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  • Texas State Fires Professor Accused of Inciting Violence

    Texas State Fires Professor Accused of Inciting Violence

    Alter at Texas State is the second Texas professor fired this week.

    Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman/Getty Images

    Texas State University fired a professor Wednesday after he was accused of inciting violence during a speech at a socialist conference, The Texas Tribune reported. 

    In a video posted on X, associate professor of history Thomas Alter can be seen giving a speech over Zoom to attendees of the Revolutionary Socialism Conference. “Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven mad organization in the history of the world—that of the U.S. government,” he said in the clip, which was circulated online by a YouTuber who infiltrated and recorded the event.

    Texas State president Kelly Damphousse said in a statement Wednesday that the university reviewed the comments, which he said “amounted to serious professional and personal misconduct.”

    “As a result, I have determined that his actions are incompatible with their responsibilities as a faculty member at Texas State University,” he added. “Effective immediately, his employment with Texas State University has been terminated.”

    The video clip shared on social media was spliced and cut together. In the full version of his speech, which is posted on YouTube, Alter discusses the various tactics of different socialist groups. 

    “Another strain of anarchism gaining ground recently is that of insurrectionary anarchism,” Alter said in his speech. “Primarily coming out of those that were involved in the Cop City protest. These groups, individuals have grown rightfully frustrated with symbolic protests that do not disrupt the normal functioning of government and business. They call for more direct action and shutting down the military-industrial complex and preventing ICE from kidnapping members of their communities. Many insurrectionary anarchists are serving jail time, lost jobs and face expulsion from school. They have truly put their bodies on the line. While their actions are laudable, it should be asked, what purpose do they serve? As anarchists, these insurrectionists explicitly reject the formation of a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class to power. Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven mad organization in the history of the world—that of the U.S. government.”

    Alter didn’t respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

    He is the second Texas professor to be fired from their post this week. On Tuesday, Texas A&M officials fired Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer, and removed two faculty members from their administrative roles after a student complained that the material McCoul taught in a summer course violated President Donald Trump’s executive orders.

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  • Teaching and Learning Can’t Happen Under These Circumstances

    Teaching and Learning Can’t Happen Under These Circumstances

    I’m hoping everyone working in higher education is aware of the recent events at Texas A&M, where a student recording of an exchange with an instructor ultimately led to the dismissal of the instructor and the demotion of both the department chair and college dean that had backed the instructor’s classroom autonomy.

    I looked at the big-picture academic freedom implications in a newsletter for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, where I note that one of the people who initially defended the instructor’s autonomy was Texas A&M president Mark Welsh, who told the student complainant that firing the instructor was “not happening,” only to reverse course after a storm of right-wing outrage and political pressure rained down.

    The instructor was a model of professionalism—watch the video yourself if you don’t believe me—and yet this student set out with a plan deliberately engineered to get the instructor fired, and it worked.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about this student, about what has to happen for a young person to enter college seeing something like this—personally targeting and destroying another human being who is just doing their job—as what they want to spend their college years doing.

    It is an act of great cruelty, and yet I must imagine this person does not see themselves as cruel. I’m sure they somehow have justified this cruelty, but there is simply no justification for it. If they are not cruel, what is left? It becomes an act of madness.

    One of my favorite things about teaching college-age students is that they are ready for the whole deal, adults who have volunteered themselves for a potentially transformative experience. Look, I’m not naïve about the more transactional mindsets that students bring to college, but it always seemed to me that at least the potential for something more meaningful, more lasting, was always present.

    I loved teaching because I knew that this was the goal, even as I only had vague notions of how it could be achieved. And when it was achieved for a particular student, it was clear that this was not necessarily replicable on a mass scale using the same approach. That difficulty is fascinating. The tension in not knowing if it can be pulled off, but trying anyway, was energizing, sometimes even intoxicating. This is very hard, but it is also very worth doing.

    At least I think so.

    Sometimes, when things were going well during a class, I would step outside myself for a moment and think, Look at all these people! Each one of them was a person, and together we were collectively being human, at least for a moment. What could be better?

    Here we are. I honestly don’t know how anyone can teach and learn under the present circumstances. For the bulk of my career, I worked in places where my political and religious views were out of sync with those of most my students, but I could not imagine being afraid of them exacting punishment or revenge on me for the mere fact of these views. My students were fundamentally open and curious, not without convictions by any means, but also essentially trusting that everyone involved in the educational enterprise had their best interests at heart unless proven otherwise.

