met with a student who came in and she was really nervous about this feeling that she wasn’t doing enough,” Marshall said. “There’s this kind of impostor phenomenon that you’re not involved in enough extracurriculars, you’re not doing enough to set you up for success.”
Marshall is able to relate to these students and help them reflect on their experiences.
“That’s been one of my favorite parts of being a peer mentor: getting to help students recognize their strengths and guide them through things that I’ve been through myself,” she said.
In addition to assisting their classmates, peer mentors walk away with résumé experience and better career discernment, Grimmett said. “Often our students learn a lot about their own path as they’re in dialogue with other students. It’s a full circle for many of our peer mentors.”
“It’s funny to think about the fact that our role is to help others, but it really helps all of us as peer mentors as well,” Marshall said. “We learn to connect with a variety of students, and I think it’s been really valuable for me to connect with the advisers myself and get to know them better.”
If your student success program has a unique feature or twist, we’d like to know about it. Click here to submit.
This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Branden Grimmett’s name.
In the nearly seven months since President Trump took office again, academic associations, faculty unions, researchers and other groups have used the legal system to push back on the administration’s efforts to reshape higher education and the federal government.
The lawsuits challenged bans on diversity, equity and inclusion programs; the administration’s crackdown on international students; the termination of thousands of grants; and the dismantling of the Department of Education.
“What we’re seeing is that when the administration tries to impose a whole new set of rules and regulations based upon their particular ideology … the courts are saying, ‘Wait’ or ‘No,’ until it gets to the Supreme Court,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a teachers’ union that has filed multiple lawsuits against Trump and notched a few victories.
An Inside Higher Ed analysis of more than 40 lawsuits against the administration that are related to higher ed found that district judges have ruled against the executive branch in nearly two-thirds of the cases. Almost a quarter have yet to be decided. Of those in which a judge has ruled, 18 have been appealed, and only two were overturned. In bothinstances when the district court was overruled, it had to do with reversing injunctions that prevented the Trump administration from canceling grants based in part on the president’s executive order against DEI. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration in a separate but similar case.
Nine cases have yet to receive a decision from an appeals court.
For more updates on litigation against the administration, go to Inside Higher Edrevamped lawsuit tracker. The searchable database will be updated regularly.
Of the cases Inside Higher Ed analyzed, the most frequent issue at hand was grant cuts, at 14 cases, followed by the Education Department’s reduction in force at eight.
“A lot of the actions the administration is taking are very clearly being defined by the courts as patently illegal. They’re outside of the established law and they exceed executive authority,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, which has sued the administration severaltimes to challenge a proposed cap on reimbursements for indirect research expenses that would cost universities millions.
Some worry that rulings from the conservative majority on the Supreme Court could be driven by party alignment more than the law. Fansmith said he was certainly concerned by the court’s rulings so far but was hesitant to call them an “interjection of partisan politics.”
He noted that the rulings have come from the court’s shadow docket. This means they have made their decisions outside of the traditional case procedures with limited briefings, no oral argument and often no detailed explanations.
For example, when it comes to the case challenging the Education Department’s layoffs, Fansmith said that the lawyers he’s talked to are “sort of confounded by the decision.” The justices didn’t offer an opinion on whether the department can legally fire half its employees, but did allow the administration to proceed with the process while the courts work through the case.
“So it’s sort of a split decision in some ways; the merits haven’t yet been resolved finally,” he said.
But the odds of the court making a final judgment that brings back the employees seems unlikely, some legal experts have said. And Weingarten noted that even if they do hear the cases this fall and make a final decision next spring, the damage will have been done.
“The problem is that when you start talking about medical and scientific research, the moment that those things get stopped, there is irreparable damage and it’s hard to recreate them,” she said. “The Trump administration is really hurting what was an anchoring principle of American enterprise and innovation … that research has really been suffocated and used as leverage for the Trump administration to get its ideological whims adopted.”
Still, many different plaintiffs—including Democratic attorneys general—continue to push back against the Trump administration’s agenda.
Massachusetts AG Andrea Joy Campbell, who has challenged the president in multiple suits, believes that Trump and his cabinet have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to use “unlawful abuses of power” to limit academic freedom. And as long as they continue to do so, she added, Democratic leaders will keep taking matters to court.
“State attorneys general have the power to fight back to uphold the rule of law and protect our young people—and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Campbell wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “We’ve achieved significant victories in the vast majority of our cases, and we will continue to hold the line because our children and the future of our democracy depend on it.”
Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal group that has represented plaintiffs in a number of cases, also chimed in, saying the Trump-Vance “assault” on education will continue to be “met with force.”
“These victories show just how essential higher education is to our democracy and why protecting it from political interference will remain a core part of our work,” said Skye Perryman, the group’s president and CEO.
She added that while the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn some cases was “incredibly disappointing,” it’s not the end.
“We win a lot, but if we’re not experiencing some setbacks, we’re not pushing hard enough,” she said.
However, major concerns still loom among many higher education advocates as Trump officials continue to fight back, pushing for lawsuits to reach the Supreme Court and lambasting the district and appellate judges that rule against the executive branch, calling them “activist[s]” for disagreeing with the president.
“There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision-making process,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a press conference in May.
Leavitt’s comments were related to court decisions blocking certain immigration policies, but Madi Biedermann, press secretary for the Education Department, has also criticized judges that rule against Trump.
In May, Biedermann called a district court judge who blocked the department’s mass layoffs a “far-left judge,” adding that he “dramatically overstepped his authority” and had “a political ax to grind.”
Weingarten, on the other hand, says it’s Trump and the conservative Supreme Court that are thwarting academic freedom and violating constitutional rights for political power.
What we’ve seen is “more the sign of an autocrat that tries to control as opposed to people who believe in freedom,” she said. “It’s all very, very dangerous for the future of America.”
