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  • Honoring Martin Luther King, the Nobel Peace Prize He Earned

    Honoring Martin Luther King, the Nobel Peace Prize He Earned

    The United States celebrated the life and legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this week. On the national holiday named for him and at numerous other times throughout each year, I reflect on what King taught the world through his justice-seeking philosophies, agendas and actions. I typically do so in writing, with the aim of thoughtfully connecting King to what is happening in our country at the time. For example, two years ago, I published an article in which I contended that he would be appalled by the politicized attacks on and dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. This year, I decided to write about something else that has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons.

    The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to King in 1964, four years before he was assassinated. He earned it. King did not beg for it or annoyingly insist that it should be awarded to him. He did not make boastful claims about all he had single-handedly done to help end human suffering in America and abroad. Instead, he bravely put his life on the line for peace and justice, not for a prize.

    The Nobel Foundation was persuaded enough by King’s impact to celebrate it. No one had to donate their award to the civil and human rights icon. Same with Barack Obama—his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize did not come via whining, self-aggrandizement, public expressions of entitlement or donation from a prior recipient who desperately endeavored to gain political favor with a U.S. president.

    I learned very little about the prize in my K–12 schools, college or graduate school. I did at least know that King had been awarded it, because it is often a prominent detail in his biography. There is a chance that today’s students (including collegians) still do not learn much about the prize in textbooks or anyplace else. Perhaps few would be able to name five prior recipients. But King would probably be one name that most of them call.

    In addition to not knowing enough people who have won it, it is plausible that few students know much about the origins of the prize and the process by which laureates are selected. Because “peace” is in its name, most would likely deduce that the honor is in recognition of recipients’ extraordinary efforts to promote peace. Students also would likely presume the awardees to have themselves been peaceful people, certainly not sustainers of chaos or promoters of divisiveness.

    King had lots of opponents. But he did not waste time in pulpits, in his Birmingham jail cell, on streets all over America or on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (the site of his famed “I Have a Dream” speech) talking about how much he hated those who violently challenged and rejected his agenda. Love, forgiveness, unity and peace are what he extended to and invited from them. He urged others to pursue the same with neighbors and co-workers who were from different races, socioeconomic circumstances, religions and political parties. King hated racism. He hated poverty. Notwithstanding, he proposed and aggressively pursued remedies for them from a standpoint of love.

    I know for sure that were he still alive, King would be fighting like hell right now to ensure that millions of Americans—including whites who jailed him, spat in his face and wanted him dead—get to keep access to high-quality, affordable health care. There is no way he would have sat idly by as the recent politicization of food-stamp benefits placed low-income citizens at risk of starvation. I suspect that King would make the point that poverty and sickness unfairly place people in desperate, unhealthy contexts in which conflict ensues. In myriad ways, equity and equality are strongly connected to his writings about peace, several of which are published in a 736-page anthology of speeches, letters, sermons and op-eds.

    On the eve of this year’s MLK holiday here in the U.S., instead of devoting full attention to honoring one of its most recognizable laureates, the Nobel Foundation had to spend its time articulating the sacredness of its award and making sure people understand that “a laureate cannot share the prize with others, nor transfer it once it has been announced.” Its statement released last week went on to specify, “A Nobel Peace Prize can also never be revoked. The decision is final and applies for all time.”

    Absurdity will neither diminish King’s irrefutable impact nor the Nobel Peace Prize bestowed upon him. In the most dignified manner, King accepted the honor in Oslo 62 years ago: “Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace,” he declared in his acceptance speech. “If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

    In celebration of what would have been his 97th birthday, I chose to reflect on King as a courageous, relentless pursuer of peace who himself was a peaceful leader.

    Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.

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  • Settlements Cost Higher Ed Hundreds of Millions in 2025

    Settlements Cost Higher Ed Hundreds of Millions in 2025

    Michigan State University paid nearly $30 million to settle with three people injured in a 2023 campus shooting.

    Jeffness/Wikimedia Commons

    A new report by the United Educators insurance company shows that universities spent hundreds of millions of dollars on damages in 2025, according to an analysis of publicly reported settlements.

    Legal cases involved a variety of issues, ranging from deaths on campus to antitrust issues, cybersecurity breaches, discrimination, sexual misconduct and pandemic-era policy fallout. 

    Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital had the largest settlement at $750 million in a case related to hundreds of instances of sexual abuse by Robert Hadden, a former doctor who worked at both Columbia’s Irving Medical Center and the hospital. United Educators noted that there is no clear breakdown of which entity shouldered the brunt of the settlement.

    Michigan State University followed with the next-largest settlement at $29.7 million. Michigan State settled with three victims injured in a campus shooting that killed three students in 2023.

    Other notable settlements include:

    • Pennsylvania State University paid $17 million to settle claims that it overcharged students when officials shifted from in-person to remote instruction during the coronavirus pandemic. Penn State was one of five institutions in the report to settle lawsuits amid allegations that they overcharged students, with damages ranging from a high of $17 million to a low of $3.5 million.
    • The University of Colorado Anschutz reached a $10 million settlement with 18 plaintiffs, both staff and students, who were denied religious exemptions to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

    The report noted that most of the incidents highlighted did not involve United Educators members. The full report can be read here and also includes major losses for K–12 schools.

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  • Why Ind. Fans Are Excited About First Football National Champs

    Why Ind. Fans Are Excited About First Football National Champs

    The Indiana Hoosiers defeated the Miami Hurricanes 27 to 21 to win the university’s first-ever NCAA Division I college football national championship this week. Any school would be thrilled to clinch this title and take home the trophy that accompanies it. But I will explain in this article why it hits different for IU students, alumni, employees and other supporters. Before doing so, I’ll first disclose how I know.

    Five of the best years of my life were spent in Bloomington. I have a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the extraordinary university that is the heartbeat of that beloved community. IU subsequently bestowed upon me two distinguished alumni awards. The university presented its first Bicentennial Medal to Indiana governor Eric Holcomb in July 2019; that same month, I became the second recipient.

    Since graduating with my doctorate 23 years ago, I have returned to campus to deliver several lectures and keynote speeches, including the 2024 Martin Luther King Jr. Day Address. My favorite trip back was in 2011 to celebrate my fraternity’s centennial. Ten visionary Black male students founded Kappa Alpha Psi there, a brotherhood that now has more than 150,000 members. I am proud to be one of them. These are just a few of countless reasons why I have long been one of IU’s proudest alums.

    Here is what I remember about football games in the late ’90s and early 2000s: Whew, yikes! Tons of people showed up to tailgate outside our stadium on Saturday mornings before home games. I was often one of them. Those gatherings were probably just as fun there as they were at schools that had won Power 4 conference titles and national championships. But there was one embarrassing feature of our pregame tailgates: Few people actually went inside Memorial Stadium for games. When I say “few,” I mean at least two-thirds of stadium seats were empty. I thought it rude and unsupportive of student athletes to eat and drink in the parking lot for hours then skip the game—hence, I opted for the tailgate-only experience no more than four times each season. I was inside cheering all the other times.

