Developed with the help of volunteer leaders and member institutions across the country, The Job Description Index provides access to sample job descriptions for positions unique to higher education.
Descriptions housed within the index are aligned with the annual survey data collected by the CUPA-HR research team. To aid in the completion of IPEDS and other reporting, all position descriptions are accompanied by a crosswalk section like the one below.
Crosswalk Example
Position Number: The CUPA-HR position number BLS SOC#: Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation classification code BLS Standard Occupational Code (SOC) Category Name: Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation category title US Census Code#: U.S. Census occupation classification code VETS-4212 Category: EEO-1 job category title used on VETS-4212 form
***SOC codes are provided as suggestions only. Variations in the specific functions of a position may cause the position to better align with an alternate SOC code.
All examples in the Job Description Index come directly from member contributions. You can help us grow the index further by sharing sample descriptions for any of the positions on our desired positions list.
By now, it’s no secret that phones are a problem in classrooms. A growing body of research and an even louder chorus of educators point to the same conclusion: students are distracted, they’re disengaged, and their learning is suffering. What’s less clear is how to solve this issue.
Of late, school districts across the country are drawing firmer lines. From Portland, Maine to Conroe, Texas and Springdale, Arkansas, administrators are implementing “bell-to-bell” phone bans, prohibiting access from the first bell to the last. Many are turning to physical tools like pouches and smart lockers, which lock away devices for the duration of the day, to enforce these rules. The logic is straightforward: take the phones away, and you eliminate the distraction.
In many ways, it works. Schools report fewer behavioral issues, more focused classrooms, and an overall sense of calm returning to hallways once buzzing with digital noise. But as these policies scale, the limitations are becoming more apparent.
But students, as always, find ways around the rules. They’ll bring second phones to school or slip their device in undetected–and more. Teachers, already stretched thin, are now tasked with enforcement, turning minor infractions into disciplinary incidents.
Some parents and students are also pushing back, arguing that all-day bans are too rigid, especially when phones serve as lifelines for communication, medical needs, or even digital learning. In Middletown, Connecticut, students reportedly became emotional just days after a new ban took effect, citing the abrupt change in routine and lack of trust.
The bigger question is this: Are we trying to eliminate phones, or are we trying to teach responsible use?
That distinction matters. While it’s clear that phone misuse is widespread and the intent behind bans is to restore focus and reduce anxiety, blanket prohibitions risk sending the wrong message. Instead of fostering digital maturity, they can suggest that young people are incapable of self-regulation. And in doing so, they may sidestep an important opportunity: using school as a place to practice responsible tech habits, not just prohibit them.
This is especially critical given the scope of the problem. A recent study by Fluid Focus found that students spend five to six hours a day on their phones during school hours. Two-thirds said it had a negative impact on their academic performance. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 77 percent of school leaders believe phones hurt learning. The data is hard to ignore.
But managing distraction isn’t just about removal. It’s also about design. Schools that treat device policy as an infrastructure issue, rather than a disciplinary one, are beginning to implement more structured approaches.
Some are turning to smart locker systems that provide centralized, secure phone storage while offering greater flexibility: configurable access windows, charging capabilities, and even low admin options to help keep teachers teaching. These systems don’t “solve” the phone problem, but they do help schools move beyond the extremes of all-or-nothing.
And let’s not forget equity. Not all students come to school with the same tech, support systems, or charging access. A punitive model that assumes all students have smartphones (or can afford to lose access to them) risks deepening existing divides. Structured storage systems can help level the playing field, offering secure and consistent access to tech tools without relying on personal privilege or penalizing students for systemic gaps.
That said, infrastructure alone isn’t the answer. Any solution needs to be accompanied by clear communication, transparent expectations, and intentional alignment with school culture. Schools must engage students, parents, and teachers in conversations about what responsible phone use actually looks like and must be willing to revise policies based on feedback. Too often, well-meaning bans are rolled out with minimal explanation, creating confusion and resistance that undermine their effectiveness.
Nor should we idealize “focus” as the only metric of success. Mental health, autonomy, connection, and trust all play a role in creating school environments where students thrive. If students feel overly surveilled or infantilized, they’re unlikely to engage meaningfully with the values behind the policy. The goal should not be control for its own sake, it should be cultivating habits that carry into life beyond the classroom.
The ubiquity of smartphones is undeniable. While phones are here to stay, the classroom represents one of the few environments where young people can learn how to use them wisely, or not at all. That makes schools not just sites of instruction, but laboratories for digital maturity.
The danger isn’t that we’ll do too little. It’s that we’ll settle for solutions that are too simplistic or too focused on optics, instead of focusing not on outcomes.
We need more than bans. We need balance. That means moving past reactionary policies and toward systems that respect both the realities of modern life and the capacity of young people to grow. It means crafting strategies that support teachers without overburdening them, that protect focus without sacrificing fairness, and that reflect not just what we’re trying to prevent, but what we hope to build.
The real goal shouldn’t be to simply get phones out of kids’ hands. It should be to help them learn when to put them down on their own.
Emily Smith, HonestWaves
Emily Smith is the founder of HonestWaves, a California-based company that designs and suppliesphone charging solutions, including smart lockers and charging stations, for businesses and public spaces.
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TikTok reels, attention grabbing headlines and AI that spits out instant answers. The way teens engage with the world today often lacks depth.
But at this age, where the teen brain is rapidly developing, deeper thinking — dubbed by psychologists as transcendent thinking — is vital not just for self-reflection and problem solving, but also self-esteem and better relationships in adulthood.