Whenever I write something halfway decent (sometimes) or astoundingly dumb (often), I can count on a thoughtful response from Bob Ubell. Our conversation took place during the period when Bob published two books,Going Online(2017) and Staying Online(2021), as well as numerous articles in EdSurge, IHE, The Evollution and other publications.
Bob’s online education career goes at least back to 1999, where he was the dean of online learning at Stevens Institute of Technology. Subsequent leadership roles include vice dean of online learning at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and vice dean emeritus, online learning, at NYU Tandon.
In a profession where many of us are making things up as we go, Bob stands out for his long-term experience thinking about and leading online learning initiatives. I asked Bob if he would answer my questions about his career and the future of online learning, and he graciously agreed.
Q: According to your Wikipedia page, you have been working at the intersection of higher education, technology and publishing since you graduated from Brooklyn College in 1961. What does the next decade hold for you as you think about your contributions to our online learning community?
A: I’m not optimistic about what’s ahead, not only for digital education, but also for the nation’s wider academic enterprise. It’s impossible to answer your question in isolation without reckoning with the ugly scene now taking place in higher ed. Challenged by the federal government’s attacks, early this spring, 600 higher ed leaders warned about “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” Since then, the present administration has continued to follow a treacherous path, destabilizing campuses across the country, targeting faculty and student academic freedom, and, in a new Supreme Court decision, ultimately dismantling the U.S. Department of Education.
In an opinion column inthis publication earlier this year, I predicted that American colleges and universities faced a terrifying cascade of autocratic moves “set by leaders in Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere … selecting college presidents, controlling faculty hiring and advancement, punishing academic dissent and imposing travel restrictions.” Many of these despotic actions have already been implemented and continue to be imposed on schools in this country.
Last month, to restore about $400 million in federal research funding, Columbia University bowed to tyrannical demands by officials. In an unprecedented agreement, Columbia will pay more than $200 million in fines for dubious accusations of antisemitic student theatrics. It also opened the gates for government intrusion in the school’s academic prerogatives in hiring, admissions and curriculum. Keeping Columbia in academic handcuffs, the deal will be overseen by an outside monitor, reporting to officials every six months.
The midcentury philosopher and cultural critic Hannah Arendt, in her masterful account of totalitarian regimes, revealed that they rely on systematic suppression of individual thought and freedom to maintain control, undermining the very purpose of universities—institutions that encourage critical thinking, open debate and intellectual autonomy, essential in a democracy. Recent power plays against Columbia, Harvard, Brown, Duke—and, just this week, UCLA—show how brutal our government can be in imposing its will.
The noted Columbia genocide scholar Marianne Hirsch, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who teaches a class on genocide with a book by Arendt, is considering leaving Columbia following its adoption of a new definition of antisemitism, which casts criticism of Israel as hate speech, a provision in the new pact with the federal government. Hirsch fears it may force her to face official sanction for even mentioning Arendt, who criticized Israel’s founding.
“A university that treats criticism of Israel as antisemitic and threatens sanctions for those who disobey is no longer a place of open inquiry,” Hirsch told the Associated Press. “I just don’t see how I can teach about genocide in that environment.” Reactionary governments always find an innocent mark to target. In the 1950s, it was American Communists. Today, it’s pro-Palestinian faculty and students.
The downstream effects on remote learning are already being felt, with the perception overseas—following arrests of foreign students and other threats against students and scholars from abroad—that the U.S. is turning its back on international recruitment, undermining our reputation as a leading destination for higher education and potentially impacting foreign student tuition revenue, face-to-face and online. In the U.S., the demand to shut down DEI programs will surely affect the greatest number of online students—80 percent of whom work and a third [of whom] are first in their families to attend college.
On a personal note, I worry that closing the [Education Department] will cripple and may even end higher ed data collection and reporting, giving us less reliable information on the status of American college students. Over my career in higher ed, I’ve depended on federal government data, especially in supporting findings I’ve disclosed in my writing. “We’ll soon be in the dark,” I warned in a recent IHE column.
Turning to your question, asking what sort of contribution I might make to the remote learning community. Like so many others, I don’t feel my voice possesses much force against what’s happening. Nor do I feel competent to articulate what might make a difference. Academic opposition to what we face has been scattershot and largely ineffective, except for various successful legal maneuvers. More broadly, on a national scale, resistance has been disappointing, with few voices, in and out of electoral politics, with enough momentum to capture our yearning for democratic fresh air. To get us out of this nightmare, I dream that someone will rise in this desperate time to gather all of us together in an inspiring and powerful national movement against tyranny.
Q: There is a growing concern across higher education about the job market for new college graduates, as employers are increasingly utilizing AI to accomplish the work previously done by entry-level workers. What role should online learning leaders be playing at our institutions in evolving and adapting our institutions to the AI revolution?
A: Since the pandemic, it hasn’t been that easy for recent college graduates to find a job in our digital economy–even before the invasion of AI. In March, recent college grad unemployment was at 5.8 percent, the highest in the last decades, excluding the pandemic, and nearly double the rate of all workers with a college degree, now at 2.7 percent, nearly a historic low.
“For the first time in modern history, a bachelor’s degree is failing to deliver on its fundamental promise: access to professional employment,” observes a troubling report from Burning Glass, the big labor market analysis firm. “Young graduates face unemployment rates that are rising faster than any other education or age cohort, while over half of them land into jobs they didn’t need college to get. The traditional pathway from college to career is becoming less reliable.” In addition to other causes, the report singles out AI.
As with all radical technological innovations, the reception of AI is fraught with contradictory predictions on its impact. Touted by champions as an economic miracle, others fear it as a devilish intrusion, disrupting our material well-being, especially for college grads who have historically outpaced the economic success of others. In the postwar years, most American workers found middle-class manufacturing or clerical jobs, but in the last 40 years, new jobs are either in highly paid professional fields or low-wage service industries, a disastrous national calamity that has largely generated our present political trouble.