    Now, it seems prudent to assume someone is out to get you, because it only takes one person of bad faith armed with a smart phone and ill intent to destroy your career. There is an essential fragility, a brittleness to this student who took down their instructor that makes them impossible to work alongside. There is no potential for community. Even if they are only one in a thousand, the whole deal is spoiled.

    In my course policies, I would often share a quote from Cornel West regarding the project I hoped the students and I were embarking on together.

    “I want to be able to engage in the grand calling of a Socratic teacher, which is not to persuade and convince students, but to unsettle and unnerve and maybe even unhouse a few students, so that they experience that wonderful vertigo and dizziness in recognizing at least for a moment that their world view rests on pudding, but then see that they have something to fall back on. It’s the shaping and forming of critical sensibility. That, for me, is what the high calling of pedagogy really is.”

    There are places today where it seems like even articulating such a philosophy, let alone attempting to put it into practice, would disqualify me from the classroom.

    As I was first working on drafting this column, I saw the news of the violent death of another young person who got his start as an antagonist to college professors and became quite wealthy and powerful primarily by calling down harassment on others—harassment that caused them to fear for their jobs and even sometimes their lives.

    He had a wife and two children under 4 years old. More madness.

    I honestly don’t know what to make of any of this. I am in a moment of Dr. West’s “pudding.”

    Maybe tomorrow more helpful thoughts will come.

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  • Thoughts on Education and Freedom as Fall Begins (opinion)

    Thoughts on Education and Freedom as Fall Begins (opinion)

    As our fall semester begins, college students are filled with excitement and nervous anticipation. By my lights, they are getting ready to practice freedom in the service of learning. Back in the 18th century, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that enlightenment was freedom from self-imposed immaturity, describing how the process of education was the practice of freedom. When people learn—embarking on the journey of thinking for themselves in the company of others—they are experimenting with choice, autonomy, relationship and discipline.

    I (usually) find it thrilling to watch students experiment in these ways, and I occasionally get to join in. They are relinquishing—not completely, and certainly not all at once—their childish ways and trying on what it means to be an adult. They begin to experience that freedom from immaturity and figure out, provisionally, the kinds of lives they want to live. This normally includes, but is not limited to, the kind of work they are prepared to do. Facing this very practical issue is part of growing up, and colleges provide various opportunities for doing just that.

    Still, many in America have doubts about whether today’s college student is, in fact, learning to be a free adult. Some have been persuaded that college campuses no longer value the open exchange of ideas but instead demand allegiance only to ideas deemed progressive. Others see colleges as failing to practice what they preach. Children of alumni or wealthy donors have a much better chance of getting admitted to highly selective colleges than ordinary Americans; the paths to colleges believed to offer the best educations are paved with gold.

    The charge of unfair admissions—like the criticism of political groupthink or mindless grinding away to get grades and internships—attacks the integrity of learning as a path to freely thinking for oneself. If colleges are unfair or corrupt in choosing their students, then the value of the education offered is undermined. If one only learns to imitate the views of one’s professors in order to win their favor, then one is wallowing in immaturity and not practicing freedom.

    Unquestionably, there has been a loss of trust in higher education, and— while less dramatic, perhaps, than the loss of trust in the judiciary, the media or Congress—it undermines the ability of colleges to teach their students. No matter how much teachers emphasize critical thinking, learning requires trust. It requires that we open ourselves to ideas and people that might have an impact on how we live. This can, of course, sometimes be disturbing, even offensive, but the deepest learning often involves reconsidering our assumptions and deeply held beliefs.

    I see this regularly in the class I teach, Virtue and Vice. I see undergraduates willing to stress test their moral intuitions against thinkers as varied as Aristotle and Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche and Danielle Allen. I see students considering how they want to live by thinking with some of the central texts of our traditions. Each week they practice one of the traditional virtues and discuss this with their fellow students. They read, think, practice, discuss. Reconsider and repeat.

    Critics prone to exaggeration have claimed that this kind of traditional humanistic work is no longer possible because today’s colleges have been captured ideologically by the woke left. Of course, there have been pernicious examples of close-mindedness from progressive purists, but the current attempt at ideological capture by the Trump administration is far more dangerous, as well as dishonest. Since President Trump’s inauguration, scores of colleges are being investigated for deliberately ignoring the harassment and intimidation of their Jewish students. These investigations, I have argued, are just vehicles for the White House to put pressure on higher education.