Many of us spend a lot of time in what researchers call “surface-level” thinking — reacting to what’s in front of us. Transcendent thinking, though, is when we go beyond concept descriptions, to wrestle with questions like, What does this say about justice? How do systems work? Where do I fit in all this?
“Young people get so much information fed to them through social media, influencers and podcasts and AI, and this is such a passive way of learning,” said Marcy Burstiner, News Decoder’s educational news director. “Dangerous, really, if they aren’t critically thinking about the information they are getting.”
That’s why for 10 years News Decoder has used the lens of journalism to engage students in the process of learning. Through our educational programs, students are encouraged to ask big questions, identify problems they see around them and talk to people to get their questions answered — classmates, neighbours, family and experts. In doing this, they find out information themselves.
Spoon-fed learning
This is more important than ever as the internet transforms from a place where people would lose themselves as they “surfed,” stumbling upon all kinds of new and interesting information along the way, into a place where an AI bot does that for them and spits out summarized results.
For 10 years, we’ve been asking teens to find real people to interview, to compare their different perspectives and from that to come up with their own original thoughts about complex topics where there isn’t a clear right and wrong, where there are layers of inequity.
Student Jack McConnel at The Tatnall School in the United States did this when he interviewed his state’s congressional representative, Sarah McBride, the nation’s first transgender representative in Congress.
Through the research he did, and after interviewing McBride, McConnel came to the conclusion that voters in his district didn’t elect her because of gender identity, but because McBride pledged to help solve the more mundane issues they cared most about — protecting consumers from getting scammed, for example, or helping farmers to lower food prices. Gender identity wasn’t their most important concern.
Students, like McConnel, who work with News Decoder often start with a “pitch” — a proposal for a news story. In the pitch, we have them ask a big question that their story will answer. McConnel’s asked three: “What role does identity play in our elected officials? Has this fixation from both sides made congressional and senatorial positions simply for show? Does it matter more who the person is or what the person does, and have we lost sight of what matters about our politicians?”
Through his research and his one-to-one interview with McBride, he was able to answer all those questions.
Beyond facts
Hannah Choo is a student at an international school in South Korea, and is working with News Decoder as a summer intern. As part of her work, she creates video content for social media based on articles published on News Decoder.
Choo has found that through engaging with these stories, she’s forming a deeper connection with the issues the stories explore. She said the challenge is to go beyond merely summarizing the information. The goal is to connect with an audience.
“And that puts me in a position where I need to really focus on why this issue matters and why I should care,” Choo said. “And that gives a lot more of a sense of purpose.”
Choo remembers talking to a biology graduate student, who told her about apoptosis, a process whereby cells die off — a way our bodies get rid of unneeded cells. Alone, this concept feels meaningless, even dry.
But the grad student told Choo that when we’re initially formed in the womb, we have paddle-shaped hands with a webbing of skin connecting the fingers and toes. This webbing disappears as we form, due to this apoptosis. Choo remembers looking at her own hands in fascination.
“And so later, when I actually got to learn biology and learn about the cell cycle, it was a lot easier for me to engage with the topic,” Choo said. “I wasn’t just studying science but I was studying my own body.”
From deep thinking to deeper relationships
A five-year study, published in 2024 in the journal Scientific Reports, followed 65 teenagers aged 14-18 to see how transcendent thinking shapes their brains, and how this further shapes their lives.
The teens were shown emotionally rich mini-documentaries featuring real stories of adolescents around the globe — a method that triggers transcendent thinking. They then talked through what the stories meant: how they felt, why they mattered, and what bigger ideas they raised.
They found that teens who engaged in this deeper style of thinking showed stronger connections over time between two key brain networks — those involved in self-reflection and big-picture thought, and focus and problem solving.
Crucially, they also found that these teens went on to have a clearer sense of identity in late adolescence, which later linked to greater self-esteem and better relationships in young adulthood.
One way News Decoder helps young people understand deeper meanings and broader implications is by having them look at societal problems and possible solutions.
Searching out solutions
At News Decoder we ask students to identify a problem in their community and then see if they can find people working to solve that problem.
“In the process they see at first that a lot of problems seem to have no solution or the solutions are so far off,” Burstiner said. “But all the complications that prevent solutions are like protective layers around the problem. They are like the levels you need to surmount in a video game.”
If a teen has the patience and persistence to work through those complications they can not only see the solutions but they can see what is preventing those solutions, Burstiner said.
“In exploring the topic she hit on the idea of lost languages — that a language is what often ties a community together and connects generations. But if a community is forced to disperse and the people end up integrating into other lands, the language that connected them could die out,” Burstiner said.
Connecting dots
Another student at The Tatnall School played soccer, and began thinking about how much it cost his family for him to play at a competitive level. “In exploring this he realized how much of competitive sports is elitist and how much more difficult it is for someone to go into professional sports if they are poor,” Burstiner said.
When students conduct interviews with people who understand these topics in-depth or who are affected by these issues, they can further connect their sense of self with these stories.
Choo, during her internship, pitched a story about cancer, because a close family member was undergoing cancer treatment. She asked this question: “How does climate change affect the quality of healthcare for cancer patients?”
In doing the research, uncovering connections and conducting interviews, she connected the often-abstract issue of climate change to her own life.
“This was the first time I could really connect climate change to my own life and my own loved ones,” Choo said.
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In June, Ohio became the second stateto regulate how colleges can use third-party vendors to help launch and operate their online degree programs.