Sorry, but I don’t have exciting new ways to recommend to recent college grads to extricate themselves from the present dilemma, other than—not a very original idea—encourage them to enhance their knowledge gained in college classrooms with online or in-person nondegree courses in AI and other technical disciplines, giving them a leg up with attractive additional credentials.
Not being knowledgeable about AI, I reached out to Alfred Essa, an insightful colleague and author of the forthcoming Artificial Intelligence: Shaping the Future of Innovation, who advised, “Students must think of themselves as designers, creating AI-powered applications to solve problems, not just in the short-term, but over their careers, positioning themselves in industry, capable of building and changing things with AI.” Essa emphasized that his advice is not only for technically savvy students, but for others who are creative in aesthetics, humanities and other disciplines.
Essa worries that the present higher ed leadership is obsolete. “For colleges to succeed,” he urged, “they must be led by a new generation who will adopt the new AI environment.” In the meantime, for my part, higher ed needs to welcome AI as a technical innovation, in the long tradition of typewriters, calculators, computers and digital education. Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can’t stick it back in. Restrictive, retrograde rules are foolish or punishing—or both.
Q: What advice do you have for folks like me who are thinking about ways to stay active and engaged in online learning and higher education once we retire from our university administrative roles?
A: Cicero found that the way we lived in our youth prepares us for retirement. The choices we made when we were young naturally lead to the life we will live as we age. He argued that preparation for our later years is not a separate phase, but a continuation of the life we led all along. “The harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessings previously secured,” he wrote (Cicero De Senectute, translated with an introduction and notes by Andrew P. Peabody [Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1887]).
Rumors are swirling about the extent to which Harvard University will acquiesce to the Trump administration’s attempt to crush institutions of higher education. Until very recently Harvard was being publicly lauded for standing up to the government. Reports that Harvard may be willing to pay a sizable financial settlement to resolve legal accusations that it allowed antisemitism and promoted diversity policies were shocking to many. But the university’s purported resistance to government overreach already had a glaring exception—Palestine—and we as scholars who work on the subject have recently experienced it firsthand.
The Harvard Educational Review was set to release a special issue this summer focusing on education and Palestine. The topic, commissioned in early 2024, was timely in the wake of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which rights groups and other experts have concluded is a genocide, and aligned with the journal’s commitment to publishing research that tackles the most pressing issues facing education. The articles had been accepted, edited and contracted. The special issue had already been promoted at major education conferences and on the back cover of the spring issue of the HER. But suddenly, Harvard pulled the plug.
As recently reported in The Guardian, the Harvard Education Publishing Group (HEPG), which publishes the Review, abruptly and unilaterally decided to cancel the forthcoming special issue.
We wrote one of the articles that was supposed to be published in the special issue. Our article, one of 10 slated for publication, focused on the experiences of Palestinian teachers during the Lebanese civil war. But in May, as the special issue was nearing publication, we were surprised to find out that HEPG wanted to submit the entire issue to Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel for an exceptional and last-minute “risk” review. Articles had already been through the regular publishing process and were under contract. At no point to our knowledge had any “risk”-related concerns been raised about any of them. An additional review was therefore well outside the realm of routine practice.
Alarmed by this move and the dangerous precedent of subjecting academic scholarship to vetting by university lawyers, all authors in the special issue organized and expressed unequivocal refusal to this additional review in a letter sent to HEPG.
After we expressed our refusal, HEPG went radio silent for almost a month. And then it canceled the whole issue, only then claiming that there were problems with copyediting and its internal process. But procedural claims have often been leveled to silence speech, especially when it comes to Palestine. Whatever concerns about the process, there is no justification for the cancellation of the entire special issue. HEPG’s decision is yet another example of the “Palestine exception” in action: the term used to describe how seemingly liberal institutions restrict freedom of expression when it comes to Palestine.
Given the timing of HEPG’s decision—which aligns with the Trump administration’s weaponizing of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—this seems to be the logical outcome of a political climate that has promoted sweeping claims of antisemitism to attack student protesters and higher education institutions, including Harvard. In this climate it seems far more likely that HEPG opted for censorship over academic freedom.
Of particular concern is Harvard’s recent adoption of a problematic new definition of antisemitism. That definition, proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), has been roundly criticized by experts—and one of the authors of the definition—for equating critiques of the state of Israel with antisemitism. This conflation makes it harder to speak out against Israel’s actions and policies toward Palestinians and easier to victimize Palestinians. Harvard is not alone in this action.
Even before Israel’s latest brutal onslaught of Gaza, scholars writing and advocating for Palestinian rights confronted the limits of liberal empathy for Palestinians in the form of tenure denials, censored freedom of speech, doxing by pro-Israel groups and even death threats. But the repression of knowledge production and freedom of speech on Palestine has escalated since October 2023. U.S. universities and colleges (including Harvard) have canceled events that center Palestinian rights, attempted to censor scholarship, forcibly suppressed student protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza and beyond, and dismissed faculty over Palestine-related programming.
Still, the scrapping of this special issue marks a worrying escalation. It suggests that even those universities that are outspoken about their liberal values are ready to stifle academics’ legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and practices. Make no mistake: Anticipatory censorship of this kind is a hallmark of the governmental overreach that authoritarian regimes around the world are known for. As a growing number of higher education institutions adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, we fear we will see more and more examples of the suppression of academic freedom.
The consequences of this extend far beyond the academy. As the death toll in Gaza exceeds 60,000 and young people there face a third year without education amid ongoing bombardment, blockade and starvation, knowledge, debate and democratic action are essential to preventing the kind of horrors that are unfolding in Gaza today.
Thea Renda Abu El-Haj is a professor of education at Barnard College, Columbia University. Jo Kelcey is assistant professor of education in the Department of Psychology and Education at Lebanese American University.
The past few years have brought a seemingly endless series of existential challenges for colleges and their leaders. Although many of the most recent challenges have been initiated by decision-makers in the nation’s capital, a sense of crisis on college campuses is nothing new. For any number of social, political and economic reasons, leadership in the world of higher education has been hard for some time, and it will probably keep getting harder.