    As a Jewish teacher and university president, it pains me to see the fight against antisemitism used as a cudgel with which to attack centers of teaching and research. I’ve been very aware of antisemitism since I was a little boy, when a fellow fourth grader told me the only thing wrong with Hitler was that “he didn’t finish the job.” I reported this to my dad, and he told me to punch the kid at the next opportunity, which I did. I got in trouble at school, but my father was not displeased. I’ve never expected antisemitism to go away, and so its recent resurgence is concerning but not surprising.

    I am genuinely startled, though, by the ways Christian nationalists in the American government use Jew hatred as a vehicle to advance their authoritarian agenda. That’s what we are witnessing today: the exploitation of anti-antisemitism by a White House determined to extort money and expressions of loyalty from higher education. Sensing opportunity, some universities see a marketing advantage in portraying themselves as “good for the Jews,” offering protest-free environments (all the while singing the praises of free speech).

    As academic leaders, of course we must support students of faith generally, and we have a particular obligation to acknowledge religious minorities who have traditionally been targets of abuse. This, of course, includes but is not limited to Jews. Not a few of my students are interested in the topic “virtue and vice” because of their religious beliefs, and I find they are at least as capable of thinking critically about their faith as secular students are when asked to reconsider their own values. They join in the process of reading, thinking, practicing, discussing. Reconsider and repeat. As we practice a virtue each week, all my students learn how moral ideas might play a role in their daily lives. How much of a role, of course, is up to them.

    When I write it’s “up to them,” I imagine their choices as part of the process of leaving behind self-imposed immaturity. Sometimes, unfortunately, parents contribute to a student remaining a child, especially when they try to run interference for cherished offspring whenever an obstacle arises. But most of the time I see undergraduates practicing freedom in a safe enough environment—not too safe that they aren’t pushed to reconsider their choices, but accommodating enough that they can explore possibilities without feeling in danger. 

    This environment is threatened by the enormous pressure the federal government is putting on higher education to “align its priorities” with those of the president. I am worried about the normalization of this authoritarian effort to reshape the ecosystem of higher education. Too many opportunists and collaborators have been responding by noisily preaching neutrality or just keeping their heads down.

    Some faculty, student and alumni groups, however, have begun to stand up and make their voices heard. Whether refusing to apologize for diversity efforts or simply standing up for the freedom of scientific inquiry, there is growing resistance to the administration’s attempt to control civil society in general and higher education in particular.

    The groups defending their campuses from governmental intrusion are not just shielding the status quo. They are resisting attempts to undermine education as the practice of freedom, safeguarding the various ways that learning can allow students and teachers to open their minds and their hearts to new ideas and ways of living.

    We don’t want the government thinking for us, telling us what the president’s priorities are so that we can imitate them. We want to learn to think for ourselves in the company of others, leaving behind a dependence on authority. Authoritarians would see us impose immaturity upon ourselves. As the new school year begins, we in higher education must redouble our efforts to model and defend the enlightenment ideals of education and freedom—while we still can.

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  • Mass. College Launches Student-Led Basic Needs Center

    Mass. College Launches Student-Led Basic Needs Center

    An estimated 59 percent of all college students have experienced some form of housing or food insecurity in the past year, according to 2024 data from the Hope Center at Temple University. Closer to three in four students have lacked access to other basic needs, such as mental health care, childcare, transportation or technology.

    At Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, it was students who first noticed their peers needed additional resources.

    Spencer Moser, MCLA’s assistant dean for student growth and well-being, teaches a leadership capstone course in which students complete a community-based service project. “One group of students was aware that some of their peers were attending classes hungry,” he recalled.

    As part of their assignment, students researched available resources to address basic needs insecurity and identified the need for a campus pantry.

    “The program started as a drawer at my desk,” Moser said. “Then it grew to fill a shelving unit, a closet and eventually its own space on campus.”

    Now, MCLA hosts an Essential Needs Center (ENC) on campus for any student who may face financial barriers to acquiring food, housing or other necessary items.

    How it works: Located in the campus center, the Essential Needs Center is open 24 hours a day from Monday to Thursday, with more limited hours on Fridays. The center provides students with food, housing and transportation assistance, seasonal clothes, and more.

    Students can utilize a variety of resources to address food insecurity, including grab-and-go or instant meals and free meal swipes for the dining hall, as well as help with their SNAP applications. The center’s website also provides links to recipes using MCLA food pantry staples to help students with minimal cooking experience prepare nutritious meals.

    One of the unique offerings of MCLA’s center is a build-a-bundle initiative that allows students to request a variety of personal health, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom or cleaning items, as well as school supplies. Students can submit a form online requesting supplies ranging from a first-aid kit to baking supplies and a bath mat.