    Despite what had long been its shady tailgating culture, IU has amazing fans. I often screamed alongside them at basketball games. During one of my most recent visits to campus, President Pam Whitten generously hosted me for a Big Ten matchup in her fabulous suite inside the iconic Assembly Hall. I was instantly reminded that my beloved alma mater has an electrifying, inspiringly loyal fan base—for basketball. As it turns out, winning five men’s national basketball championships, clinching 22 Big Ten conference titles and making 41 NCAA tournament appearances (advancing to the Final Four eight times) excites people. Suffering so many defeats in football year after year, not so much.

    Throughout the last two seasons, ESPN commentators and other sportscasters have annoyingly repeated that Indiana has long been the losingest major college football team of all time; I will leave it to someone else to fact-check that. Going from being so bad for so long to an 11–2 season and playoff berth last year, followed by a Big Ten Championship, a flawless 16–0 season and a national championship win this year, are just some reasons why IU alumni and others are so excited. Oh, and then there is Fernando Mendoza, our first-ever Heisman Trophy winner, and Curt Cignetti, the inspirational head coach who accelerated our football program to greatness in just two seasons.

    Instantly improving from (reportedly) worst of all time to college football’s undisputed best is indeed exciting. Nevertheless, it is not the only reason why the Indiana faithful are so amped. Our university is beyond extraordinary in numerous domains. Academic programs there are exceptional; many, including the one from which I graduated, are always ranked in the top nationally. The university employs many of the world’s best professors and researchers. Its connection to the Hoosier State is deep, measurable and in many ways transformative. The Bloomington campus, framed by its gorgeous tulip-filled Sample Gates, is a vibrant, exciting place to be a student. It feels like a great university because it has long been, still is and forever will be. It is birthplace of the greatest collegiate fraternity, a fact that requires no verification.

    Finally having a football program that matches all the other great things that IU is and does is why those of us who have experienced the place are so freakin’ excited about our first-ever college football national championship. Greatness deserves greatness. Thanks to Cignetti and his staff, Mendoza and every other student athlete on their team, Indiana University has finally achieved football greatness. They have given others and me one more reason to be incredibly proud of a great American university that excels in academics, public outreach, athletics and so many other domains. I conclude with this: Hoo-Hoo-Hoo-Hoosiers!

    Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled Let’s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America’s Most Polarizing Topics.

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  • All about Scotland’s newly passed Tertiary Education and Training Act

    All about Scotland’s newly passed Tertiary Education and Training Act

    For the Tertiary Education and Training (Funding and Governance) (Scotland) Act, the journey from review to consultation to bill to law has been a long one – but it’s finally complete.

    As the dust settles, we can heuristically chop its protracted passage up into three stages according to where the policy focus was.

    First came the Withers review and its push to reconfigure the funding body landscape to promote coherence, which resulted in the accumulation of new responsibilities for the Scottish Funding Council, and the corresponding diminution of Skills Development Scotland’s remit in a way that was at times quite fractious.

    If you’d responded to the 2024 consultation on funding body reform, you could be forgiven for assuming that this shake-up would have continued to be the central area of prominence as the legislation was introduced. It’s true that plenty of parliamentary time and written evidence was taken up with the mechanics and technicalities of moving staff and capabilities from one arm’s length body to another, but for much of last year the real action wasn’t around the SFC/SDS/SAAS moving parts – rather, it related to questions of sector financial oversight and how the legislation could better speak to these.

    Former higher education minister Graeme Dey kicked this phase off last January by musing that the bill could beef up the funding council’s “powers of intervention”. In light of the crisis at the University of Dundee, and emerging issues elsewhere, it became politically tricky to press forward with a bill that could be potentially criticised as rearranging deckchairs (there was no great cross-party love for it – it later squeezed through stage one with support from the Scottish Greens, who explicitly said they wanted it to progress so that they could append stuff to it later).

    So when the legislation was published, we got some additional but still fairly tenuous new powers for the SFC. These included greater scope to conduct the investigations known as “efficiency studies”, and the ability to issue written recommendations (possibly publicly, but I wouldn’t hold your breath) and guidance that governing bodies will need to “have regard” to. Plus there will be a responsibility on funded education bodies, including universities, to proactively notify the funding council in the event of “certain developments”. But exactly what these will be is left to secondary legislation – it’s likely to include job cuts and specific financial thresholds, but the process has been left convoluted and it’s clearly not a system that’s going to be springing into action any time soon.

    While the desire to use the bill to speak to the government’s job of monitoring the financial health of the system has not gone away, it’s also been clear since the autumn that ministers didn’t want to go too far either, shooting down amendments on issues like governance reform (as well as proposals on executive pay caps, student union funding, and mental health).

    Rather, the final run-up to the legislation’s passage at stage three was dominated by both opposition MSPs and the government adding other bits and pieces to the legislation in a series of compromises (we can but speculate on how the reshuffling off of Graeme Dey led to more compromising than might have been the case otherwise).

    As a result, the headline measures that the newly passed Act will bring about feel quite distinct from where we were at the start. Let’s take a look how it changed.

    A national strategy

    The bill’s long title was originally as follows:

    An Act of the Scottish Parliament to make provision about the functions and governance of the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council; to make provision about financial support for students in further and higher education; and for connected purposes.

    Following stage three, it’s now

    An Act of the Scottish Parliament to make provision about a national funding strategy for tertiary education, skills and apprenticeships; to make provision about the functions and governance of the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council; to make provision about financial support for students in further and higher education; and for connected purposes.

    You get the sense that the repeated questioning in Holyrood of the need for this legislation – at a time of serious challenges for Scotland’s universities, colleges and apprenticeship system – has played a role here. The Act is now squarely about funding, even if it has done so in a way that leaves the actual content until after the election.

    Scottish ministers will now be obliged to prepare a national funding strategy, specifying needs, priorities and outcomes for different aspects of the tertiary system. Consultation with learners, trade unions, employers and education bodies will be mandatory. Regular progress reports are stipulated. In the Scottish Parliament, higher education minister Ben Macpherson said that having a strategy will ensure that funding decisions are based on an “even more robust understanding” of skills needs.

    The language of “as soon as reasonably practicable” gives leeway for this to appear after the ongoing Future Framework for Universities project, and to be informed by its findings. Which is not to say that the Scottish higher education sector is necessarily thrilled about it – in the stage three debate, we heard that Universities Scotland has expressed concerns about autonomy. The minister was at pains to stress that for universities the strategy will not direct funding to specific provision.

    Fair work, GBV, and access

    Last week – a cynic might suggest there was a final push to get the legislation over the line – the Scottish government announced that the bill would enable action on both fair work requirements and prevention of gender-based violence on campus. Something similar happened ahead of the stage two vote, where provisions for data sharing in support of the access agenda were unexpectedly introduced, despite previous indications that the Scottish government was reluctant to take these forward in the current parliamentary session.

    The fair work announcement – an agreement between the SNP and the Scottish Greens – will see colleges and universities expected to adopt further Fair Work First criteria by April 2027, including no inappropriate use of zero hour contracts, flexible and family-friendly working practices, and action on workplace inequalities, all of which are currently only encouraged. The announcement to Parliament does note that where a case is made for more time is required for an institution to make the changes, this may well be accepted.

    Including a condition of funding around preventing gender-based violence was first proposed at stage two in a slightly different form, supported by campaign group EmilyTest. This didn’t pass, but new Scottish government amendment 29 will enable the SFC to impose a condition of funding on education bodies around the prevention of gender-based violence, both in terms of taking action to prevent gender-based violence against staff and students, and in reporting on action taken. Before issuing guidance, the funding council will be required to consult both campaign groups and education bodies.