Navigating external crises is especially challenging for midlevel campus leaders, such as department chairs and center directors. Too few of these individuals receive effective leadership training or support. And in moments of crisis, higher education’s collective failure to invest in developing strong leaders is on full display. Beyond the lack of role preparation, the very ambiguity at the heart of midlevel leadership—sandwiched between senior leaders and front-line faculty and students—makes it an inherently tough place to be.
On so many college campuses, department chair service carries limited power, authority, time and resources. As we prepare to begin a new academic year, chairs and directors may already feel exhausted or overwhelmed. In the paragraphs that follow, we offer a few general principles that may help department chairs figure out how to use their often overlooked and undercelebrated positions to support the collective well-being of their faculty, staff and students in what will most certainly be a challenging year ahead.
Accept what you cannot do (legally, morally, procedurally). Serving as a director or chair makes you a campus leader, whether or not you tend to describe yourself in those terms. And as a leader, you bear responsibility for acting in accordance with institutional policies and also for exercising good judgment in your actions and speech.
Chairs should not offer blanket assurances of safety to individuals or guarantees of legal counsel, for example. Instead, the better move might be to connect faculty and staff with identified resources and to let the experts employ their expertise. In moments of budget austerity, midlevel leaders should exercise caution in pledging financial support or informal guarantees of continued employment.
Chairs are empowered to use their full rights as private citizens—to protest, author op-eds and contact their elected representatives—but they should take care not to blur the lines between their personal activism and their official duties and position. You chair a department that includes diverse individuals who likely think and vote differently from one another. And right now, all of them need your full support for both routine and more substantive university matters. Anticipate that faculty, staff and students may look to you to set the ground rules so that all feel welcome, valued and safe in a polarized and scary world.
Exercise creative problem-solving within your domain. In a highly charged moment, chairs should use all the tools in their arsenal, strategically employing action and inaction.
Act by supporting small moments of connection, such as bringing in some baked goods or inviting a colleague who seems particularly overwhelmed to join you on a walk and talk across campus. If a faculty member in your department has lost the support of a federal grant, keep in mind that their entire research program may be in crisis. And if such a colleague is approaching a review for tenure or promotion, you may want to initiate a timely conversation about recalibrating expectations around scholarly productivity.
As for inaction, a crisis is an opportune moment to do no more than is absolutely necessary. Off-campus turmoil demands energy and attention. Do your best to help the department separate things that must be done now from the things that can wait. This may not be the time to request funds for an external speaker. Delay scheduling a faculty retreat to overhaul the long-overdue revision of the capstone class. Use the opening faculty meeting of the year to set some scaled-back, modest goals and enlist your colleagues in a pledge to keep the shared to-do list lean. (We suspect that’ll be an easy sell.)
Prioritize stability management.Ashley Goodall has argued that change, even necessary change, tends to disrupt our ability to find belonging, autonomy and meaning in our professional lives. Goodall offers the term “stability management” to describe what leaders can do for their colleagues on a daily basis, especially when everything is in flux.
Stability management begins by recognizing what works and needs to remain constant, focusing above all on preserving those things. Many faculty members may find comfort in the ordinary work of constructing class schedules, ordering textbooks, applying for travel funds, conducting faculty searches and the like. For some of your colleagues, business as usual may convey the implicit assurance that university life marches ever forward. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore or downplay the severity of a crisis; it just means that you can try to keep it in perspective.
Rituals and relationships also provide stability. If your department has a tradition of festive gatherings to mark the beginning of the academic year, now is the time to approach such gatherings with all the joy you can muster. And if your department is lacking in joyful traditions, well, that might be an opportunity for meaningful and much-needed change.
Defer to campus experts. During the pandemic, campuses mobilized their public health resources in highly visible ways, such as appointing campus physicians and researchers to policymaking task forces. Recent executive orders and policy mandates from the federal government have forced colleges to draw on a new set of experts, including international support personnel, grant managers, lawyers and financial aid counselors.
Rather than chairing high-profile committees, many of these trained professionals may work with impacted individuals in their specific, and often highly technical, unique situations. Many of these sensitive conversations are best conducted away from the limelight.
In other words, if you don’t see these efforts happening in public, extend the charitable assumption that campus resources are being mobilized to support those in need in the ways that make the most sense.
Embrace—don’t fight—the messy in-betweenness of being a department chair. The true art of midlevel leadership hinges on accepting its inherent dualities, limitations and freedoms. Department chairs may not be able to issue broad decrees, but they wield considerable influence over climate and tone. Not all problems are theirs to solve, but they can always offer sympathy and empathy. Instead of issuing top-down edicts, they can provide time and space for others to respectfully think together about hard topics.
In fraught moments, higher ed needs midlevel leaders to lean into their in-betweenness—to serve as translators, mediators and conduits between what on some campuses are warring factions. Send messages up the chain by highlighting the concerns of the most vulnerable members of the department, in case these individuals aren’t already receiving help. Make a point to show up at campus town halls and carefully read emails from central administration so you can keep your faculty informed. When you can, de-escalate hostile exchanges, quash baseless rumors and ensure no one feels overlooked or left out.
Commit to the beauty of your discipline. One of the hardest parts of leading in a crisis is not just navigating external pressures, but withstanding the slow erosion of your own spirit, which can quietly wear down even the most resilient leader. You can’t show up as the best version of your chair self to serve others if you have fallen into despair.
The recent attacks on colleges and universities have cut many of us to the core. There is no point in pretending that most of the work that happens in the academy will solve climate change, save American democracy or right centuries of injustice. Whatever benefits accrue to the world out there as a result of your teaching and scholarship will probably be indirect and difficult to measure.
Nonetheless, an academic leader can gain strength by reflecting on the ways in which their chosen discipline contributes, however indirectly, to the common good. The grunt work you do as department chair also makes it possible for students and faculty to deepen, enrich and expand their understanding of the world. Your work makes it possible for them to come ever closer to fulfilling their dreams.