    The pantry has a small budget from the college, which is supplemented by grants, a partnership with the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and donor support. Interested donors can give nonperishable food items, toiletries or monetary contributions.

    Student supported: The ENC first started with students looking to support their classmates, and student leadership continues to be at the heart of the center’s work.

    “Students manage the inventory, make sure their peers know about this resource, staff the center,” Moser said. “The center is student-run and -managed, designed to be student-centric due to the belief that students know best what students’ needs are.”

    The pantry sees 400 to 500 students use the pantry regularly, for a total of 1,313 visits between November 2023 and January 2025, Moser said.

    In fall 2024 alone, ENC logged 729 visits—including from 96 first-time visitors—and distributed over 2,600 items.

    Other Models of Success

    Basic needs insecurity impacts college students across the country, hindering their academic progress and forcing them to choose between educational pursuits and personal needs. Here are some examples of how other colleges and universities are promoting student well-being.

    • Anne Arundel Community College students in Maryland created a cookbook featuring items exclusively from the campus pantry, many reflecting their traditions and cultures.
    • Some colleges allow students to pay off their parking tickets by donating food pantry items.
    • Pace University offers a monthly mobile market for students, faculty and staff to receive free food items that cannot be stored for longer in the permanent campus pantry.
    • The University of California, Davis, piloted a discounted food truck on campus at lunchtime, allowing students to receive a hot meal at a pay-what-you-can price.
    • Virginia Commonwealth University established mini pantries across campus with grab-and-go food items, modeled off the concept of a little free library.

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  • Green skills, graduate competencies, and championing subject diversity – it’s time to join up some agendas 

    Green skills, graduate competencies, and championing subject diversity – it’s time to join up some agendas 

    Author:
    Rebecca Collins and Santiago Poeira Ribeiro

    Published:

    This HEPI blog was kindly authored by Rebecca Collins, Director, Sustainability and Environment Research and Knowledge Exchange Institute, University of Chester and Santiago Poeira Ribeiro, student in Natural Sciences (Physics), University of Chester. 

    UK universities are currently grappling with a perfect storm of disruptors: financial challenges, ambivalence from national policymakers, and, increasingly, from prospective students as they question what a university education really offers them. At the same time, the employment landscape is weathering its own storms, including those driven by accelerating technological change (particularly AI), concerns about skills deficits, geopolitical turbulence, and equivocation about whether or not this net zero business is here to stay.  UK Government response to these challenges has most recently taken the form of Skills England’s analysis of the skills requirement across ten priority sectors and the promise of a new industrial strategy from 2026-27 that connects these requirements to reforms of the higher education system.  

    It is in this context that a strangely paradoxical scenario is playing out.  On the one hand are claims that the UK does not have the necessary skills for a ‘green transition’ to net zero – what are increasingly being described as ‘green skills’.  (Notwithstanding the current national political ambivalence about net zero, most sectors of the UK economy have long since recognised the necessary direction of travel and know they need an appropriately knowledgeable and skilled workforce to accelerate action.) On the other is a higher education sector beset by the contraction or closure of subject areas perceived by some political and industrial leaders as insufficiently relevant to our collective economic future, ‘green’ or otherwise. However, for many years now, UK higher education has cultivated students’ green skills through its commitment to education for sustainable development (EfSD), widely recognised as essential knowledge for graduates entering the workforce. Indeed, climate literacy training is now often embedded in university curricula, as well as becoming increasingly normalised as a core, if not mandatory, training requirement across a range of industry sectors. Whilst what EfSD looks like at different universities varies, the majority of institutions demonstrate some degree of engagement with this agenda across all subject areas, with some making it a flagship institutional policy.   

    UK higher education thus seems to be quite good already at cultivating green skills for graduates, and across a wide range of subject areas. How, then, does this map onto the very varied definitions of green skills that have emerged from different sectors? The proliferation of reports concerned with this topic has not (yet) resulted in a clear, unified definition. Rather, this tends to be determined by who is doing the defining. Considering the different definitions and concepts prioritised by different institutions, we propose that these intersecting concerns can ultimately be distilled into three main types of green skill: 

    1. Technical skills: particularly those needed to accelerate decarbonisation; concentration of this need in industries such as manufacturing, transportation, utilities and infrastructure.  
    1. Green-enabling skills: otherwise known as soft or transferable skills, including systems thinking, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, adaptability. 
    1. Values-based skills: such as environmental awareness, climate justice, democratic engagement, cultural sensitivity. 