Under a new law, both public and private colleges in Ohio must disclose on their websites for their online programs when they are using vendors to help run those offerings.Staff who work for these vendors, known as online program managers, must also identify themselves when talking to students. And it requires colleges to report OPM contracts annually to the state’s higher education chancellor.
The law, part of a larger state budget bill, additionally prohibits OPMs from making decisions about or disbursing student financial aid.
“Ohio’s law is a step in the right direction,” said Amber Villalobos, a fellow at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank. “It’s great to see transparency laws because students will know who’s running their program, who’s teaching their programs.”
The new law is the latest sign that states may take on a greater role in regulating OPM contracts, heeding calls by consumer advocates for stronger government oversight.
However, Villalobos said Ohio lawmakers could have improved the legislation by barring colleges from entering agreements that give OPMs a cut of tuition revenue for each student they recruit into an online program. Minnesota, the first state to pass a law regulating OPMs in 2024, prohibited its public colleges from striking tuition-share deals with these companies if they provide marketing or recruiting services.
U.S. law bars colleges that receive federal funding from giving incentive-based compensation to companies that recruit students into their programs. However, in 2011, federal guidance created an exception for colleges that enter tuition-share agreements with OPMs for recruiting services — but only if they are part of a larger bundle of services, such as curricular design and help with clinical placements.
But these deals have led to OPMs using misleading recruitment and marketing practices to enroll students and fill seats, Villalobos said.
“When tuition-sharing is used for marketing or recruiting purposes we’ve seen issues like predatory recruitment,” she said.
OPMs under scrutiny
OPMs help colleges quickly set up and market online programs, said Phil Hill, an ed tech consultant. That’s important since launching a successful online program catering to nontraditional working adults can be challenging for colleges that typically enroll 18- to 24-year-olds, Hill said.
“It gives them a way to operate in the online space based on what students expect, but do it right away,” Hill said.
However, OPM contracts have been subject to lawsuits and federal scrutiny in recent years.
In Ohio, for instance, legislators passed the new state law following Eastern Gateway Community College’s closure in 2024 after it offered tuition-free online college programs with an OPM.
After the college began working with the for-profit company Student Resource Center, its enrollment soared from just 3,182 students in fall 2014 to 45,173 enrollees by the fall 2021, according to federal data. Former employees of the college accused the relationship of turning the college into an education mill, Inside Higher Ed reported at the time.
By early 2022, the rapid enrollment growth and the college’s relationship with the Student Resource Center had attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Education.
The federal agency alleged that year that the college’s free college initiative illegally charged students with Pell Grants more than those without. In response, the Education Department placed the college on Heightened Cash Monitoring 2 status, which forced the institution to pay its students’ federal financial aid out of pocket before seeking reimbursement from the agency.
In 2023, Eastern Gateway reached a deal with the Education Department to end its free college program.Its board of trustees voted to shutter the institution the following year.
Ohio likely had “the worst example of an OPM contract harming students, harming an institution of any state in the country,” said Hill. Legislators were “reacting to that situation and the collapse of that school.”
Colleges nationwide have also faced scrutiny over their OPM relationships.
In 2023, the University of Southern California also winded down its partnership with an OPM on most online degrees they ran together.The move came after a 2023 class-action lawsuit accused USC of misrepresenting an online social work master’s degree program developed with the OPM as the same as its campus-based one.
In January, the Biden administration’s Education Department issued guidance informing colleges that they could lose access to federal financial aid or face penalties if OPMs misrepresent themselves to students. That includes OPM employees implying they work for colleges or representing a virtual program as equivalent to an institution’s campus-based version when they have material differences.
Pros and cons of Ohio’s law
Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, criticized Ohio’s new law on the conservative Minding the Campus website in June. Despite being watered-down after it was first introduced in the Ohio House, the bill essentially “required a warning label when a college had an OPM partnership,” Kissel wrote.
However, higher education experts said students will benefit from the disclosures and reporting standards in Ohio’s law.
A 2022 U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that at least 550 colleges worked with OPMs to support at least 2,900 education programs. However, the office couldn’t determine the exact number of OPM arrangements due to a lack of comprehensive data.
“Without any real tracking, any real reporting or accountability systems in place, I think that some states just don’t know how large of a scale the OPMs may be operating at in their state,” said Villalobos. “In some cases, that may be a reason we don’t see states taking action.”
Yet Stephanie Hall, a higher education policy expert, said the Ohio law could have been improved if it had banned institutions from paying companies that provide recruiting services on a commission basis, referring to tuition-share agreements.
“This practice has long been banned in the context of typical, on-campus admissions, but for some reason online students are not afforded the same consideration and protection,” Hall, a former senior director of higher ed policy at the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, said in an email.
Additionally, how Ohio enforces the law’s prohibitions on OPMs controlling or influencing financial aid decisions will be key, said Hall.
OPMs in some arrangements provide input on whether the program’s tuition price is competitive, which Hall argues influences pricing, she said.
Some colleges, through such contracts, also agree to offer promotions such as special scholarships or discounts, which the OPM markets or uses to persuade prospective students to enroll, Hall said.
The availability of financial aid including those scholarships and discounts, for example, is often discussed as OPMs field questions from prospective students about the program and its price on behalf of its college client, she said.
“These activities bring the OPM close enough to financial aid decisions to warrant oversight,” Hall said.
Many contracts between OPMs and colleges include a clause stating that the OPM is not a financial aid servicer — but those clauses are meaningless if regulators don’t verify them, Hall said.