Their work has meaning and value because, among other things, it embodies curiosity and an openness to new ideas. Your work may sometimes feel like an exercise in keeping the trains running on time, but you might remind yourself that, as long as the academy stays true to its core principles, the trains are heading in a worthwhile direction.
As a new academic year approaches, midlevel leaders are uniquely positioned to be a source of information, prudence, levity, focus and reassurance for the faculty, staff and students in their immediate spheres of influence. There’s plenty that we cannot begin to predict about the year to come, but we are confident that this is a year when students, faculty and staff will look to their most proximate leaders for guidance on how to keep moving forward.
Duane Coltharp is an associate professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio. He served Trinity for 18 years as an associate vice president for academic affairs.
Lisa Jasinski is president of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. She is the author of Stepping Away: Returning to the Faculty After Senior Academic Leadership (Rutgers University Press, 2023).
HEPI Director, Nick Hillman OBE, takes a look at why today’s landmark report on student maintenancefrom HEPI, TechnologyOne and the Centre for Research in Social Policyat Loughborough Universityis so important.
Later today, HEPI will be hosting a free webinar with UCAS on this year’s admissions round – see here for details and to register for a free place.
A recent Wonkhe article by Will Yates of Public First noted, ‘It really was not that long ago that maintenance grants were the norm and student life was cheap and cheerful.’ We probably all know what he means.
When I went to the University of Manchester 35 years ago, I had no tuition fees and got to collect a grant cheque even though my parents were in secure middle-class jobs. Since then, life has become harder financially for students. Costs have gone up and grants have disappeared (in England). Meanwhile, the student body has diversified to include more people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
As if battling with the impact of COVID on their secondary schooling was not enough, today’s students face big financial obstacles. During my nine years as a Trustee of the University of Manchester (which sadly came to an end last month), I regularly ascended those same stairs I used to climb to collect my physical grant cheque in order to attend Board meetings at which we would discuss student poverty and its impact.
Will Yates’s conclusion needs qualifying of course. Just as it is true that there are today many poor pensioners alongside all the well-off ones who have cleaned up thanks to intergenerational inequities, so there have always been some students who struggled to survive on the maintenance support they received. I recently stumbled across the following exchange in Hansard from 1969, for example, on whether parents were making up the income of their student offspring in the way they have long been supposed to:
Mrs. Shirley Williams:I appreciate that students who do not receive the full parental contribution often suffer hardship. My Department recently wrote to local education authorities asking them to ensure that parents were made aware of the importance of making up the student’s grant. But I do not think it would be desirable or practicable to impose a legal obligation on parents to make their contributions. (Source: Hansard, 30 January 1969)
Plus ça change… Aside from the reference to local education authorities (which no longer have a role in student maintenance), the answer could have come from pretty much any one of the last seven decades.
These issues are topical in part because the threshold at which parents are expected to start contributing to their adult student offspring’s living costs has not increased for over 15 years – it was set at £25,000 for England by Gordon Brown (six Prime Ministers ago…). So parents in English households on just over £25,000 a year are expected to cough up – the situation is even worse elsewhere (just over £19,000 in Northern Ireland).
The recent HEPI / Advance HE Student Academic Experience Surveyshows over two-thirds of full-time undergraduates now do paid work during term time, and often at a dangerous number of hours (‘dangerous’ in the sense of impacting their academic work). So what has changed is the proportion of students who feel wickedly under-resourced financially.
The biggest lie told about students today is that they are pathetic ‘snowflakes’ who melt on contact with real life; in fact, when financially challenged, they tend to confront the problem head on by going out and finding paid work. Norman Tebbit would have been proud.
While my generation of students were debating or politicking or going to gigs, today’s students are more often serving those who do have the money to go out. In the UPP Foundation / Public First research that Will Yates was writing about, the students said they thought ‘it was them (rather than the university, the government, the OfS or any other body) who took responsibility for ensuring that they could afford to study and socialise.’
In my view, one of the very best projects we do at HEPI is the HEPI / TechnologyOne Minimum Income Standard. This is completely different to the student money surveys that ask students what their income is and how they spend it. Those are useful but only up to a point because what if the income is not enough? Knowing I have X pounds and spend X pounds is only of modest value if I actually need 2X pounds in order to afford the bus to campus, join my favourite student society and buy personal healthcare items (on this, see HEPI’s recent report by Rose Stephenson on menstruation and learning).
So the Minimum Income Standard starts with a blank sheet of paper plus a tried-and-tested methodology developed by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University to consider how much students really need to live with dignity – the calculation is not for a plush lifestyle nor a monastic one, but rather for a fairly basic-but-safe one and is based on the extensive experience of the research team as well as detailed focus groups with multiple students around the UK.
This year, the second such study dwells upon first-year students in Purpose-Built Student Accommodation (university halls and privately-owned student accommodation blocks). So it supplements last year’s study of second and third-years in shared ‘off-street’ housing. (In my view, it should really be called ‘on-street’ housing as it tends to be on normal residential streets, but I digress.)
While TechnologyOne have generously funded this vitally important work, I must stress that neither they nor HEPI have had any editorial control over the core central numbers, which are entirely Loughborough’s work and based on what students have told them. HEPI’s input has included feeding in supplementary figures for accommodation costs , with the help of Student Crowd and Students, and thinking through the possible policy consequences of the research.
The top-level finding is that first-year students living in halls need £418 a week – over £20,000 a year and double the maximum maintenance support package in England. Even if a student (in England, living away from home and studying outside London) is in receipt of the maximum maintenance loan, they need to work 20 hours a week throughout the year to earn enough money to hit the Minimum Income Standard. Remember, these are people on full-time courses. As a society, we are now expecting people to do full-time study and half-time paid work and then we wonder why young students struggle to feel a sense of belonging to their institution…
People should look carefully at the methodology and conclusions to see if they agree with them. As a think tank, our job is to make people think; we can identify the main challenges and propose solutions but we are not a lobby group, so we would never claim we have all the answers. There may be elements of the Minimum Income Standard for Students that people want to pore over, challenge and improve.