    Whilst definition 1 skews towards STEM subjects (as well as forms of technical expertise developed through other forms of learning, such as apprenticeships or vocational training), definitions 2 and 3 are within the purview of many other subjects commonly studied at undergraduate level, particularly within the arts, humanities and social sciences.   

    It is a timely moment to be reflecting on the relationship between how skills deficit narratives are framed by some corners of industry and government, and how universities position their offer in response. It feels like every academic in UK higher education has a story about recent, current or imminent institution-wide curriculum transformation. Whilst the rationales presented for these varies, one of the stronger narratives concerns ensuring students develop competencies that are fit for the future, respond directly to regional, national or global skills needs, and give students the vocabulary to articulate how the former meets the latter. As such, curriculum transformation presents an opportunity to think about how universities frame their offer, not just to prospective students but equally to the sectors those students might move into as skilled graduates.   

    Further, whilst driven by a range of factors, curriculum transformation presents the opportunity to articulate the role of all subjects studied in higher education, and all types of higher education providers, to contribute to the skills needed for an economy resilient to the socio-political shocks that will inevitably be invoked by environmental crises. There is a role for university leaders to be much bolder in articulating the value of all subjects – STEM and the arts, humanities, social sciences, and everything in between – and the green skills they cultivate. Now is the moment to consider how the promise of higher education might speak to or work with other agendas concerned with ensuring environmentally and socially sustainable and inclusive economies, regionally, nationally and globally. University leaders have a central role to play in advocating for a national higher education system where diversity – of student, skill and subject area – is not just celebrated as a buzzword but is demonstrated to be an essential part of a thriving, resilient and sustainable society.  

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  • The Urgency for Outreach to Shy College Students – Faculty Focus

    The Urgency for Outreach to Shy College Students – Faculty Focus

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  • Podcast: Mergers, reshuffle | Wonkhe

    Podcast: Mergers, reshuffle | Wonkhe

    This week on the podcast we examine the bombshell merger announcement between the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent, set to create the London and South East University Group – one of the largest higher education institutions in the UK.

    With a memorandum of understanding signed and contracts expected by Christmas, this “super university” is being hailed as a potential blueprint for sector transformation. But what does this new multi-university model really mean for students, staff, and the future of higher education consolidation?

    Plus we discuss the recent government reshuffle and its implications for the sector, as Angela Rayner’s departure triggers ministerial changes across departments with direct links to higher education – from Liz Kendall’s appointment as Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology to questions about skills policy under Pat McFadden’s expanded brief at the newly configured Department for Work and Pensions.

    With Ben Vulliamy, Executive Director at the Association of Heads of University Administration, Emma Maslin, Senior Policy and Research Officer at AMOSSHE, Michael Salmon, News Editor at Wonkhe, and presented by Mark Leach, Editor-in-Chief at Wonkhe.

    The first multi-university group arrives

    Back to the future for the TEF? Back to school for OfS?

    The former student leaders entering Parliament

    You can subscribe to the podcast on Acast, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Deezer, RadioPublic, Podchaser, Castbox, Player FM, Stitcher, TuneIn, Luminary or via your favourite app with the RSS feed.

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  • Multiple HBCUs Go On Lockdown in Response to Threats

    Multiple HBCUs Go On Lockdown in Response to Threats

    At least seven historically Black colleges and universities across the country went into lockdown on Thursday after institutions received threats, which they did not elaborate on.

    Southern University and A&M College in Louisiana asked those on campus to shelter in place in response to a “potential threat to campus safety.”

    The lockdown applied to the “entire Baton Rouge landmass,” including the Southern University Law Center, the Agricultural Research and Extension Center, and the university’s Laboratory School, according to a statement from the institution.

    The lockdown lifted in the afternoon, but all classes and campus activities were canceled through the weekend.

    Alabama State University also received a “terroristic threat,” university officials told local media outlets, and shut down campus as law enforcement officials checked buildings. The university sent an all-clear notice later in the day, noting that “the immediate threat has been resolved,” but told students to continue to shelter in place.

    Two HBCUs in Virginia were also targeted.

    Virginia State University went into lockdown while local, state and federal law enforcement agencies investigated the credibility of a threat received earlier that day, according to a message from the Virginia State University Office of Communications and University Relations. University officials assured students, “No injuries or incidents have been reported in connection with the threat” and said they would be provided with meals in university housing during the lockdown.

