As the final school bells ring and students head into summer vacation, educators and parents alike are turning their attention to the phenomenon known as the summer slide–the learning loss that can occur when children take a long break from structured academic activity.
NWEA research notes that students can lose up to two months of math skills over the summer, and reading abilities can also decline, particularly for students from underserved communities.
But the summer slide isn’t inevitable. With the growing availability of engaging, high-quality online learning tools, students have more opportunities than ever to keep their skills sharp. These tools offer interactive lessons, personalized learning paths, and fun activities that reinforce what students learned during the school year–without making summer feel like school.
Here are five standout online resources designed to help K-12 students stay on track over the summer months:
1. Khan Academy: Khan Academy’s free online platform offers comprehensive lessons in math, science, history, and more. Its summer learning programs provide structured plans for students in grades K-12, including daily activities tailored by grade level. Each lesson includes short instructional videos, interactive quizzes, and mastery challenges. For students who want to get ahead or reinforce tricky concepts from the previous school year, Khan Academy is an ideal, self-paced resource.
Khan Kids, a separate app for younger learners (ages 2-8), combines educational videos, stories, and games that focus on early literacy, math, and social-emotional development.
2. PBS LearningMedia: PBS LearningMedia curates thousands of free videos, lesson plans, and interactive activities aligned to state and national standards. The content is engaging and age-appropriate, drawing from trusted PBS programs like Wild Kratts, NOVA, and Peg + Cat. During the summer, PBS typically offers special themed weeks–like “Summer of Reading” or “Science Week”–featuring playlists and activity bundles to help children stay curious and engaged.
For younger children, PBS Kids also provides games and shows that reinforce foundational skills in reading, math, and critical thinking.
3. ReadWorks: Reading skills are among the most vulnerable to decline during the summer, especially for students who do not have regular access to books or structured reading activities. ReadWorks is a nonprofit platform offering free, research-based reading comprehension materials for grades K-12. Teachers and parents can assign grade-level texts, paired with vocabulary lessons and comprehension questions. The platform also features an Article-A-Day challenge that encourages students to build background knowledge and reading stamina with just 10 minutes a day. ReadWorks is especially helpful for English Language Learners, offering audio versions and question supports to aid comprehension.
4. Prodigy: For students who struggle to stay motivated during math practice, Prodigy turns learning into a role-playing adventure game. Students solve math problems to earn rewards and level up characters, making the experience both educational and fun. Aligned with state standards and suitable for grades 1-8, Prodigy adapts to each learner’s skill level, offering targeted practice without the pressure of grades or tests. Parents can access dashboards to track progress and set goals over the summer. Prodigy also offers a version for English Language Arts, expanding the platform’s reach beyond numbers.
5. Smithsonian Learning Lab: For families looking to incorporate cross-curricular learning, the Smithsonian Learning Lab provides a treasure trove of multimedia collections that blend history, science, art, and culture. Students can explore virtual exhibits, complete inquiry-based lessons, and create their own digital portfolios. The platform is well-suited for middle and high school students, especially those interested in project-based learning and critical thinking. Whether studying the Civil Rights Movement or learning about ecosystems, students can explore real artifacts, images, and primary sources from the Smithsonian’s vast collection.
Keeping minds active and curious
Experts emphasize that summer learning doesn’t need to mirror the structure of the traditional classroom–keeping students intellectually engaged as they explore their personal interests reinforces academic skills in an low-stress environment.
Families can also incorporate daily routines that promote learning–reading together before bed, practicing math while cooking, or exploring nature to spark scientific curiosity.
As the digital learning landscape expands, there are more tools than ever to support students year-round. With just 20-30 minutes of meaningful academic engagement each day, students can maintain their momentum and return to the classroom in the fall ready to learn.
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
States suing the U.S. Department of Education over its mass layoffs claim the reduction in force is impacting the agency’s legally required functions, including research and grant distribution. But in documents submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, the Education Department said states “have no statutory right to any particular level of government data or guidance.”