Some of the issues people may want to consider on the back of the MISS include:
As the report makes clear, student life is generally a temporary phase that lasts no more than three or four years. So is it reasonable to apply the same methodology as is used for defining the basic minimum income for someone in work or in retirement? It is valid, in my view, because three years still represents a substantial proportion of a young person’s life up to that point and undergraduate study is often the first period of real independence for people – plus some other phases of life for which the minimum income methodology has been applied are also not always very long term. For example, someone on a ‘living wage’ is likely to hope to rise above it in due course as they gain experience. Besides, in one sense, no phase of life is permanent.
A second important question is whether letting students define their own minimum standard of living via focus groups will always tend towards larger monetary sums. The Minimum Income Standard for Students assumes students are likely to have gym membership, a short UK holiday and other costs (like wireless headphones, a modest alcohol budget and food for takeaways) that some people may deem to be non-essentials or at least not things that should be subsidised by taxpayer-funded income-contingent student loans (though, on the other hand, we only include very small sums for study-related costs). The MISS also includes some costs than some people might deem relevant only to a minority of students (such as paying to store items between terms). But the MISS is about having enough money for every student to live reasonably, with dignity and safety; it is not designed to be a ‘bare minimum’ or to represent the lifestyle of an ascetic. This is one of a number of reasons, further explored below, why we studiously avoid ever saying we think the Government should automatically set the maximum maintenance package at exactly (or even roughly) the level of the MISS. Moreover, students are not spendthrift – one interesting change this year compared to last, for example, is that they no longer deem a TV Licence as a must-have item so it has been removed from the calculation.
What we call a ‘minimum’ is also an ’average’; some cities are notably more expensive than others – London aside, we generally ignore this in the calculation and so the MISS might look too high or too low depending on where someone is studying and their own personal circumstances. For example, this means some of the freebies – such as prescriptions and bus travel – enjoyed by many Scottish students are ignored.
Should we be looking to reduce costs by giving applicants and students better information? A modest amount of the first-year premium (the extra costs that first-years seem to accrue) comes from being unused to budgeting and feeding themselves. The MISS for first-year students even includes a small additional sum for the first 12 weeks while students settle down and get used to things like eating up food before it goes off. Would better information of the students are crying out for fix at least some of the need for this? Similarly, would better information on the different consequences of different accommodation preferences shape better decisions, which in turn could shape the supply of student accommodation, and lead to a reduction in the MISS?
One particular policy challenge is explaining how any extra student maintenance support that could be offered now or later is likely to be spent in practice. Ministers will be less likely to give students improved maintenance packages if they think they will be entirely swallowed up by higher rent levels. One real challenge here, as so often, is that student accommodation tends to fall through the cracks in Whitehall, so it is not always clear who should be approached for these conversations.
Above all, HEPI is a policy body so for us the key question is always: what are the possible policy ramifications? On this, and notwithstanding the important fact that the report gives a clear indication of a preferred direction of travel, we are still working them out.
For example, the report concludes that the maximum maintenance package is only half of what students need to live. It clearly needs to be higher and available to more people. It would be absurd (literally absurd) to think parents could easily fill in the gap from their take-home pay unless they are on very good salaries indeed. It is similarly absurd, however, to think the Government can easily fill the whole gap, given the fiscal situation and the much larger number of students than in the past.
So what level of paid employment is it reasonable to assume students might do (and in holidays or term-time or both)? Or should students opt for a more basic standard of living (no en suite perhaps or more shared rooms, as in the United States)? Or should more students live at home as commuter students but at the cost of experiencing a full traditional student experience? These are difficult questions and, again, the answers will be different in different cases. Nonetheless, we welcome all thoughts in response.
As I sometimes say when speaking in schools, if and when it comes to my own children going to higher education, I will tell them three things:
good social spaces are more important than things like en suite facilities – if you are living a full student lifestyle, you may spend less time in your room than you originally expected;
taking a temporary full-time job in the holidays is generally preferable to doing a high number of hours of paid employment during term time, if you’re lucky enough to have the choice; and
in general, it tends to be better not to be a commuter student, unless there are specific individual reasons for being one.
Yet like most parents, I will also have to accept they will take what I say with a large pinch of salt and then find their own way.
ELKHART, Ind. — The numbers were discouraging, and in some cases getting worse. Nearly 30 percent of Indiana’s high schoolers were chronically absent in 2022. Only about 52 percent of students in the state enrolled in collegein 2023, a 12-percentage-point drop in seven years. Fewer students were pursuing other paths, too: The share of students enlisting in the military, for example, declined by 41 percent from 2018 to 2022.
When Katie Jenner toured the state after becoming education secretary in 2021, she heard from many students who said they simply didn’t value high school or see how it would help them.“That was really hard to hear,” Jenner said. “We had to look in the mirror and say, ‘OK, this is the reality. Let’s do better.’”
Jenner and her team began redesigning what high school looks like in Indiana, in an effort to make it more relevant to young people’s futures and help them gain a better grasp of career paths. For too long, she and others argued, kids had been pushed to plan for four-year college, yet only about half of seniors actually enrolled, and those who did go often dropped out before graduating.
When a draft of the plan was released in early 2024, it drew fierce protest from many parents and educators who worried the state was prioritizing workforce learning over academics. Jenner and her staff reworked the proposal, eventually crafting a plan that alleviated some, though not all, of the concerns.
The “New Indiana Diploma” — which was signed into law in April and goes into effect for all incoming first-year students this academic year — gives students the option to earn different “seals” in addition to a basic diploma, depending on whether they plan to attend college, go straight to work or serve in the military. Jenner describes it as an effort to tailor the diploma to students’ interests, expose students to careers and recognize different forms of student achievement.