    All these measures – promoting fair work, enabling data sharing, and preventing gender-based violence – got a shout-out in the minister’s closing speech as among the substantial benefits the bill will bring. All of them have quite a long way to go as well. On the free school meal data sharing question, it’s been widely suggested that the limited nudge the idea gets in the legislation is a long way from ironing out all the technical barriers.

    The SFC and its role

    During the legislation’s passage the government hinted it was open to renaming the Scottish Funding Council to reflect its expanded role. It hasn’t happened, but Ben Macpherson still told Holyrood he was open to the idea.

    Stage three did, however, see amendments to the bill which will see the Scottish Funding Council board expand, with a new maximum size of 16 members appointed by ministers, up from 14. The government also put forward, or accepted, some degree of stipulation on who those board members should be – under pressure from other MSPs – though it ended up couched in the language of “have regard to the desirability of” rather than a prescription. This will now include learner representatives, SFC employee representatives, and education sector staff representatives.

    We explored in our original write-up how the legislation seeks to give the funding council new powers, up to a point, to monitor and influence the education bodies it funds (and there’s a summary above). While during parliamentary passage many MSPs sought to push for further duties and means of intervention, the Scottish government largely saw these off, arguing for the importance of university autonomy and the purported risks around Office for National Statistics public sector classification.

    But there were a few small changes along the way, for example the insertion of powers for the SFC to secure the carrying out of an independent examination into the financial sustainability or financial governance of an education provider it funds, and the remit of funding council “efficiency studies” has been extended to consider the needs and interests of staff as well as students.

    An opposition amendment that will require the SFC to conduct an annual report on the financial sustainability of the further and higher education sector was accepted by the government – some would say the funding council already does this, but now it’s in the legislation. This was made more interesting by a rival opposition amendment which sought to make this an independent review of university financial health (it was suggested that Audit Scotland would take the lead). However, this was shot down.

    Apprenticeships and future battles

    For all that MSPs have used the bill’s passage as an opportunity to probe the Scottish government’s stewardship of the university sector – and it shouldn’t be underestimated how much the legislation’s eventual form has been shaped by reaction to funding crises and job losses – the issue that has been most prominent throughout Holyrood debate has been about shifts in apprenticeship responsibilities and the wider question of how much funding goes to this kind of post-16 provision.

    Amendments requiring the Scottish government to publish an account of how apprenticeship levy consequentials are being spent, or to introduce an apprenticeships guarantee, or ringfence funding, or to specify a commitment to foundation apprenticeships, were all voted down. But the question of Scotland’s level of apprenticeship starts – and how the government deploys levy money, to the extent that it can be said to – has continued to grow in importance as perhaps the pre-eminent attack line on the SNP from opposition parties in post-compulsory education policy.

    There’s an important takeaway for the sector here, in how much political pressure is being brought to bear on boosting apprenticeship numbers, rather than university degree places. It’s already an argument the sector is trying to get ahead of – an article from Universities Scotland today makes the case that universities want to do more in the graduate apprentice space, and are being held back by a lack of flexibility.

    The tertiary bill, in the form it eventually ended up in, puts new duties on universities, as well as taking some tentative steps which – if followed through in implementation – could contribute to them being better places to work and study in. It also heaps more responsibility for overseeing the disparate parts of the system on the funding council, while introducing reforms to its corporate structure which will inevitably take time to process.

    It even, via the last minute changes, commits the next Scottish government to spelling out its approach to funding. But it doesn’t speak to the quantum of that funding, and for universities it’s never been clearer that there exists both growing financial pressures elsewhere in the tertiary space, and growing political pressure to pay attention to areas outwith higher education, an issue that will grow in prominence in a likely more divided and certainly more unpredictable Holyrood after May’s elections.

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  • From policy to practice: preparing for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement

    From policy to practice: preparing for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement

    This blog was kindly authored by Mark Jones, Executive Vice President – Education, TechnologyOne.

    Having worked with higher education institutions globally for three decades, I’ve seen policy-driven transformation succeed and fail. The difference comes down to whether institutions treat fundamental change as a strategic and commercial opportunity, or merely as a compliance burden.

    Across UK universities, conversations are increasingly centred on what the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) will mean in practice. The LLE fundamentally restructures how higher education is funded and accessed. Learners will be able to study modular provision at levels 4 to 6 in government-prioritised subjects, pay for individual credits, accumulate learning over decades, and transfer credits between providers.

    The policy intent – making higher education more accessible – is clear. For institutions built around three-year undergraduate programmes, delivering on that requires more than administrative adjustment. It demands a rethink of curriculum design, digital systems, academic regulations and student support models.

    A technology inflection point

    The LLE is more than a policy change. It represents a technology inflection point for higher education. For years, institutions have made incremental adjustments to systems designed for cohort-based, September-to-June academic cycles. The LLE exposes the limitations of those systems.

    Institutions will need to track lifetime credit accumulation across multiple providers, process granular payments that may be months or years apart, verify external prerequisites in real-time, and maintain learning relationships that span decades rather than discrete degree programmes.

    This creates space for innovation. The challenge is not simply to adapt existing platforms, but to reimagine student record systems, finance integration, and learner engagement from the ground up. The technologies that enable personalised digital experiences in sectors such as media streaming or retail banking offer relevant models. International developments – for example, micro-credentials in Australia – provide both cautionary tales and promising precedents.

    The question shifts from ‘How do we make current systems cope?’ to ‘What would we build if we designed for modular, lifelong, multi-provider learning from the outset?’

    The market waiting to be served

    The demand signals are clear. UCAS 2025 data shows UK mature acceptances (aged 21+) have declined 3.3% to 106,120, with steeper drops among those aged 30 and over. Meanwhile, 31% of UK 18-year-olds now intend to live at home while studying (89,510 students, up 6.9% from 2024), driven by affordability constraints.

    The Post-16 education and skills white paper explicitly recognises the need for workforce upskilling at scale. Career transitions require targeted learning rather than full degrees and learners need options that fit alongside work and caring responsibilities.

    The technology enabling this market – flexible enrolment, credit portability, lifetime learner accounts – represents a fundamental refresh of how higher education operates digitally. The LLE removes the policy barriers. The remaining question is whether institutions can build the infrastructure to deliver on the opportunity.

    The curriculum challenge that unlocks it

    Serving this market demands more than breaking degrees into smaller units. Each module must function as both a standalone learning experience and as a component that can stack with credits from other providers. Prerequisites must enable learners to navigate pathways independently. Assessment models must work for twelve-week episodes rather than three-year relationships.

    Academic regulations designed for continuous programmes need to adapt to episodic engagement over decades. Student services built around sustained relationships must be reimagined for twelve-week presences. These aren’t minor adjustments; they’re fundamental policy framework redesigns.

    Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) becomes central rather than peripheral. The issue is not whether institutions can scale existing processes, but whether they can reimagine how learning is valued when it originates elsewhere.

    Timeline realism

    LLE applications open in September 2026. For institutions targeting January 2027 launches, timelines are extremely tight. Across the sector, universities are planning phased September 2027 launches with limited subject scope, rather than ambitious early rollouts that risk operational failure.