    Hampton University canceled all activities and classes for both Thursday and Friday in response to a potential threat. Students were discouraged from moving across campus unless absolutely necessary, and all nonessential employees were told to “evacuate immediately” in a notice on the university’s website.

    A threat at Bethune-Cookman University in Florida also forced the university to cancel classes and go into lockdown. A notice from the university told students to go to their dorms and faculty and staff members to leave campus.

    Spelman College in Atlanta didn’t receive a threat but issued a shelter-in-place order because of its proximity to Clark-Atlanta University, which did. The order was lifted around 2 p.m.

    Howard University, in Washington, D.C., assured students the institution hadn’t received any threats but would maintain “heightened security.”

    “At Howard, we denounce all acts of hate designed to foster fear in our communities,” an update from the university read. “Howard stands in solidarity with our fellow HBCUs.”

    A predominantly white institution, the University of Central Florida, also reported receiving a threat Thursday. The Orlando Sentinel, which obtained a copy via an anonymous tipster, reported that the expletive-laden message threatened Black students and referenced the killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee stabbed on a train in North Carolina.

    A message from the UCF Police Department Thursday afternoon said, “Similar messages have been reported at other universities around the country.” The police department added it was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assess the threat but does not consider it “to be credible.”

    In what appears to be an unrelated incident, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., went on lockdown Thursday evening after suspicious activity was reported on campus, The Baltimore Banner reported. One person was injured as Naval Security Forces cleared a building.

    Florida A&M University, an HBCU, did not receive any threats but put out a statement of solidarity with institutions on lockdown.

    Rep. Troy A. Carter, a Democrat from Louisiana, posted on X that he was “outraged and deeply disturbed” by the threats to HBCUs.

    “These reprehensible acts are not only an attack on institutions of higher learning—they are an attack on our history, our culture, and the promise of opportunity that HBCUs represent for generations of students,” Carter wrote. In a statement, he called on the federal government “to utilize every available resource to identify, apprehend, and prosecute those responsible.”

    The Congressional Black Caucus also put out a statement calling for action from the U.S. Department of Justice and FBI. Caucus members described the threats as a “chilling reminder of the relentless racism and extremism that continues to target and terrorize Black communities in this country.”

    The rash of violent threats is reminiscent of a wave of bomb threats that targeted HBCUs in 2022 and prompted the FBI to get involved. The HBCU campus lockdowns also come on the heels of a series of false calls to colleges and universities about active shooters last month; an online extremist group claimed responsibility for the hoaxes.



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  • High tariff providers may be making medium tariff offers

    High tariff providers may be making medium tariff offers

    There’s only really one headline from this year’s UCAS cycle – and that’s about the recruitment behavior of higher-tariff providers.

    The closest analogue is 2021: the so-called “mutant algorithm” year in which higher-than-predicted A level results (arguably the first accurate and fair set of results for many years, unconstrained by any predetermined curve) meant that traditionally selective providers were contractually obligated to honour a lot more offers than expected.

    But there was no such anomaly in results this year. The cohort did do very slightly better than expected (within the limits of the system), but this was – as it should be – down to their own hard work rather than any external factor.

    The assumption has to be that the growth in numbers at selective providers (those that have traditionally used tough level three requirements as a way of admitting only those with the best results) has to be down to a change in behavior. So what has changed, and why?

    What are we looking at

    Twenty-eight days after A level results day (JCQ results day to use the technical term) isn’t quite the final day of Clearing. You can still apply for 2025 entry up until 6pm on 24 September – which, depending on where you are heading, is pretty much welcome week.

    However, JCQ+28 is the last point at which UCAS releases statistics on applications and acceptances, before we get to the End of Cycle reports through December and January. These are the points where we can get a perspective on how this round of recruitment has gone (for the sector in December, by provider in January).

    But even this isn’t a final number. Many universities and colleges have multiple undergraduate entry points – and of course not all applications go via UCAS. End of cycle UCAS statistics do include the ones that they know about (the “Record of Prior Acceptance”) but the Clearing data does not.

    Volume up

    In most recent years around 10 per cent of applicants overall have been placed via Clearing, including both “direct to Clearing” applications (where someone hasn’t made choices of course and provider on their UCAS form) and standard “Clearing” (where someone has not been accepted, or not accepted a place at their firm or assurance choice). This proportion has grown slightly over the last decade – in 2016 it was nearer 9 per cent.