Experts said the template is something of a model nationally, at a time when more states are reconsidering how to help students prepare for careers and the federal government is also pushing alternatives to four-year college. Elements of that effort have earned bipartisan support: Presidents from both parties have advocated for expanding work-based learning, and President Donald Trump recently called for the creation of 1 million new apprenticeships.
“The basic architecture of American high school is being questioned and challenged,” said Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation.* Indiana is at the forefront of an effort to incorporate more experiential learning instead of restricting education to school buildings, he said: “Indiana is really breaking ground.”
The initial proposal Jenner’s agency drafted would have created two high school diplomas, “Graduates Prepared to Succeed” and “Graduates Prepared to Succeed Plus.” Both would have scaled back math and science requirements and loosened recommendations for world languages and other electives. Meanwhile, they would have encouraged all students to participate in work-based learning in apprenticeships, internships or job shadowing, with at least 75 hours in such activities required for the “plus” diploma.
Indiana hopes that work-based learning opportunities at companies like Alpha Systems and Hoosier Crane Service Company, in Elkhart, Indiana, can flourish under the new diploma system. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
In 2024, the state board of education held dozens of meetings to gather feedback on the proposal for the revamped diplomas — and the backlash was intense. Leaders of higher education institutions, including the state’s flagship schools, Indiana and Purdue universities, said students graduating under the new system would not meet minimum requirements for admission. Purdue’s president, Mung Chiang, wrote a letter to Jenner showing that the proposed diploma system required too few credits in every subject except English.
Hoosier parents were furious that their children might have to sacrifice more challenging courses to fulfill the mandatory work experience requirement under the “plus” option. At an Indiana Department of Education hearing in June 2024, parent Michelae Hill was among dozens who criticized the proposal, calling it “intentionally dumbing down our population” and warning that “what will happen is that we are ensuring a permanent underclass, we are ensuring cheap workers.” There were also questions about the logistics of workplace learning, including transportation and possible safety issues on job sites.
State education policy makers went back to the drawing board. The revised version, adopted last December, establishes one basic diploma that all graduates earn, plus the seals students can pursue depending on their post-high-school plans. Even within each seal, students have several ways of meeting the requirements.
For example, to receive the “enrollment” seal — meant primarily for college-bound students — high schoolers can choose from more advanced classes in math, science, social studies and world languages, and may earn additional credits in Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other such college-level courses. An “enrollment honors plus” seal requires that students concurrently obtain a credential such as an associate’s degree or technical certificate and complete 75 hours of work-based learning in apprenticeships, internships or other such programs.
“We wanted rigor and flexibility and less cookie cutter,” said Jenner.
Even the updated system has critics, though. For the basic diploma, students must earn a minimum of 42 credits, two more than before. But how students reach that threshold is different: Economics, geometry and Algebra II are no longer required, while courses in financial literacy and communication are. Physical education is one credit instead of two, and world languages and fine arts are no longer recommended electives.
Professor Michael Hicks, who runs the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana, said he worries about the reduced mathematics rigor in particular. While most states do not require Algebra II for graduation, the class is often seen as a necessity for admission to selective colleges and for certain careers. Hicks said high-achieving, well-resourced students may benefit from the flexibility of the new diploma, as could students committed to the military. But many other students could be harmed, he said, if they are left with the impression that the basic diploma alone will prepare them well for college when it does not.
“It is essentially funneling children away from academic opportunity very early at a time when we really needed to have more kids pushed into the academic options that would get them into college,” he said, arguing that people with college degrees outearn those with only a high school education and have also fueled the state’s and country’s economic growth of the past several decades. “This curriculum will cause the Indiana economy to stall and potentially go into reverse.”
At public meetings last winter, some parents and educators raised concerns that the new system amounted to an unfunded mandate for school districts and would put a huge burden in particular on counselors, who would be working closely with students to help chart their diploma paths. Critics also objected to the de-emphasis of other classes like music and foreign languages. Megan Worcester, the president of the Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association, said the reduced emphasis on foreign language would hurt the state’s economy; she cited a study in which nearly 1 in 4 employers surveyed said they had lost or couldn’t pursue a business opportunity because of language barriers.
Jenner, a former high school teacher, said the new diploma allows students greater flexibility to choose electives depending on their goals, which could include language and music study. While Algebra II is no longer required, students must take four math credits beyond the required Algebra I and personal finance, she said. Jenner also said the state had allocated a portion of $50 million in discretionary funding to train counselors in helping students navigate the new diploma system. In addition, it dedicated up to $10 million in grants to help students pay for transportation, equipment and certifications related to work-based learning, and also provided financial assistance to companies that take on apprentices. Each school that offers work-based learning will receive an extra $500 per participating student.
The new plan eventually quieted the concerns of many education leaders. Several universities, including Indiana and Purdue, released letters of support. “We appreciate the thoughtful adjustments to the work based learning requirements, AP testing and transferability of dual credits,” wrote Pamela Whitten, president of Indiana University. (Neither university agreed to an interview with its leaders.) All major education groups in the state, including the Indiana State Teachers Association, Indiana School Boards Association and the Indiana Association of Public School Superintendents, endorsed the plan.
Ty Zartman, a student apprentice at Hoosier Crane Service Company in Elkhart, Indiana, decided to go straight to work after graduating high school, despite being a straight A student. Parents and educators objected to Indiana’s first proposal for a new high school diploma system, arguing that the emphasis on workplace experience would crowd out academic learning. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
In April, Gov. Mike Braun announced that beginning this year, students who earn the state’s “enrollment honors plus” seal will be automatically accepted into the state’s public colleges and universities, including Purdue and Indiana, potentially persuading more students to enroll.
Parent Chantee Eldridge said she believes the new diploma will make higher education more affordable and help students sharpen their career plans at an earlier age. Her son, Micah, is a 16-year-old senior at Brownsburg High School, near Indianapolis, and has already taken dual credit courses through a partnership with Vincennes University. College credits can be expensive, she said, so earning them at no cost in high school can be a big money saver.