The state’s higher education chancellor’s office should thoroughly review how OPMs are involved in pricing, discounts, scholarships and enrollment strategies, instead of just ensuring that such clauses are in their contracts, she said.
The reforms Hall and others are calling for have merit, said Hill. Transparency about contracts, particularly in public education, is a good thing, he said.
But Hill cautioned against characterizing all OPMs as predators.
“I would argue that without this model, a lot of nonprofit colleges and universities just wouldn’t be able to make an online offering that grows at all,” he said.
The Trump administration has stepped up government scrutiny of college admission. Settlements reached with Brown and Columbia Universities each included a requirement that they pursue “merit-based” admission policies. On Aug. 7, President Trump issued a memorandum requiring colleges and universities to submit data to IPEDS (the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) demonstrating that they are not considering race in admission decisions. The Department of Education has since published in the Federal Register details about the planned data collection, with the public having 60 days to comment. And Attorney General Pam Bondi has entered into the fray by publishing a memo outlining what constitutes unlawful discrimination.
I will leave it to others to rail against the unprecedented federal attack on higher education and the incursion into admission policies at individual institutions. I would prefer to examine some of the issues and underlying assumptions suggested by these documents.
The Aug. 7 Presidential Memorandum
Trump’s memorandum calls for increased transparency to expose practices that are “unlawful” and to rid society of “shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies.” For some reason, it doesn’t say that all racial hierarchies are shameful and dangerous. Is that an oversight or a meaningful omission? The memorandum also asserts without explanation that race-based admission policies threaten national security.
The call to get rid of “shameful, dangerous racial hierarchies” is ironic. It is easy to imagine previous administrations using the same phrase to defend the very race-based admission policies that the executive order now seeks to abolish. “Shameful” and “dangerous” are in the eye of the beholder, and may not be color-blind.
What is not clear is how the administration intends to collect and analyze the data, given its efforts to gut the Department of Education. As Inside Higher Ed has reported, the National Center for Education Statistics had been decimated, with a staff of more than 100 reduced to a skeleton crew of three employees.
The Bondi Memo
Attorney General Bondi’s July 29 memorandum offered guidance to federal agencies about practices that may constitute illegal discrimination at colleges and other entities receiving federal funds. A lot of it is rehashed, targeting popular straw men/persons like DEI programs and transgender athletes (and bathrooms).
What is interesting is Bondi’s take on what she calls “unlawful proxy discrimination,” defined as the use of “facially neutral criteria” that function as “proxies” for race or other protected characteristics. Per the memo, examples in higher education may include things like requiring diversity statements in hiring or essay questions asking applicants to reflect on their unique identity or to write about obstacles they have overcome.
On a surface level, Bondi is right that those can become back doors to identify an individual’s race. At the same time, knowing the obstacles an individual has overcome is essential to understanding his or her unique story, and race would seem to be one of the factors that can heavily influence that story.
Where Bondi goes off the rails is in maintaining that what she calls “geographic targeting” may constitute a potentially unlawful proxy. She is suggesting that recruitment or outreach in schools and communities with high levels of racial minorities may be illegal. That is preposterous. Trying to expand access to education through outreach is in no way comparable to reverse engineering an admission process to arrive at a desired class composition.
Taken to its logical extreme, Bondi’s guidance would prevent colleges from recruiting not only at inner-city schools with a large percentage of Black students, but also at suburban schools with a large percentage of affluent white students. Both could be examples of what she calls “geographic targeting.” For that matter, colleges might be in violation for asking for an applicant’s address, because ZIP code information can be used as a proxy for determining race and socioeconomic status.
New Data Collection Requirements
As for data collection for IPEDS, the administration has proposed a new “Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement,” or ACTS. ACTS will require targeted colleges and universities to report data in the following categories, disaggregated by race and sex:
Admissions test score quintile
GPA quintile
Family income range
Pell Grant eligibility
Parental education
It will also ask for information to be broken down for early decision, early action and regular admission as well as institutional need-based and merit aid. What’s missing? Legacy status and athletic recruits, both categories that benefit white applicants. At some of the Ivies, between 10-20 percent of the undergraduates are athletes, many in “country club” sports where most of the competitors are wealthy and white, and the proportion of athletes is even higher at the highly selective liberal arts colleges that make up the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Discovery in SFFA v. Harvard revealed that recruited athletes had an 86 percent admit rate. You don’t have to have had an uncle who taught at MIT to know that is substantially higher than the overall admit rate.
ACTS will apparently apply only to “all four-year institutions who utilize selective college admissions,” which the administration maintains “have an elevated risk of noncompliance with the civil rights laws.” That may at first glance seem to be singling out elite, “name” colleges, and that’s probably the intent, but it also reflects a recognition that the vast majority of institutions couldn’t practice race-based admission even if they wanted to because they are too busy filling the class to worry about crafting the class.
The focus on selective institutions will both make it easy to score political points and hard to derive meaning from the data. Selectivity, especially at the 5-10 percent level, makes it impossible to know why any individual is or isn’t admitted. Admission deans at the highly-selective (or rejective) universities report that they could fill several additional freshman classes from among those applicants who have been waitlisted or denied.
Merit-Based Admission
The real target of the push for “merit-based” admission may be holistic review. A holistic admission process allows colleges to take into consideration nuances in an individual’s background and life experiences. It can also be frustrating for applicants, since different individuals are admitted for different reasons. The government may be pushing consciously or unconsciously for a more formulaic selection process.