    Institutions making meaningful progress are treating LLE as a strategic transformation requiring executive vision. They are testing actual workflows, allocating dedicated resources, and making deliberate scope decisions that acknowledge building capability takes time. Importantly, they’re approaching LLE as an opportunity, not just an obligation.

    The transformation ahead

    The LLE creates space for institutions to rethink digital infrastructure fundamentally rather than incrementally. The most successful technology transformations occur when external pressure aligns with internal ambition – when ’we have to change’ meets ‘here’s what we could build’.

    Institutions approaching this purely as a compliance exercise experience compressed timelines and onerous requirements. Those that view it as an innovation catalyst find that it justifies investments in modern, integrated platforms that have been deferred for years. It enables a more ambitious question: ‘What would a student system designed for lifelong, modular, multi-provider learning actually look like?’

    The opportunity to serve learners historically excluded from higher education is genuine. So too is the opportunity to modernise infrastructure that has struggled under incremental adaptation. The sector’s challenge is translating policy ambition into operational reality for institutions, students, and the communities higher education serves. Those that thrive will be the ones that treat the LLE as permission to innovate, not just an obligation to comply.

    These implementation challenges and more will be explored at TechnologyOne Showcase London on 25 February at HERE & NOW at Outernet, featuring an executive panel with voices from UCISA, ARC, HEPI, SUMS, and institutional leaders discussing how governance, culture, technology, and commercial strategies need to adapt to this new policy landscape. Register for TechnologyOne Showcase here.

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  • Designing the 2026 Classroom: Emerging Learning Trends in an AI-Powered Education System – Faculty Focus

    Designing the 2026 Classroom: Emerging Learning Trends in an AI-Powered Education System – Faculty Focus

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  • Graduates are paying more and getting less

    Graduates are paying more and getting less

    There’s an absolutely jaw-dropping passage in this year’s IFS Annual report on education spending in England.

    In total, we now estimate that under current policy, the long-run cost of issuing loans to the 2022–23 starting cohort will be negative (–£0.8 billion), with graduates repaying more than they borrowed, when future repayments are adjusted for inflation.

    In other words, we’ve gone from government suggesting that the state would subsidise undergraduate student loans by about 45p in the pound, to making a profit on them for that cohort.

    Put another way, we’ve stealthily moved from a £4,950 (graduates) £4,050 (state) cost sharing arrangement in the headline tuition fee to a £9,606 (graduates) -£356 (state) split for that 2022 cohort.

    “Tuition fees almost doubled in a decade on average” is not the story that universities tend to tell. But it is, according to the IFS, the reality.

    Floods of tears

    I like to think of the English student loan system as an onion with several layers, all of which make people cry.

    On the surface there’s the headline fee, even though you might not pay that in the end. Below that there’s the “debt” figure that appears on your student loan statement, which is impacted by interest. You may well not pay that either, because student loans are written off after a certain number of years.

    What really matters – several layers down – is the repayment terms. And that 2022 cohort have been double whacked.

    Back in 2022, then universities minister Michelle Donelan announced a response to the Augar review, in which she was “delighted to announce” that she would deliver the Conservatives’ manifesto commitment to address the interest rates on student loans by reducing it to down to inflation only.

    To pay for that reduction in eventual repayments, the new “Plan 5” was only going to write off loans after 40 rather than 30 years, and the repayment threshold would be set at £25,000, rising with inflation from April 2027 onwards.

    But for 2022 starters on the old Plan 2 – the ones with interest rates at RPI-X plus 3 per cent – she also announced a decision to hold the Plan 2 repayment threshold at £27,295 until April 2025.

    Fixing the threshold in cash terms was going to pull more borrowers into repayment and increase repayments year by year, which at the time the IFS said would mean nearly all borrowers would lose from the reform, with graduates with middling earnings set to lose the most:

    And on the Plan 5 changes, the IFS said that cutting the repayment threshold and then freezing it (and changing how it is uprated thereafter), extending the repayment term from 30 to 40 years, and cutting the interest rate to inflation only would result in graduates with lower-middling earnings losing the most, while the highest earners would gain substantially:

    The changes were, in other words, both stealthy and regressive.

    The Pink Panther meets reverse Robin Hood

    In 2022, Labour’s then Shadow Secretary of Education, Bridget Phillipson, said:

    The Tories are delivering another stealth tax for new graduates starting out on their working lives which will hit those on low incomes hardest.

    In her September 2023 speech to Universities UK conference, she said:

    …student finance will be the first to see change, although by no means the last. We have been clear about that from opposition and we will be clear about that from power.

    She was concerned about distributional impact:

    The Tory changes which bite a first cohort of students this autumn are desperately unfair. More unfair on women. More unfair on low earners. More unfair, not just for a few short years, but all through a generation of working lives, with higher loan repayments eating away at pay for young graduates just as they’re starting out on their working lives, and deterring older learners from retraining or upskilling.

    And we got commitments on change, and the speed of that change:

    Future nursing graduates repaying about £60 more a month. The Tories’ choices are hammering the next generation of nurses, teachers and social workers; of engineers, of designers and researchers. It’s wrong. It’s unsustainable. And it’s going to change. And why I tell you today that the next Labour government, whenever it is elected, will move swiftly to right these wrongs.

    In an interview with the Telegraph on 7th October 2023, she doubled down – saying that the new system is “going to become more regressive for lower middle earners” and:

    …is not a sustainable system… we will have to confront that if we win the election.

    And then on BBC Question Time in May 2024, she said:

    I am determined that we can deliver a more progressive system without any more spending or borrowing.

    But rather than deliver on that raft of promises, they’ve done the stealth and regressive thing again.

    Blink and you missed it

    Buried in the Budget in November, chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a freeze in the Plan 2 repayment threshold – it is to be frozen at its April 2026 level (£29,385) for three years.

    There’s been a dribble of political press coverage ever since, focussed mainly on the plight of young graduates and the rise in the minimum wage eroding the graduate premium.

    But (as the IFS point out in their annual report), something else was hiding. As well as the repayment threshold, Plan 2 interest-rate thresholds (the lower and higher thresholds that determine whether interest is charged at RPI, RPI plus 3 per cent, or a sliding rate between) are also to be frozen for three years for Plan 2 grads, at their April 2026 levels (£29,385 and £52,885).

    This was not mentioned at all in the Budget document or speech, but did appear deep in OBR costings – and was subsequently confirmed to the IFS.

    For that 2022 cohort, it means many more borrowers can expect to make repayments for longer, and an increase in the interest accrued. And the IFS says that the latter will have nearly as substantial an impact on lifetime loan repayments as the repayment threshold freeze, and will affect a different set of borrowers.

    Here’s how the IFS calculate the distributional impacts of the changes for that 2022 cohort:

    I’m not sure I could have invented a stealthier, or more regressive change if I tried.

    One thing I note in passing is that the changes to both Plan 2 and Plan 5 are usually accompanied by an equality impact assessment – that hasn’t appeared at all – and the changes to Plan 2 are actually in theory joint changes that require both Welsh and English ministers to lay them jointly.

    Not only has the secondary legislation not appeared, there’s no word yet on whether Welsh ministers are accepting them. And if and when we do get that EIA, let’s not expect much light – given that DfE doesn’t even bother to break down estimates of loan borrower numbers by the rate of interest paid.