The department is pushing the high court to let its massive RIF go through after being paused by both a federal district judge and the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In court documents, the agency said “it can carry out its statutorily mandated functions with a pared-down staff and that many discretionary functions are better left to the States.”
Its request to carry through on the RIFs comes even as the agency notified “all impacted employees” on administrative leave in a June 6 email obtained by K-12 Dive that it is “actively assessing how to reintegrate you back to the office in the most seamless way possible” to comply with the court orders.
On June 16 — the same day as the agency’s latest Supreme Court filing — it also emailed RIFed staff for information to help the department in “understanding potential reentry timelines and identifying any accommodations that may be needed.”
However, several of the more than 1,300 department employees put on administrative leave in March told K-12 Dive last week that they do not think the agency intends to actually bring them back. This is despite many of the employees having worked on legally required tasks the department has lagged on or trimmed down since the layoffs, as well as the department’s efforts to seemingly comply with the court orders.
“While they’re saying we’re coming back, they’re also still appealing the [RIF] process,” said one Education Department employee who is on administrative leave because of the RIF. “It feels like they’re slow-walking it.”
Employees ‘in limbo’ as department lags on statutory tasks
The department is still paying all these employees’ salaries — amounting to millions of dollars — only for them to sit tight.
According to an email from American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, the union representing a majority of the laid-off employees, the Education Department is spending at least $7 million in taxpayer dollars per month to workers on leave.
That amount is, in fact, only for 833 of the 962 laid-off Education Department workers that the union represents and whom it was able to reach for its analysis. Thus, much more than $7 million is actually being spent per month to keep the more than 1,300 laid-off employees on payroll.
Since March, the department has spent approximately $21.5 million on just those 833 employees, according to data provided by AFGE Local 252.
While the Education Department emailed laid-off employees multiple times in the past month to gather information for “reintegration and space planning efforts” on government IDs, retirement plans and devices, among other things, several employees called this a superficial effort to comply with court orders.
In the meantime, employees are free to apply to other jobs, start their own organizations, and go on vacation if they so choose, according to employees K-12 Dive spoke with as well as an AFGE Local 252 spokesperson.
“We feel like we’re in limbo,” said an employee who has been on administrative leave since March. “They haven’t talked to us.”
This employee and the others who spoke to K-12 Dive asked to remain anonymous for fear that identification could negatively affect their employment status or severance terms.
Condition of Education report falls behind
This employee would have been working at the National Center for Education Statistics on data related to the Condition of Education Report, which is required by law — and for which the department missed its June 1 deadline “for the first time ever,” according to Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.
After leaving just a handful of employees in NCES, the department has so far released only a webpage titled “Learn About the New Condition of Education 2025: Part I,” which includes significantly less information than in previous years.
“Now all we have is a bare-bones ‘highlight’ document with no explanation to Congress or to the public,” Murray said in a June 5 Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing. “And that is really unacceptable — students, families, teachers all deserve to see a full report.”
In 2024, the report was a 44-page document including new analysis, comparisons with past years, and graphs to visualize the data. It included over 20 indicators grouped by topics from pre-kindergarten through secondary and postsecondary education, labor force outcomes and international comparisons. Individual indicators ranged from school safety issues like active shooter incidents to recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. This year, the department said it would be “updating indicators on a rolling basis” due to its “emphasis on timeliness” and would determine “which indicators matter the most.” More than two weeks after its missed June 1 deadline, however, the report still only includes a highlights page with five indicators linking to data tables, many of which had already been released.
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers have also expressed concerns that the department lagged on its statutory responsibilities to disburse key federal funds, including for Title I-A — which they said took three times as long to distribute than under the last administration. The delay in funding distribution gave states and districts less time to plan for helping underserved students, including those experiencing homelessness, lawmakers said.
The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to K-12 Dive’s requests for comment on its missed June 1 deadline for the report or on how it will increase government efficiency and cut costs while spending millions on salaries for employees who are not working.
Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., questions McMahon during a hearing about the proposed 15% cut to the Education Department’s budget on Capitol Hill June 3, 2025, in Washington, D.C. The budget was consistent with President Trump’s executive order to wind down the Education Department.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images via Getty Images
Department says RIF impacts are “speculative”
However, in its Supreme Court filing on Monday, the department dismissed as “speculative allegations” states’ complaints of disruptions to services as a result of the RIFs.
The states, in their filing last week seeking to block the RIFs, said that “collection of accurate and reliable data is necessary for numerous statutory functions within the Department that greatly affect the States.”
The department relies on this data “to allocate billions of dollars in educational funds among the States under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” the states said in their June 13 response to the administration’s plea to the Supreme Court to let its RIFs take effect. The department has given “no explanation of how such allocation can occur without the collection and analysis of underlying data, or of how the data can be collected or analyzed without staff,” their filing said.
In its Monday response, the department maintained that it is not required by law to maintain “a particular quality of audit.” The states arguing to maintain the department’s previous staffing levels are trying to “micromanage government staffing based on speculation that the putative quality of statutorily mandated services will decline,” the agency said.
However, when pressed by Sen. Murray in a budget hearing earlier this month, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said “no” analysis was conducted about how the firings would impact the agency’s functions or how it would continue its statutorily required responsibilities without much of its staff. The department did read “training manuals and things of that nature” prior to the layoffs, she said, and had conversations with “the department.”
But several laid-off staffers told K-12 Dive that they were never spoken to about how their responsibilities would continue to be fulfilled after their departure.
“They don’t understand what they’ve cut,” an employee said.
This week on the podcast we examine the Office for Students’ new free speech guidance as controversial requirements prepare to take effect from August 1st.
What do the “deeply disturbing” YouGov findings about academic self-censorship really tell us, and how should universities navigate campus protests and challenging research topics?
Plus we discuss outgoing UKRI chief Ottoline Leyser’s stark warning about “inevitable consolidation” in university research.
With Mark Peace, Professor of Innovation in Education at King’s College London, Arti Saraswat, Senior Policy Manager for Higher Education at the Association of Colleges, Livia Scott, Partnerships Coordinator at Wonkhe, and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
Following the Trump administration’s crackdown on international students, Franklin University Switzerland is opening up its doors to some of those who won’t be able to re-enter the United States.
About 40 slots are open to the students who attend institutions that are part of the Council of Independent Colleges, according to an email from CIC president Marjorie Hass. Franklin University is one of the association’s international members and is accredited in the United States and Switzerland. Students can receive an $11,250 scholarship per semester.
This partnership with Franklin University is just one way that colleges are working to support students amid the travel bans and visa restrictions. Experts have suggested that colleges could establish branch campuses in other countries as another option.
Hass wrote that she hopes students will be able to return to their original U.S. institution when possible, but the Franklin option could help them continue their studies in the meantime.
“I am proud to see an international member step up to offer this enriching academic opportunity to students at other CIC institutions,” she wrote. “I’d like to express my appreciation to Samuel Martín-Barbero, president of Franklin University Switzerland, for recognizing the plight of US CIC institutions and for stepping forward with a collegial offer of support.”
Since CIC announced the Franklin University partnership, Al Akhawayn University in Morocco and American University of Nigeria have alaso agreed to offer a similar deal to CIC member institutions.
More than a week after the Senate education committee released its draft plan to overhaul the federal student aid system, higher education leaders across the sector are still breathing a sigh of relief over key provisions concerning how to hold colleges accountable for student outcomes.
The high chamber’s proposal, which ties a university’s access to federal loans to how much their students earn after graduation, is simpler and more productive than the House proposal, known as risk-sharing, which would require colleges to pay an annual penalty based on their students’ outstanding loan balances, they say.
“More than any other factor, a program having low earnings is the thing that is most connected with the prevalence of students defaulting or struggling to pay down their loans,” said Jordan Matsudaira, director of the Postsecondary Education and Economics Research Center at American University. “This is a serious and sensible proposal to establish what I think of as a very necessary accountability in the higher education space.”