    [Full screen]

    A part of the reason for this is the introduction of the UCAS “decline your place” option, and the continued improvements in the Clearing system via the “Clearing Plus” tool that matches students with courses and providers based on interests and aptitudes. It is now easier for students to make a change to their plans – to decline a firm (and/or) insurance place even though they met the requirements, and to find another place that suits their needs. As you might guess, this has been a boon for high-tariff providers – who now find it much easier to recruit students who have exceeded results day expectations – but the benefits are wider.

    It is good news for the students in question as well – if you have done particularly well it may unlock a course or university that you wanted to go to but didn’t dare waste an application slot or firm acceptance status on. It might mean a more direct route to a career now you know more about professional requirements, a place nearer home (or further away!), a cheaper part of the country to live in (or an easier one to find term-time work in) or the uni where your friends are also heading. A lot can change in the life of an applicant between putting your form in on 15 January and getting your results in mid-August.

    An element of concern

    So the growth in acceptances at high-tariff providers is partially explained – but not entirely.

    [Full screen]

    You don’t have to spend a long time talking to admissions staff to hear that so-called high-tariff providers are now taking students with less stellar A level results in greater numbers. Making it easier to “trade up” (as the frankly unhelpful discourse would have it) is one thing, lowering the tariff is a different matter.

    The popular perception is that high-tariff providers are better. This is true in that they are better at being high-tariff providers.

    If you’ve done a few open days you will have been made aware that universities are not a homogenous lump. Even on a similarly named course, they will teach differently (more lectures, more tutorial, more blended, more hands on, more theoretical or academic), focus more on different parts of the subject, have different facilities (anything from lab kit to student support services), and even timetable differently. These are the differences that should really be driving applicant decision-making – and a high-tariff provider may not be better for a particular student (whatever their results).

    A choice of university governs a lot more of an applicant’s life than just what they’ll end up putting on their CV and who this might or might not impress – although a lot of popular commentary and ministerial statements take a more simplistic view of “undermatching”.

    Under the bonnet

    Because we get stats on a mostly daily basis, we can get a sense of when the application deals are being sealed. I’ve not plotted every day of data because honestly who has time, but here we have results day, the day after, and the Monday of the next week (traditionally the three big Clearing days) plus day 28 which rounds up most of the rest of the action.

    There’s not much Clearing data in the JCQ results day release: that that is in there is mostly from applicants domiciled in Scotland with SQA results (they get their results a week earlier, the lucky things), mature students, and overseas students. So for 18 year old entry on that day in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland you are just seeing the automatic workings of the UCAS system – where applicants got the grades on the offer they get the place.

    [Full screen]

    And there’s our first clue. The number of initial placements at high tariff providers (England, Wales, and NI domiciled applicants, 18 years old) was higher than the total number of placed applicants last year. Or indeed any year on record.

    You don’t get that by being an aspirational destination, or by being active in Clearing. You get that by lowering the offers you make. We’ll see more in the end of cycle data, but in some cases this would be lowering them by quite a lot. Higher tariff providers didn’t take a lot of students in Clearing (we’re talking about 8,000 of this subgroup in 2025, rather than 7,000 last year or 10,000 in 2019), they took a lot of students.

    Why, though?

    It wasn’t a mistake. There was no underestimation of performance, because performance wasn’t meaningfully different than in any other non-pandemic year.

    And it can’t be pure greed. The best data we have on the cost of educating students (audited, regulated, everything) is TRAC and we know from the last release that selective providers (who tend to be in TRAC groups A and B) tend to recover around 85 per cent of the costs of public funded teaching. If you lose £1,430 on each (price group D) student then if you take more of them that just adds to your deficit?

    There’s a suggestion that some universities are using home students to fill spaces that would previously have gone to (higher fee paying) international students. The thinking being that even some income is better than none, and helps to sustain capacity (departments, courses, jobs) that might otherwise be lost. However, there’s not a massive difference in the number of visas issued by the Home Office, which suggests that there will be a similar number of international students this year as last (still down on 2023 and earlier, mind).

    Any capacity backfilling, in other words, would have happened last year. And there’s been a sharp uptick in the proportion of international students heading to big name destinations this cycle: numbers at selective providers are now at a level above the golden age of the mid 2010s.

    [Full screen]

    The extra students, then, are simply extra students over last year. Growth in numbers, pure and simple. Very few universities have the finances to substantially invest in capacity (staff, estates) – so we have to assume that this means larger classes, less individual attention, more competition for resources, and a tighter accommodation market.

    The most able, and best connected, students will flourish. They pretty much always will – you could lock them in a darkened room for three years and they’d still get a good degree and a good job. It’s the rise in traditionally selective providers recruiting a substantially greater volume of students who have excellent potential but who need extra support and more opportunities to build networks and build confidence, that worries me. I hope these providers are ready to rise to what will be a new and substantial challenge.