    It couldn’t be, could it, that a Treasury desperate to make its excel sheets add up having ruled out income tax increases just decided at the last minute to raid the budgets of Plan 2 graduates in the hope that nobody would notice? Could it?

    The student interest (rate)

    Of course being less “stealthy” does require someone to peel back the onion layers – never the Treasury’s strong suit – and pretty much the only opinion in the Gordian knot on making changes that are less regressive involves higher interest rates. It’s only by asking both Plan 2 and Plan 5 high-earning graduates to pay back more (by paying their “graduate tax” for longer) that you can do it.

    But the political problem of increasing interest rates is significant – because everyone hates interest, especially when it adds to that (often irrelevant) balance figure. And because the system is still labelled as a loan and sold as a loan, and because therefore people assume (hope?) they’ll pay it back some day, more interest sounds bad.

    For that Plan 2 mob, if government had just whacked interest up to a gazillion per cent, all of them would be paying graduate tax for 30 years – with only the most successful graduates paying more. But in that “it’s a bit like a loan and it’s a bit like a tax” dance, tilting the see-saw towards loan will always mean it ends up more regressive.

    In a debate just before Christmas on student loans, Treasury minister Torsten Bell said that there had been a “cross-party consensus” that a fairer system of university funding will require a “lower net contribution to universities from the taxpayer”.

    In 2025, 34 per cent of loan debt for full-time plan 2 graduates was forecast not to be repaid, so what we are talking about is still substantive.

    The Department for Education’s calculation of the RAB charge differs a little from the way the Treasury calculates the subsidy in the accounts every year, and both differ a little from the way the IFS calculates things.

    But Bell was actually referring to the tiny number of students left getting a new Plan 2 loan this year. And at what point has there been a “cross-party consensus” that the subsidy for 2022 entrants should be minus 4 per cent?

    More importantly, why on earth should students who are paying more but getting less be expected to fund the raft of public “goods” expected from their private debt, when the only contribution the state will make for that cohort is running the loan scheme?

    That’s livin’ all wrong

    Elsewhere in the report, there’s analysis on the international levy and the proposed maintenance grants, and a pretty shocking graph on the decline in maintenance loan entitlements per year by household income:

    The upshot there is that despite the government trumpeting that maintenance would be index-increased along with fees, by 2029–30 IFS expects that some students – those with household residual incomes of between £23,400 and £61,400 – may be able to borrow less in real terms than they would be entitled to this academic year, with the largest falls of over £1,100 (around a sixth) for those with household incomes of around £53,000.

    That’s the refusal to uprate the household income threshold since its announcement in 2007 – which will see fewer and fewer students getting the maximum loan as the Parliament continues.

    (Astonishingly, the government’s guidance for the 2025-26 iteration of the Turing scheme now defines “students from disadvantaged backgrounds” as someone with an annual household income of £35,000 or less, up from £25,000 last year. They’d have to be able to afford to participate HE in the first place, mind)

    I’ve not rehearsed here the stealthy abolition of the protection you currently get on the parental contribution when more than one child is in higher education, the miserable state of PG loans (both in repayment and value terms), the shocking state of the level of support for student parents, the slow shift of DSA onto universities’ budgets, the shameful way we treat those on universal credit that are in full-time education, or the ways in which this reduction in the spending envelope will impact the “equivalence” envelope for the loans systems in devolved nations.

    But I will rehearse how far Labour has fallen on student financial support.

    Those were the days

    In January 2004, partly to sweeten the pill over proposals to raise fees to £3,000, then Secretary of State for Education and Skills (Charles Clarke) announced a new package of student finance to ensure that “disadvantaged students will get financial support to study what they want, where they want”.

    From September 2006 there were to be new higher education grants – and maintenance loans were to be raised to the median level of students’ basic living costs as reported by the student income and expenditure survey – to ensure that students have “enough money to meet their basic living costs while studying”.

    The aspiration was to move to a position where the maintenance loan was “no longer means-tested” and available in full to all full-time undergraduates, so students would be treated “as financially independent from the age of 18”. Graduates were to get the optyion of a repayment holiday to ease the burden as they moved into the labour market. And the new Office for Fair Access was to be required to issue additional bursaries to students.

    By July 2007, the then new Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, John Denham, went further with new reforms to support for (undergraduate) students in higher education (from England) – to recognise that hard-working families on modest incomes had “concerns about the affordability of university study”.

    The rhetorical flourishes are all pretty similar to those we hear today – but we should, for the sake of argument, look at what has happened since. Even though by the time the changes were implemented the SIES data was a few years old, at least the “we’ll fund basic living costs” principle was there.

    In 2007 DIUS ministers had not been able to persuade the Treasury to abandon means testing – but full grants were to be made available to new students from families with incomes of up to £25,000, compared with £18,360 – along with minimum £310 bursaries from higher education institutions.

    The announcement was accompanied by a document with some handy case studies – Student A, whose parents who had a combined household income of £50,000 and who had a brother who already studying at university; Student B, from from a single parent family with a household income of £20,000; and Student C, living with both parents who had a residual household income of £25,000.

    Here’s what they were entitled to at the time (away from home, outside of London):

    Student A Student B Student C
    Household income 50000 20000 25000
    Grant 560 2825 2825
    Loan 4070 3370 3370
    Guaranteed bursary 310 310
    Total 4630 6505 6505

    That £25,000 household income threshold hasn’t moved since, there’s now no grants (and the ones that are coming derisory), nobody’s guaranteed a bursary (and most universities are reducing their spend on bursaries) and both prices and incomes have risen since.

    So to see how far things have fallen, let’s see what those three students were entitled to last year. Student A’s parents now earn around £83,500; Student B’s single parent family now earns around £33,400; and Student C’s parents earn around £41,750.

    Student A Student B Student C
    Household income 83500 33400 41750
    Maintenance loan 4767 9497 8035

    Now let’s adjust those totals to 2008 prices (RPI) to look what what they’re worth:

    Student A Student B Student C
    Maintenance loan 2569 5117 4330

    And let’s do the comparison in 2008 prices, which shakes down as follows:

    Student A Student B Student C
    2008 4630 6505 6505
    2024 2569 5117 4330
    Inc/Dec -2061 -1388 -2175
    -45% -22% -34%

    Finally, let’s take HEPI’s minimum income standard from 2024 as a way of judging the gap between state (loan) support and what students need – the implied parental/part-time work contribution – we can see the problem in another way as follows (all figures adjusted for 2024 prices via RPI):

    Student A Student B Student C
    2008 £10,040 short £6,561 short £6,561 short
    2024 £13,865 short £10,135 short £10,598 short

    Why are two-thirds of students working? Why is attendance becoming so hard to secure? Why are mental health problems rocketing? Why are more and more students choosing to live at home, restricting their subject and institution choices? Why is youth despair at record levels? Sometimes the answers are pretty obvious, really.

    Levelling down

    Why is all of this happening? An observation on borrowing, and two final graphs from the IFS report tell the real story.

    First, borrowing. Back in 2021, when the government borrowed money on the bond markets to fund student loans, it could do so very cheaply in real terms because interest rates were low and inflation was expected to be higher – so investors were effectively accepting a loss after inflation.