But would that be any better? Even if you focus only on grades and test scores, should you put more weight on a three-hour test or on four years of high school? How do you compare applicants from schools with different grading scales and levels of academic rigor? Should a test score obtained after thousands of dollars in test prep count the same as an identical score without coaching?
How do we distinguish between merit and privilege? Those who have strong test scores may be more likely to believe that test scores are a measure of merit, and yet test scores are strongly correlated with family income. Those who are born into wealth and privilege may come to believe that their good fortune is a proxy for merit, buying into a perverse and self-serving interpretation of John Calvin’s doctrine of the elect. They may see themselves as deserving rather than lucky.
Proxies in Admission
We need a larger discussion about proxies in college admission. Advanced Placement courses are a proxy for a rigorous curriculum. GPA is a proxy for academic accomplishment, and yet means little without understanding context. Similarly, SAT scores are often seen as a proxy for ability, despite the fact that the College Board long ago abandoned the pretense that the SAT measures “aptitude.” The U.S. News & World Report college rankings have always relied on proxies, such as alumni giving as a proxy for alumni satisfaction when it may be more a measure of the effectiveness of the development office. Selectivity is a proxy for academic quality—feeding into the belief that the harder a place is to get in, the better it must be. Are proxies for race any more problematic than these other proxies?
The larger question here is what should the selective college admission process be a proxy for. Should we seek to reward students for past performance? Predict who will earn the best grades in college? Identify those students who will benefit the most from the college experience? Or predict who will make the greatest contribution to society after college?
I’m waiting for an executive order or memo or even a discussion among college admission professionals about what the selective admission process should represent and what proxies will support those goals.
Jim Jump recently retired after 33 years as the academic dean and director of college counseling at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Va. He previously served as an admissions officer, philosophy instructor and women’s basketball coach at the college level and is a past president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. He is the 2024 recipient of NACAC’s John B. Muir Excellence in Media Award.
As professors, we naturally talk a lot about teaching—and I’ve certainly benefited from public discussions at workshops and panel presentations. But we can also have more intimate moments of instructional insight, private moments we may initially keep to ourselves until over time we come to appreciate more fully their value.
Here’s my hitherto secret bit of pedagogic wisdom.
It’s my teaching mantra. For many years before teaching each class, I took a moment and silently repeated to myself: Be clear. Be engaging. Be honest. Be kind.
As a beginning teacher, it was a simple tactic to calm my nervousness before class. But as philosophers since Aristotle have recognized, daily choices become persistent habits that evolve into enduring character. It worked. As I strove to embody these values, they enabled me to bring the self I hoped to become into the classroom.
Clarity. Engagement. Honesty. Kindness. Simple teaching virtues, yet I’ve come to believe they have a larger salience in the turbulent academic world of today.
Be Clear
Students today are coming to college with their own share of inner turmoil. Unsettled by the disruptions of COVID, facing an uncertain job market, and inundated with social media skepticism about the value of college, there’s a vulnerability to them that’s new.
With their perceptions of a topsy-turvy world, students are understandably looking for clarity, elusive though it may be. Well-designed syllabi and clear directions help, but the clarity they’re looking for is something more than straightforward course formalities. The clarity they’re looking for is a more deeply rooted certainty that they can count on you.
Thus, providing the clarity students are hoping for today involves the self you bring to the classroom. It is more a matter of character than of course planning. Are you someone they can depend on, confide in and trust? Demonstrating these personal qualities hinges on the kind of outreach you make to students from the start.
Be Engaging
Tentative and uncertain as they often are, I can’t expect students to come to me. Personal outreach today means I have to make the first move. It also means doing so by beginning wherever they are. Only by beginning wherever they are can you hope to take them where you might want them to go.
While I dearly love my students, I don’t expect them to be like me. In my teaching, it has been important to remind myself of this as effective engagement depends on knowing your audience well. Particularly as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to ensure my cultural references, case choices and even language use have a resonance for students decades younger than I am. I am regularly grateful to my daughter, a recent college graduate, for exposing me to the current lingo of “crashing out,” the delights of matcha and the talents of Billie Eilish.
Be Honest
Honesty is hard as a teacher, particularly when reading students’ less-than-laudatory evaluations. I’ve certainly had my share of such evaluations and they can discourage extending yourself in personal outreach. But I’ve taken heart from an entrepreneur friend who has counseled openness on my part. See such student comments simply as information, he said, just as he does in reflecting upon investor critiques after pitching a business plan.
Honesty is especially hard when enduring criticism of an unfair or even hostile nature, something that in the classroom can be especially painful. But taking criticism as simply information, as a source for developing my own deeper reflection and critical faculties, enables a self-honesty that I’ve come to realize I need not fear. In teaching law, I am regularly reminded of John Stuart Mill’s insight: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”
Be Kind
Sometimes, the personal outreach you offer matters more than even the latest teaching strategies you might employ. Kindness toward students can make a decisive difference. Once, while suffering from a bad cold and struggling with a lecture, I noticed that a student coughing in the front row was struggling with her own respiratory ailment. While continuing with the lecture, I offered her a few throat lozenges from the packet that was giving me relief. From the thankful look she gave me, I saw that simple unplanned gesture had a greater impact on her than any of the legal theories I espoused that day.
The turmoil of students’ inner lives mirrors the unsettled state of professors’ professional lives today. Many external forces are currently upending the established norms of academic life. From politicians who act to defund us to AIs that threaten to replace us to a public that increasingly distrusts us, the traditional foundations of academic culture are at risk. With such larger external threats to these traditional foundations, little tips for strengthening our relationships with students may appear to have negligible relevance or sway.