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  • We cannot address the AI challenge by acting as though assessment is a standalone activity

    We cannot address the AI challenge by acting as though assessment is a standalone activity

    How to design reliable, valid and fair assessment in an AI-infused world is one of those challenges that feels intractable.

    The scale and extent of the task, it seems, outstrips the available resource to deal with it. In these circumstances it is always worth stepping back to re-frame, perhaps reconceptualise, what the problem is, exactly. Is our framing too narrow? Have we succeeded (yet) in perceiving the most salient aspects of it?

    As an educational development professional, seeking to support institutional policy and learning and teaching practices, I’ve been part of numerous discussions within and beyond my institution. At first, we framed the problem as a threat to the integrity of universities’ power to reliably and fairly award degrees and to certify levels of competence. How do we safeguard this authority and credibly certify learning when the evidence we collect of the learning having taken place can be mimicked so easily? And the act is so undetectable to boot?

    Seen this way the challenge is insurmountable.

    But this framing positions students as devoid of ethical intent, love of learning for its own sake, or capacity for disciplined “digital professionalism”. It also absolves us of the responsibility of providing an education which results in these outcomes. What if we frame the problem instead as a challenge of AI to higher education practices as a whole and not just to assessment? We know the use of AI in HE ranges widely, but we are only just beginning to comprehend the extent to which it redraws the basis of our educative relationship with students.

    Rooted in subject knowledge

    I’m finding that some very old ideas about what constitutes teaching expertise and how students learn are illuminating: the very questions that expert teachers have always asked themselves are in fact newly pertinent as we (re)design education in an AI world. This challenge of AI is not as novel as it first appeared.

    Fundamentally, we are responsible for curriculum design which builds students’ ethical, intellectual and creative development over the course of a whole programme in ways that are relevant to society and future employment. Academic subject content knowledge is at the core of this endeavour and it is this which is the most unnerving part of the challenge presented by AI. I have lost count of the number of times colleagues have said, “I am an expert in [insert relevant subject area], I did not train for this” – where “this” is AI.

    The most resource-intensive need that we have is for an expansion of subject content knowledge: every academic who teaches now needs a subject content knowledge which encompasses a consideration of the interplay between their field of expertise and AI, and specifically the use of AI in learning and professional practice in their field.

    It is only on the basis of this enhanced subject content knowledge that we can then go on to ask: what preconceptions are my students bringing to this subject matter? What prior experience and views do they have about AI use? What precisely will be my educational purpose? How will students engage with this through a newly adjusted repertoire of curriculum and teaching strategies? The task of HE remains a matter of comprehending a new reality and then designing for the comprehension of others. Perhaps the difference now is that the journey of comprehension is even more collaborative and even less finite that it once would have seemed.

    Beyond futile gestures

    All this is not to say that the specific challenge of ensuring that assessment is valid disappears. A universal need for all learners is to develop a capacity for qualitative judgement and to learn to seek, interpret and critically respond to feedback about their own work. AI may well assist in some of these processes, but developing students’ agency, competence and ethical use of it is arguably a prerequisite. In response to this conundrum, some colleagues suggest a return to the in-person examination – even as a baseline to establish in a valid way levels of students’ understanding.

    Let’s leave aside for a moment the argument about the extent to which in-person exams were ever a valid way of assessing much of what we claimed. Rather than focusing on how we can verify students’ learning, let’s emphasise more strongly the need for students themselves to be in touch with the extent and depth of their own understanding, independently of AI.

    What if we reimagined the in-person high stakes summative examination as a low-stakes diagnostic event in which students test and re-test their understanding, capacity to articulate new concepts or design novel solutions? What if such events became periodic collaborative learning reviews? And yes, also a baseline, which assists us all – including students, who after all also have a vested interest – in ensuring that our assessments are valid.

    Treating the challenge of AI as though assessment stands alone from the rest of higher education is too narrow a frame – one that consigns us to a kind of futile authoritarianism which renders assessment practices performative and irrelevant to our and our students’ reality.

    There is much work to do in expanding subject content knowledge and in reimagining our curricula and reconfiguring assessment design at programme level such that it redraws our educative relationship with students. Assessment more than ever has to become a common endeavour rather than something we “provide” to students. A focus on how we conceptualise the trajectory of students’ intellectual, ethical and creative development is inescapable if we are serious about tackling this challenge in meaningful way.

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