    In practical terms, markets were willing to pay the government about 1.4 per cent a year, after inflation, just to lend it money.

    But today – mainly because Germany is now back in the borrowing game – the situation has reversed. Interest rates on long-term government borrowing are much higher, while expected inflation over the same period is lower, so borrowing now costs the government money in real terms.

    Using the same measure, the government is now paying investors roughly 2.3 per cent a year, after inflation, to finance new student loan borrowing. The swing from a negative to a positive real cost is large, and it materially changes how expensive student loans are for the public finances – just not in way that is especially (or, in fact, at all) transparent.

    And then there’s the IFS education spending squid:

    To be fair to ministers, it’s true that the research says you can make the most difference on life chances by investing in early years. Substantially, coupled with investment in NEETs and those in further education, we are seeing ministerial priorities manifest over time:

    But none of the research that underpins those priorities weighs up cutting the spend on HE to fund everything else, which will mean spend per student will soon be just 44 per cent greater than primary school spending per pupil, having been almost four times greater in the early 1990s.

    More importantly, there simply hasn’t been a proper debate about the share of that blue line that should be paid by the state versus the share (eventually) paid by graduates since the grand promises of the early 2010s.

    We now, by some very substantial measure, have easily the most expensive state higher education system in Europe from a student/graduate point of view – a system which see the recipients paying more and more, getting less and less, and having less money (and therefore time) to participate in what’s there – resulting in worse educational outcomes (as measured internationally), and worse mental health.

    And it’s a system in which, thanks to graphs like this and the regressive nature of the loans changes described above, where distributionally, the losers are also those least likely to benefit from the great boomer wealth transfer that is coming in the next decade:

    Add it all up, and it means that the role that higher education once thought it played in social mobility is pretty much dead. From here, talk like that I’ll be an angel then things can only get worse.

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  • What Covid restrictions meant for participation and belonging

    What Covid restrictions meant for participation and belonging

    The emergency online pivot is long gone, yet the “new normal” turned out to be neither of those things.

    The sector continues to wrestle with problems that look suspiciously like academic long covid: falling attendance, concerns about disengagement, and a steep rise in the number of disabled and neurodivergent students and mental health conditions.

    It is tempting to attribute these problems to student attitudes, “Gen Z personalities,” or to blame online provision and the emergence of GenAI. It is equally tempting to respond by going to either extreme, either by doubling down on surveillance and policing student behaviour, or by promising ever greater flexibility.

    But both responses risk forgetting the nuances that the pandemic revealed about inclusion, particularly for students from widening participation backgrounds.

    The best year?

    In our new paper, “The best year / ‘I struggled with everything’: widening participation experiences of pandemic online learning”, we worked with 23 widening participation students at two Scottish universities to understand which aspects of the online pivot supported or undermined their participation. Much of what they recounted echoes the broader literature on Covid and higher education; however, their relative disadvantage magnified their experience.

    The themes we report are particularly salient for current debates about engagement and inclusion, notably, participants kept returning to the question of agency and resources. For many, lockdown removed their commute which made it easier to combine study with caring responsibilities, jobs, and health conditions. But it also gave them back hours they would have otherwise spent on public transport as well as the associated cost, a change described as transformative and for one student “The best year.”

    At the same time, the very flexibility that some students valued intensified existing inequalities for others. Many struggled with poor broadband, limited devices shared with family members, and the absence of quiet spaces. One student described how “online learning brought my work to a grinding halt” because without a dedicated study space they “struggled with everything.” Without access to campus libraries and study spaces, watching recordings rather than coming in for lectures actually reduced their control over the learning environment.

    Belonging and the incidental

    Participants also emphasised that belonging and authentic connection underlies so much of what we do as educators. Widening participation students have long described the effort of trying to “fit in” to institutions that were not built with them in mind, and the tension between wanting to succeed academically and not wanting to stand out socially. The relative anonymity made possible by online learning made some students more willing to type questions in the chat or attend virtual office hours. However, participants were also clear that online interactions with staff felt transactional and when every meeting had to be booked and justified, it made everything feel more formal.

    What they missed were the incidental conversations before and after class, the chance encounters in corridors and libraries, and seemingly purposeless chit-chat with peers that allowed them to compare progress, make sense of expectations, and realise that they were not the only ones struggling.

    And our study draws attention to the hidden curriculum and the role of self-regulation. Widening participation students are less likely to arrive at university familiar with tacit rules about how to study, when it is acceptable to ask for help, or how to navigate institutional systems. Our participants described how moving online removed opportunities to learn vicariously by watching how others behaved in class, by overhearing peers ask questions, or by observing how more experienced students managed their workload. Without these cues, those who already felt they did not belong were even more reluctant to reach out, particularly if they worried about adding to staff workload.

    Psychologically, these experiences connect to work on self-efficacy and self-regulated learning, which show that students who doubt their academic capability are less likely to seek help, persist with difficult tasks, or adapt their strategies after setbacks. We also saw strong links with self-determination theory, which argues that three basic needs underpin intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Flexible engagement can clearly enhance autonomy, especially for students with complex lives. However, if we neglect competence and relatedness, greater autonomy simply becomes greater responsibility without corresponding support.

    A bit of distance

    Part of the reason we’re writing about this now is that thanks to the timeline of academic publishing, the authorship team collectively experienced double digit covid infections, three promotions, two College restructures, and the creation and birth of two humans in the time it took to publish our study. But part of the reason is that sometimes a bit of distance is needed to truly understand the most important lessons and to see that our new problems and potential solutions, are actually rather familiar.

    Universities must protect and normalise flexible learning options that confer genuine agency and must not use concerns about engagement to punish the most vulnerable. For example, the evidence that recorded lectures improve accessibility for disabled students and those from widening participation backgrounds is now substantial and removing this flexibility in the name of “getting students back” risks penalising those for whom education might be the only way out.

    But it is also just as vital that we conceptualise campus presence as an inclusion issue and recognise that to frame the need to attend as exclusionary is to misunderstand the issue. Students who lack quiet study space at home are disadvantaged when too much learning is pushed out of the timetable. Our participants were clear that regular, structured time on campus was not the enemy of flexibility; it was the scaffold that allowed them to make use of flexible resources. When deciding whether to keep online exams, flip a module, or consolidate teaching into fewer longer blocks, it is essential to ask where and when students will actually be able to study and how their contact with both staff and students will be impacted if campus time is reduced.

    If we want higher education to be genuinely inclusive, we need to resist trying to find simple solutions to complex problems – banning lecture recordings and arguing that in-person exams are always/never (in)appropriate are comforting solutions because they’re concrete, not because they’re right. The experiences of widening participation students during lockdown reinforce that inclusion is less about offering students unlimited choice and more about designing flexible structures that combine agency, support, and connection. Those structures are likely to benefit all students but if we ignore them, we will once again ask those with the least social and material capital to shoulder the greatest share of the risk.

    This article is based on research carried out with colleagues Jacqui Hutchison, Alison Browitt and Jill MacKay, whose contributions we gratefully acknowledge.

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  • Congress Proposes Increasing NIH Budget, Maintaining ED

    Congress Proposes Increasing NIH Budget, Maintaining ED

    The House and Senate appropriations committees have jointly proposed legislation that would generally maintain the Education Department’s funding levels, plus increase the National Institutes of Health’s budget by more than $400 million this fiscal year. It’s the latest in a trend of bipartisan Congressional rebukes of President Trump’s call to slash agencies that support higher ed.  