But such little ideas do matter, even if only because of the way they contribute to the cultural resilience colleges will need in the coming days. In a deeper sense, we as individual professors are the academy’s foundations, the strength in which its future resides. And the future begins with the values embedded in the teaching choices we make each day.
Jeffrey Nesteruk is an Emeritus Professor of Legal Studies at Franklin & Marshall College. He has published widely in the areas of law, ethics and liberal education and may be reached at [email protected].
High-quality educational experiences are best created when professors partner with instructional/learning designers. This is true for in-person, hybrid and fully online courses. If you are searching for an instructional/learning designer, I would like to highlight that opportunity in this Featured Gig series.
Q: What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?
A: The College is invested in continuing to grow its online presence. We have recently had a number of our instructional designers leave for positions that offered them different flexibility or that allowed them to move into other positions, and this current position is to backfill that space and to support our faculty both in the online space as well as the in-person teaching as faculty continue to learn how to best leverage their LMS to benefit their students.
It aligns with our strategic priorities with regard to providing faculty with resources to best leverage our digital resources to align with our pedagogy.
Q: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?
A: The instructional design team sits in the Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (our teaching center) and reports to the director. In that capacity, the Center engages with faculty in all formats of pedagogy and supports both the face-to-face and online pedagogy as well as the digital resources that engage learners. The new ID will work with the team in the center to align practices but will also engage extensively with faculty as subject-matter experts to best design digital resources for their particular style of pedagogy.
Q: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?
A: Success would be the continued growth of utilization of digital resources such that there is more consistency in what is available for learners in the digital platform. In three years, we’d like to grow our footprint on campus so that we are working alongside faculty in all areas to maximize learning.
Q: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?
A: As a comprehensive teaching center, we encourage our instructional design team to learn about educational development writ large. Thus, we hope that over time our instructional designers engage in all manner of educational development, leaning into digital resources but also aligning pedagogical practice with creating effective assessments and further ensuring that they are appropriate for the learning outcomes of the courses. We expect our IDs to be well-versed in a variety of areas of educational development, including science of learning, so that our center speaks with a common voice.
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Time spent with animals can boost feelings of well-being for students at all levels.
Laura Fay/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Therapy dogs are often touted as a way to give students a reprieve from busy academic schedules or remind them of their own pets at home, but a recent study from Chatham University found that engagement with therapy dogs can instill a sense of social connection for students at all levels.
An occupational therapy student at Chatham who researched how weekly therapy dog interactions could impact graduate students in health science programs found that the encounters produced benefits for students’ social and emotional health.
Regardless of their program of study, graduate students also tend to be removed from general campus services and activities due to physical campus layouts, residing and working off campus, or a misalignment of schedules between resources and their responsibilities. Therefore, identifying services specifically for graduate students can improve their access and uptake.
How it works: Twenty-five students were recruited to participate in the study, meeting weekly to engage in activities with a group of therapy dogs, including petting, playing with, brushing, holding and walking the animals. Students could interact with the dogs for up to two hours over the course of the seven weeks. Before and after each puppy playdate, participants completed pre- and post-test surveys to gauge their feelings and the effects of the animal intervention.
Survey results showed students were less likely to report feeling stressed and more likely to say they felt happy after engaging with the dogs.
“I’ve really enjoyed this experience,” one participant wrote. “I feel like this has positively impacted my mood and well-being overall. I always leave feeling more relaxed and happier.”
In open-ended questions, students said the dogs made them feel happy, loved, calm, relaxed, motivated and connected. Many said they also appreciated the opportunity to engage with their peers, noting that the regular cadence allowed them to socialize and meet new people, including the therapy dogs’ owners. Students indicated they wanted the visits to continue in some way if possible.
The average student spent around 30 minutes with the therapy dogs during the trial, and, if they had the opportunity, a majority said they would participate in therapy animal groups on campus three to four times per month.
Other Comforting Canines
Chatham University students aren’t the only graduate students learning to destress from dogs. Here are some other examples of animal-assisted interventions across the country:
At Virginia Tech, graduate students at the Innovation Campus receive love and cuddles from Allen, a therapy dog who is co-handled by Barbara Hoopes, the graduate school’s associate dean for the region.
The University of Cincinnati featured therapy dogs at their Graduate Student Appreciation Week in April, honoring the hard work students do and helping them break their usual routines.
You have expert insights—plenty of them. You give impromptu lectures in office hours, debate podcast guests midrun and readily join boisterous debates over dinner. Maybe you’re even drafting a book that builds a careful case from your expert point of view. But when it comes time to write your own op-ed? That sharp idea can start to feel too complex, too niche or—let’s be honest—too wordy for 800 words aimed at a general audience.
That’s not a failing; it’s a feature of your training. Academics are trained to distill ideas for their peers, not for nonspecialists. You argue carefully, if not compactly. You cite meticulously, not conversationally. But public writing demands something different—skills to illuminate complex concepts in a way that an intelligent lay reader can follow, feel and act on.
Before you spend an afternoon translating your expert insight into an 800-word article you pitch to a newspaper or magazine, run your idea through this op-ed readiness test. It won’t replace compelling writing, but it may help determine whether your idea is ready to leave the seminar room and live, persuasively, on the opinion page.