Micah, who has a 3.7 GPA and plays semi pro soccer, said he’s always enjoyed challenging classes and plans to go to college. “When things get repeated, that’s when I get bored and start to tap out mentally,” he said. In college, he anticipates studying psychology — a surprise to his mother, who expected him to pursue math or physics, two topics he’s always excelled in. She likes the idea of him doing an internship with a psychologist, so he can learn more about the field and gain practical work experience before he goes to college; that’s the sort of opportunity that will become more common under this new diploma system.
“Very rarely do you know exactly what you want to do between 16 and 18,” Eldridge said. “That will help students and their families make an informed decision.”
For students who want to go straight into the workforce, the employment seals are designed to provide exposure to career options and work experience that boost students more quickly into higher-paying roles. Under the “employment honors” seal, students must: take coursework or earn a credential aligned to a specific occupation; complete 150 hours of work-based learning; and demonstrate communication, collaboration and work ethic skills. The “employment honors plus” seal requires that students also earn an associate’s degree or advanced industry certificate and complete 650 hours of work-based learning.
Matt Mindrum, president and CEO of the Indy Chamber, said that most of the 150,000 vacant jobs in Indiana right now don’t require a four-year degree. “And yet 100 percent of our high school students are pushed through a college preparatory path. That makes no sense,” he said. He believes an alternate path is critical for driving economic growth in the state, by helping to fill existing jobs and attract new businesses.
Edgar Soto, a senior at Concord High School in Elkhart, is the kind of student Mindrum has in mind. Soto said he has never wanted to attend a four-year college. To get workforce experience, he enrolled in an apprenticeship through his school and is up before dawn each morning to start work with manufacturing technology company Alpha Systems. “It’s something new every day. I love it,” he said. He earns $17 an hour and gives half his paycheck to his mom for family expenses. When school is in session, he spends his afternoons taking classes back at Concord High.
Indiana’s Elkhart County has been at the forefront of expanding apprenticeships to high schoolers, but it’s had trouble recruiting companies — a challenge for the state as it tries to expand work-based learning. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Working has motivated him to study harder at school, he said; he’s never cared for math, but when he realized it was important for his job, he began asking his teacher for extra help. “I got a taste of the real world and I want to be that type of person who does things right,” he said.
Alpha Systems pays for him to take classes in industrial systems through the state community college system, Ivy Tech, and has promised to pay for any further postsecondary education if he stays with the company. In just a few years, company executives said, he could easily make more than $40 an hour, approximately $80,000 a year.
Mindrum is working with employers around the state to try to increase work-based learning opportunities so they match student demand, a particular challenge in rural areas. Communities that have already made a commitment to work-based learning have had trouble recruiting enough employers: For example, in Elkhart County, only 1 in 3 high schoolers who apply for an apprenticeship gets one. Schools will also have to reorganize class schedules and overcome transportation challenges to ensure students can complete the necessary work-based learning under the various seals. The state has a goal of 50,000 apprenticeships by 2030. “It’s an aggressive but achievable target,” Mindrum said.
Supporters hope the revamped diploma will also encourage more students to enlist in military service. Nationally, the military is struggling to recruit, and according to Army data, just 23 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds who apply to the U.S. military meet its medical fitness and academic requirements. In Indiana, the number of students enlisting in the National Guard dropped by 38 percent between 2018 and 2022, the sharpest decline of any state.
Retired Maj. Gen. Dale Lyles, who led the Indiana National Guard and helped create the “enlistment” seal criteria, said students often don’t know much about enlisting and the benefits of military service. In Indiana, for example, serving in the National Guard unlocks free tuition to state colleges.
The new diploma options are meant to fix that: Students in the “enlistment honors” and “enlistment honors plus” seals are taught about each branch of service, what it means to swear an oath to your country and the many different job opportunities available. They also must take a public service course or complete a year of Junior ROTC and receive a certain score on the military’s aptitude test, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, among other requirements. Students can receive coaching for the test and have the opportunity to visit Camp Atterbury-Muskatatuck, a nearly 35,000-acre military post, for hands-on learning opportunities.
“Today’s military is much different than it was even five years ago, just because of the high degree of technology,” said Lyles, citing the Indiana National Guard’s platoon that flies automated aerial drones and its cyber warfare battalion. “We are in a battle for talent.” He added that the pathway emphasizes that there are other ways to serve, including as a firefighter, as a police officer or in the Department of Homeland Security.
Nicholas Purdy, a 17-year-old from Marion, has three grandparents who served in the military and said he’s always been interested in enlisting. In his first year of high school, he signed up for JROTC, and he said he loves traveling to other states for competitions and leadership camps where students participate in activities such as rappelling, water operations and land navigation. “It doesn’t matter what your background is, how much money you have, your looks,” he said of the experience. “The only thing that matters is your character.”
His mother, Stephanie Purdy, said she’s seen his confidence deepen as a result of his experiences with JROTC. Nicolas has won ribbons and pins for marksmanship and leadership that he wears on his uniform, and he likes the idea that under the new seals, those accomplishments would be reflected on his high school transcript. Nicholas wants to become a combat medic in the army. “The training set me up for really good opportunities, and it’s all paid for,” he said.
Jenner’s work continues — with a pressing deadline, as schools roll out these changes for first-year students this year. Her office is working on an online advising tool, a pilot program to help communities identify solutions to transportation challenges, guidance for educators on the new diploma options and courses, and incentives for school districts to measure skills like communication, collaboration and work ethic, not just academic outcomes.
It’s a big task. “This is new terrain for our country when you think about the level of scale we’re trying to accomplish,” said Jenner. “We don’t have a model to just copy and paste, so we’re going to learn some lessons along the way.”
*Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story included an inaccurate description of the Carnegie Foundation.
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.