    For the current fiscal year, Trump had asked Congress to cut the NIH by 40 percent and subtract $12 billion from ED’s budget. The president proposed eliminating multiple ED programs, including TRIO, GEAR UP and the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program, which all help low-income students attend college. He also proposed reducing the ED Office for Civil Rights budget by over a third. 

    But the proposed funding package senators and representatives released this week maintains funding for all of those programs. 

    “We were surprised to see the level of funding for the higher education programs actually be increased, in some regards—and be maintained,” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education. “We knew that level funding would be considered a win in this political environment.” 

    This latest set of appropriations bills is the final batch that Congress must approve to avert another government shutdown at the end of the month. Democrats have said passing actual appropriations bills, as opposed to another continuing resolution, is key to ensuring that federal agencies spend money as Congress wants.

    Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told Inside Higher Ed that the NIH budget increase is essentially “flat funding,” considering inflation. But she said “this appropriations package once again demonstrates Congressional, bipartisan support for research and development and the importance of these investments, as well as rejecting the administration’s very dramatic cuts.”  

    Earlier this month, Congress largely rejected Trump’s massive proposed cuts to the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Energy Department, three significant higher ed research funders. These developments are adding up to a more encouraging 2026 funding picture for research and programs that support postsecondary students. 

    But Congress has just 10 days to pass this new funding package, and Trump must still sign both packages into law. A government shutdown will begin after Jan. 30 for those agencies without approved appropriations legislation. 

    Guillory noted that—despite the Justice Department declaring last month that minority-serving institution programs are unlawful because they “effectively [employ] a racial quota by limiting institutional eligibility to schools with a certain racial composition”—Congress still proposed funding these programs. 

    “Pretty much every single program that is a minority-serving institution program received an increase in funding,” he said. 

    The appropriators also want to send another roughly $790 million to the Institute of Education Sciences, compared to the $261 million Trump requested. Last year, his administration gutted IES, the federal government’s central education data collection and research funding agency. But, like the broader Education Department, laws passed by Congress continue to require it to exist. 

    Beyond the appropriations numbers, the proposed legislation to fund the NIH would also prevent the federal government from capping indirect research cost reimbursement rates for NIH grants at 15 percent, as the Trump administration has unsuccessfully tried to do. Indirect cost rates, which individual institutions have historically negotiated with the federal government, pay for research expenses that are difficult to pin to any single project, such as lab costs and patient safety. 

    The appropriations committees released an explanatory statement alongside the legislation that says “neither NIH, nor any other department or agency, may develop or implement any policy, guidance, or rule” that would change how “negotiated indirect cost rates have been implemented and applied under NIH regulations, as those regulations were in effect during the third quarter of fiscal year 2017.” 

    GOP members of the House Appropriations Committee didn’t say they were bucking the president in their news release on the proposal. Instead, they said the legislation demonstrates “the will of the American people who mandated new priorities and accountability in government, including priorities to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ and ‘Make America Skilled Again.’” 

    “Investments are directed to where they matter most: into lifesaving biomedical research and resilient medical supply chains, classrooms and training that prepare the next generation for success, and rural hospitals and primary care to end the chronic disease epidemic,” the release said. 

    Democrats claimed victory for Congress. 

    “This latest funding package continues Congress’s forceful rejection of extreme cuts to federal programs proposed by the Trump Administration,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, in a release.  

    “Where the White House attempted to eliminate entire programs, we chose to increase their funding,” DeLauro said. “Where the Administration proposed slashing resources, we chose to sustain funding at current levels. Where President Trump and Budget Director Russ Vought sought broad discretion over federal spending, Congress, on a bipartisan, bicameral basis, chose to reassert its power of the purse.”

    Carney says she thinks passage is “highly likely.” 

    “Ostensibly, what they call the ‘four corners’—the chair and ranking members from both chambers and both parties—have come to this agreement on this package,” she said. So, barring “last-minute surprises,” she said, “it should be relatively smooth sailing.”

    Rep. Tom Cole, the Republican chair of the House appropriations committee, urged his fellow lawmakers to pass the legislation.

    “At a time when many believed completing the FY26 process was out of reach, we’ve shown that challenges are opportunities,” Cole said in a statement. “It’s time to get it across the finish line.”

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  • Search Everywhere Optimization: Reinventing Student Discovery for the AI Era

    Search Everywhere Optimization: Reinventing Student Discovery for the AI Era

    For decades, the enrollment funnel followed a familiar script: search, click, visit, inquire. That script no longer describes how decisions are made. Strategies that still treat traffic to your school’s .edu domain as the main measure of success are increasingly invisible to the Modern Learner.

    That is because search has broken free from the constraints of the search bar.

    Modern Learners operate in a search everywhere ecosystem, investigating institutions on social platforms, querying AI chatbots, cross-referencing video and scanning third-party sites. The traditional results page has shifted from a static stack of blue links to a verified, AI-driven dialogue. Visibility is no longer about ranking first on a list. It is about being the answer wherever the question is asked.

    This shift demands a new strategic operating system: Search Everywhere Optimization.

    From Search Engine Optimization to Search Everywhere Optimization 

    Website marketing experts at EducationDynamics define Search Everywhere Optimization as a holistic strategy that treats every discovery surface—search engines, AI answers, institutional sites and social media—as one integrated system. It aligns brand, media and experience around a single imperative: remain visible, credible and compelling wherever students ask questions.

    Standing on its own, traditional search engine optimization is now obsolete. Where SEO focused narrowly on technical tactics to rank a specific URL and drive a click, search everywhere optimization manages a decentralized web of signals to influence an answer. SEO chased algorithms to feed a crawler; search everywhere optimization builds reputation to inform a decision.

    This is more than a shift in tactics. It is a shift in mindset.

    In an AI-first environment, institutions that cling to yesterday’s search habits are already falling behind.

    The question is no longer whether to evolve. It is how fast an institution can reinvent its approach to discovery. The next era of enrollment is not about clicks. It is about credibility, visibility and being the trusted answer wherever the question is asked.

    Winning AI Overviews in higher ed with AI Density 

    Google’s AI Overviews. These experiences have rewritten the rules of search in higher ed. They do not just sit above traditional results. In many cases, they replace them. Prospective students now see a single synthesized answer that decides which institutions and programs show up first, frames expectations for cost and outcomes and often ends the search before a site visit ever happens. 

    When an institution is not shaping that answer, AI is shaping it based on everyone else’s signals. 

    EducationDynamics built AI Density to change that equation. 

    AI Density is EducationDynamics’ proprietary metric for AI visibility. It measures how often an institution is cited or referenced inside AI Overviews and related AI answers across a defined set of high-intent queries. Traditional search reports show where a page ranks. AI Density shows whether the institution has a voice in the answer that shapes a student’s decision. 

    High AI Density means AI systems treat the institution as a trusted source. The brand appears more often in AI-generated summaries, carries more weight in organic results and influences more prospects even when no click is recorded. 