Who cares? It’s a tough question, but not a cynical one. Just because something fascinates you doesn’t mean that it matters to the broader public. That’s not a judgment of your topic. It’s a reminder to find the resonance. What’s at stake beyond your personal experience or corner of the discipline? You don’t have to write about what’s already dominating headlines. In fact, if your idea surfaces something overlooked or offers a fresh lens, it may be exactly what public discourse needs. Urgency is not always about volume; it’s often about insight.
So ask yourself: Who, beyond academia, might find your idea clarifying, challenging or useful? Who might see their own experience differently—or see someone else’s for the first time? Who, if they read what you have to say, might think differently about something that affects their life, work, vote or values? If your answer is, “Well, maybe more people should care,” you might be onto something. But part of your task is to show them why.
Why now—or why always? Editors love a good news hook. If your idea connects to a breaking story, an upcoming decision or a public debate gaining steam, then run with it. But run fast. In journalism, “timely” means submitting within hours or a day or two, not weeks. If something is happening right now and you have a fresh angle, start writing.
Of course, not every op-ed needs a news peg. If your idea speaks to an enduring question or a slow-burning issue—and does so with clarity, urgency or surprising insight—it still has a shot. Just know that in an editor’s crowded inbox, a time peg can help your piece stand out. An “evergreen” op-ed may need to work harder and land stronger to compete.
Can you make your case by paragraph two? You don’t have to dumb down your argument, but you do have to speed it up. Public readers and their editors have strong opinions about long, slow windups. Spoiler: They don’t like them.
Try writing a working headline for your piece that’s under 60 characters. Then distill your argument in one or two crisp, compelling sentences—no acronyms, no jargon and no “hence” or “thus.” (Also, no “as Foucault reminds us.”) These sentences should appear early, ideally by the end of paragraph two. At first, this mandate can feel reductive. But being concise isn’t a betrayal of complexity. It’s a tool for focus. You’re not flattening your idea; you’re making it easy to find. If your piece needs detailed footnotes or a literature review, it’s probably not (yet) an op-ed.
What’s the aha? Your op-ed should offer insight that readers haven’t already heard several times this week. If your takeaway is “what you’ve heard, but with citations,” then it may still need sharpening. Some of the best pieces offer a twist such as an unexpected data point, an odd-but-illuminating comparison or a perspective that flips conventional wisdom on its head. You’re trying to make an intelligent reader think, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Are you writing to connect—or to impress? You’re not writing to prove you’ve done the reading; you’re writing to help someone else think differently. Your op-ed should feel like an intelligent conversation over coffee, not a cautious explanation in a lecture hall. You don’t have to be breezy or punchy (unless that’s your style), but you should sound like a real person with a distinct voice. This isn’t about being casual for its own sake. It’s about being readable.
If your draft feels like it could be suitable for peer review, try loosening the syntax. Ask yourself: How would I say this to a smart friend who doesn’t share my training? Readers want active verbs, not hedges. When you write like someone who wants to be understood—not just cited—you don’t dilute your thinking; you make it land.
Will a reader remember it tomorrow? A good op-ed doesn’t just inform, it lingers. It leaves a mark, even a small one, on a reader’s thinking. That might come from a vivid image, a well-turned phrase or a question that unsettles something they thought they knew. If your argument is technically sound but leaves no lasting impression, it’s worth asking: What do I know that will stay with the reader? What might echo later, in a moment of uncertainty, over a dinner-table debate or in a voting booth?
If your idea for an op-ed makes it through these six questions, chances are it’s ready to leave the seminar room. From there, it’s all about shaping the piece—tightening the structure, sharpening the language and leading with your point. An op-ed doesn’t need to say everything you know on your topic. It just needs to make one point well, in a way that readers will remember.
Not every idea belongs on the op-ed page—but yours might. Ask the questions, trust your instincts and, when you’re ready, write it, shape it and send it.
And if you’d like more help along the way, sign up for my monthly newsletter. You’ll get notice of each new article in “The Public Scholar,” plus practical writing tips, behind-the-scenes insights from my work and inspiration from other academics finding their voice in public spaces. Your expertise is hard-won. What might happen if you shared what you know more broadly?
Susan D’Agostino is a mathematician whose stories have published in The Atlantic, BBC, Scientific American, The Washington Post, Wired, The Financial Times, Quanta and other leading publications. Her next book, How Math Will Save Your Life, will be published by W. W. Norton. Sign up for Susan’s free monthly newsletter here.
It’s been a busy summer at HESA Towers. We’ve been developing Boardwise, our new suite of governance products with our partners at Balsam Advisory, and exploring new ideas on data governance and analytics with our friends at Plaid Analytics. We’ve also been touring the country with the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Thought Leadership Office and the Business + Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) to talk about higher education, economic growth and productivity. The “what we heard” document from those sessions will be out in mid-September, and there are several follow-up events scheduled, including a leaders’ summit hosted by RBC later this month. This event will focus mainly on how higher education and business can work together to tackle some of the country’s most pressing challenges, such as clean energy and technology, artificial intelligence, and defence. Further insights from this work will also be explored at the BHER Executive Summit in February 2026.
And, of course, our own Re: University conference – where we will be presenting some of the most interesting ideas out there to improve and inspire the quality, effectiveness and experience of postsecondary education in Canada – is coming up in late January in Ottawa. (Tickets are going fast – reserve your spot!)
A couple of other small programming notes:
The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada 2025 will be released tomorrow.
The World of Higher Educationpodcast will still come out every Thursday, but we’re back to an audio-only format because editing is a hassle and apparently very few of you are videophiles.
TheFifteen will continue to bring you the top global higher education stories every other week.
Next Friday will mark the debut of a new biweekly webinar series, Friday Focus, to be hosted by Tiffany MacLennan, surfacing the most interesting shifts and innovations in Canadian higher education – from AI & technology, cutting-edge programming, and the everchanging student experience – through the voices of those leading the change. We hope you can join us.
Our University Vice Presidents Network (UVPN) is going strong and is scheduled to convene in Victoria in November, Quebec City in February, and then internationally for a May 2026 Study Tour in Germany.
Finally, we are targeting the first week of December for the launch of the World of Higher Education Annual Review 2025, a new year-in-review publication which tries to document the year’s shifts across the whole of our crazy sector, right around the globe, using statistics, stories and strategic planning documents.
Now, on to the year ahead.
In most places, I think the hard part for colleges is over. 2025-26 isn’t going to be an easy year, by any means, but the big decisions have mostly been made, future directions have been set and the floor on institutional income has either been reached or is in sight.
Universities, on the other hand, are a different story. They have – not everywhere, but in the main – been more hesitant to act. It’s a conservative sector that is resistant to change, be it financial, organizational or cultural. And the financial problems the sector faces – again, not everywhere but in the main – are going to drag on for quite awhile mainly because international student numbers aren’t bouncing back the way they might have (more on that next week) and because an imminent recession is the opposite of helpful when it comes to provincial finances.
So, it’s going to be a tough year ahead. In my mind, I think there are 5 rules for success.
Rule 1 – Act like Universities are a Means to an End, not an End in Themselves. Literally the worst thing universities can say right now is “universities are crucial, give us more money”. It’s an utterly tone-deaf approach, even if you give it an “elbows up” spin. The sector has been saying it for years and it clearly hasn’t worked, so continuing with this approach is the literal definition of insanity. And the reason it doesn’t work is because Canadians (or at least Canadian politicians) simply don’t believe that universities are crucial because they don’t believe that knowledge and science is useful. Rather, they far prefer a Canada where the construction and natural resources industries continue to call the shots (if there is a Deep State in Canada, it is surely comprised of these two sectors and their watercarriers). The case we need to make is not “spend on universities”, it’s “a knowledge-driven Canada is a better Canada”. And more importantly, it’s not a case institutions can make on their own – they need to make it with lots of other actors, particularly from industry. Alliances, people. Form alliances. Downsize your government relations team, build up your community relations efforts.
Rule 2 – Stop with the Tri-Council Fundamentalism. Federal budgets for research are going to get hammered in the coming months. This will make a lot of people argue that we should ditch all research funds except the tri-councils because inquiry-driven research is sacred etc. I understand the instinct here because so many institutions make council success a key part of the tenure/promotion process. But it’s a bad instinct. No one in Ottawa cares about your tenure processes. You can argue all you want about how basic research is more cost-efficient in terms of driving long-term discovery, but i) the public likes some short-term wins mixed in with the long-term ones and b) nobody outside universities is buying that one story about NSERC funding Geoffrey Hinton’s AI research 30 year ago as a business case for science. Like, nobody. Get over it. Understand that if there is to be growth in Canadian research funding in future, it’s going to look a lot more like Horizon Europe or the Biden Administration’s Chips and Science Act, both of which were widely hailed as being good for science despite – or perhaps because – they are largely mission-driven rather than inquiry-driven. If this is the hill the community chooses to die on, God help us all.
Rule 3 –Focus on what you can control, not what you can’t. Yes, things are bad. You can spend time complaining about it – government is short-sighted, we’re always getting shafted by the granting councils, etc. – or you can get busy. Fire up your friend-raising and fund-raising. Ramp up your spend/effort on international recruitment (more on this next week). Make a big bang with some new programs that stand out. Go big on one theme. Stand out. Please.
Rule 4 –Faster Collegiality is a Must. Part of regaining public confidence is going to involve being able to make changes at the institutional level with much more speed and determination than is historically the case. That means being able to deliver on promises and priority in the immediate term, not in some far-off future, to be able to act as an institution and not just as a sack full of cats fighting over research priorities and teaching schedules. The way this normally happens is to concentrate power in the hands of the upper administration. This is how it works in most of Asia, most of the United States, and increasingly in Europe as well (though crucially, senior admin tends to be elected in Europe). But it doesn’t have to be like that. There’s no obvious reason why collegial governance needs to be slow: it’s just custom and practice. I’ve been saying for a while that better, faster governance is key to institutions in rough times and while too few have heeded that advice, it’s never too late to start.
Rule 5 – Do less, but do it better. Universities are ridiculously strung out. Many forces are at work here, but I will single out two. At a system level, we have governance systems that are great at approving new programs and initiatives but absolutely rotten at pruning them once they have outlived their purpose. Result: institutions do too much, but do it badly, thus leading to enshittifcation. But it works at the level of individual faculty too, since departments tend to hire the biggest keeners in the system, the kind of people who won’t say no to more research, or extra teaching, or whatever. Result: burnout. In a normal organization, a manager would come along and try to make workloads manageable. But since Canadian academia long ago decided that the main purpose of department chairs is to protect staff from unwanted Decanal or Provostial schemes rather than to manage academics’ workloads, there is no one in the system who can actually make the problem go away (high-sounding talk about “wellness” doesn’t do the trick either). So, seriously, do less.
It’s going to be a hard year (or let’s face it, a hard few years), but if everyone gets the basics right, we can come out of this better and stronger.