    That influence does not live on the .edu domain alone. AI Overviews pull signals from across the ecosystem, including: 

    • Institutional pages and academic catalogs
    • Rankings sites and program directories
    • Student reviews and Q&A forums
    • Reddit threads and other social communities
    • News coverage and employer-linked stories

    Reputation now moves through this full network. Search Everywhere Optimization treats these external surfaces as extensions of institutional storytelling so AI systems encounter a consistent, credible picture of programs and outcomes. 

    In this context, AI Density is not a metric to be sidelined—it is a growth lever. It reveals how deeply institutional signals penetrate AI ecosystems, where gaps exist and which content and reputation investments actually move visibility. Institutions that ignore AI Density allow the AI ecosystem to define their market position without input. Institutions that embrace it begin to control the narrative where decisions are made. 

    Zero-click Search Strategy for a No-Click World   

    The behavior around those AI-shaped answers has its own name. In a search environment increasingly resolved without a website visit, more interactions begin and end on the results page itself. That pattern is zero-click search. 

    A zero-click search strategy starts from that reality. It assumes that visibility and influence must carry real weight even when analytics platforms never record a session. When decisions are shaped inside the search results page (SERP), traffic alone becomes a lagging, partial signal. 

    Across institutions, the same zero-click behaviors keep showing up. Prospective students collect program, cost and outcome basics directly from snippets and AI answers. Calls, map actions and clicks to third-party directories or application portals divert attention away from primary landing pages. Traditional volume metrics then underrepresent how often institutions appear in meaningful moments because the most important interactions never show up as traffic. 

    In this environment, a strategy that still equates “success” with a click-through to a deep program page has fundamentally shifted. 

    In practice, zero-click search strategy within Search Everywhere Optimization comes down to three core moves. 

    • Answer design. Program and outcome content is written in short, self-contained statements that search systems can lift into snippets, quick facts and AI answers without losing meaning. Language mirrors the way Modern Learners actually ask about value, flexibility, support and price clarity, not internal taglines.  
    • Structured data discipline. Key facts – degree type, modality, tuition ranges, locations and application timelines – carry schema markup that supports rich results and quick information panels. Technical health becomes part of the visibility strategy, not a back-end checklist. 
    • Consistency across surfaces. On-site copy, catalogs, Google Business Profiles, marketplaces, ratings sites and partner listings present the same story. In a system where AI reconciles conflicting inputs, inconsistency is a signal to downgrade trust. 

    Under this model, success expands beyond traffic counts. The objective is to shape the decision at the point of the question, click or no click. Institutions that still optimize only for visits are chasing what is left over while the real competition plays out in zero-click moments. 

    Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and AI-native discovery

    Zero-click moments describe where decisions are resolved. Generative Engine Optimization focuses on how those answers are created. AI is no longer a side feature in search. It sits in the middle of how prospective students evaluate options. They use conversational tools and answer-first interfaces to compare programs, pressure-test timelines and translate affordability into real life. Large language models and answer engines now stand beside traditional SERPs as core discovery channels. 

    Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is how Search Everywhere Optimization shows up in that layer. Institutional content can no longer speak only to crawlers and rank-based algorithms. It has to feed models that synthesize answers directly on the results page. Program pages, FAQs and resource content carry more weight when they read like direct responses to questions about outcomes, format, pace and support. Differentiators and proof points win when they condense cleanly into a sentence or two, because that is what answer engines lift. 

    Within GEO, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) targets the experiences where the entire interaction happens inside the result. AI Overviews, featured snippets, people also ask modules and knowledge panels do not wait for a click. They resolve the question on the spot. In that environment, institutional content either fuels the answer or disappears from the conversation. 

    GEO, executed through strong AEO, demands: 

    • Clear question-and-answer structures in program and outcome content 
    • Consistent details across the main site, catalogs, news releases, directories and partner listings 
    • Markup and formatting that help systems recognize and elevate accurate responses

    Generative Engine Optimization does not replace technical SEO. It raises the bar. Content now has to work simultaneously for human readers, search crawlers and answer engines across both click and zero-click interactions. In an AI-shaped discovery landscape, GEO is not an experiment at the margins. It is the standard for institutions that expect visibility to translate into real enrollment performance. 

    What leadership-level execution looks like 

    Zero-Collectively, Search Everywhere Optimization, AI Density, zero-click strategy and Generative Engine Optimization define how visibility works in this market — leadership determines whether that visibility becomes an advantage. 

     Thriving in this environment isn’t about stacking one more tactic on top of yesterday’s strategy. It is about building a presence that students and systems can understand, trust and choose. 

    Institutions gaining ground are not tweaking the old search playbook. They are changing how the institution shows up, how AI interprets it and how teams respond when students lean in. Four execution patterns consistently separate institutions built for this new search-everywhere environment from those still operating on legacy assumptions. 

    Anchor content in real student questions 

    Leading institutions organize program pages, FAQs, blogs and resource hubs around the questions students actually ask. Language centers on outcomes, time to completion, flexibility, support and price clarity, not internal jargon or slogan-heavy copy. Content that answers real questions travels farther in search, performs better in AI Overviews and converts faster once students engage. 

    Treat external platforms as brand-defining spaces 

    Reddit threads, Google Business Profiles, degree marketplaces, review sites, YouTube channels and TikTok feeds all power the same discovery engine. When tuition details, program formats or admissions timelines conflict across those surfaces, trust erodes and AI systems notice. Institutions that treat external platforms as extensions of their site build stronger credibility in AI-driven answers and in traditional results. 

    Balance broad reach with precision presence 

    National campaigns are resurging, rebuilding brand presence across fragmented markets. At the same time, leading institutions layer precision media that targets local, adult and career-focused learners at moments of high intent. Search Everywhere Optimization depends on both: consistent brand framing at scale and targeted visibility where high-yield audiences search, scroll and ask questions. 

    Turn visibility into decisive action

    Search visibility only creates advantage when institutions respond with speed and clarity. Prospects move from consideration to inquiry quickly, often expect admissions decisions in days and frequently enroll at the first institution that meets their needs. When enrollment teams move slowly or inconsistently, the lift from Search Everywhere Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization evaporates and informed students choose institutions that move faster.

    Taken together, these moves separate leaders from the pack. They treat Search Everywhere Optimization as core operating strategy, not a marketing experiment. Institutions that build around real student questions, coherent signals across every surface, smart reach and fast follow-through are not just visible in a search-everywhere world — they are the ones shaping which options feel possible in the first place. 

    Competing in a Search-Everywhere world 

    These leadership patterns sit against a larger reality that will not reverse. Modern Learners have already left the old funnel behind. They are making choices inside AI Overviews, zero-click results, marketplaces and social feeds long before webpage appears. Search will not revert to ten blue links. AI-driven answers will not move back to the margins.

    In that reality, clinging to Search Engine Optimization as a stand-alone strategy means optimizing for a shrinking slice of how decisions are made. Search Everywhere Optimization reflects the environment that actually exists: decentralized signals, AI-shaped discovery and students who expect clear, consistent answers wherever they look. Institutions that build around that reality are not just keeping up with change. They are defining the terms on which students compare their options.

    The next cycle belongs to those who act now. The AI-first, zero-click era won’t wait—and neither should institutions serious about growth. EducationDynamics is committed to helping institutions navigate this evolving landscape and put Search Everywhere Optimization at the center. Contact us to assess your AI Density and build a Search Everywhere Optimization strategy aligned to how students actually decide.

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