The Senate plan seems to be based on an existing regulation known as gainful employment, which uses students’ earnings and debt to measure whether for-profit and non-degree programs adequately prepare their students for the workforce. But Republicans who sponsored the bill and expanded its reach to all degree programs have been wary of drawing attention to the overlap, as lawmakers have avoided calling it anything like “gainful employment 2.0” or “gainful for all.”
Republicans have historically opposed the Democratic policy, which was first put in place during the Obama administration, saying it unfairly targeted for-profit programs and that a free market would be the best way to regulate the quality of academic programs. (The first Trump administration rescinded the policy, and then the Biden administration enacted a stricter version that remains in place today.)
But now, as congressional Republicans grow increasingly concerned about student debt and skeptical of higher education, some have started to change their tune.
Some say the Senate’s proposed earnings test is likely to succeed and become law, as it’s the lesser of two evils and aligns more with a conservative federalist ideology when compared to the House’s plan. But others view this new accountability measure as just that—new.
“They’re not looking at the Biden gainful-employment rules and saying, ‘Oh, this was a good thing. Let’s do it like they did.’ They’re taking a different approach,” said Jason Altmire, president of Career Education Colleges and Universities, the national trade association representing for-profit institutions, which criticized the Biden regulations. He also noted that including all types of colleges is “a huge difference from the way the two last Democratic administrations approached gainful employment.”
Either way, the provision is now up for consideration as part of a broader legislative package—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—that would cut spending in order to finance Trump’s tax cuts and immigration policies. The House bill passed by a one-vote margin last month; now, senators are aiming to pass their version by July 4.
Since lawmakers are using a process known as reconciliation, they only need 51 votes to pass the bill in the Senate, down from the typical 60 votes. But it also means the legislation has to adhere to a specific set of rules.
Some policy experts question whether the Senate’s accountability measure for colleges will pass the sniff test. If it does, they expect the proposal to be included in the final bill.
How Does It Work?
The crux of the Senate’s accountability measure is tracking the median earnings of students program by program and comparing them to the average earnings of adults ages 25 to 34 with only a high school diploma. If students don’t earn more than adults without a college degree for two out of three consecutive years, then the program would lose access to federal loans for at least two years.
Earnings for baccalaureate degree programs will be measured four years after a student leaves the program regardless of age—a time frame that some experts say is too short to truly gauge a program’s value. Meanwhile, the median income of high school graduates would not be evaluated until they hit at least 25 years old, or seven years after the typical high school graduation. Some higher ed lobbyists say that comparison isn’t fair.
“You’re comparing a 23-year-old, let’s say, cosmetology graduate just getting started with her book of business to a 34-year-old flight attendant who’s been on the job for 16 years who only has a high school diploma,” Altmire said.
A similar process would be used for graduate and professional programs, except the income level would be compared to adults with a bachelor’s degree and earnings will be evaluated further out from when the student left the program.
The Senate hasn’t released any data on its plan, but studies on the Biden gainful-employment rule offer some insights into which types of college programs could be affected most.
Data collected by the Department of Education in 2022 showed that about 1.3 percent of programs not currently subject to gainful employment would fail. About half of the programs failed because of the earnings test, according to an Inside Higher Ed analysis of department data.
Other studies show that of those programs, the ones most impacted will likely be graduate studies and for-profit bachelor’s degrees. For example, about 20 percent of students in each of these sectors failed the Biden earnings test, said Matsudaira, who worked for the Department of Education during the Biden administration and is very familiar with gainful employment. That’s compared to only about 4 percent of nonprofit bachelor programs.
Altmire, from CECU, however, disagreed. He pointed to a 2023 study conducted by Monroe College, a for-profit institution, which showed that nearly 90 percent of the undergraduate degree programs that would fail the earnings test are at public and private nonprofit colleges.
But just because more nonprofit colleges fail doesn’t mean they have a high rate of failure proportionally, Matsudaira responded.
“About 90 percent of enrollment is in the nonprofit sector, and only 10 percent of enrollment is in the for-profit sector, so of course, that should tilt in the direction of the nonprofit sector,” he said. “I would think about it a little bit more within each one of those sectors.”
A Fairer Gainful?
The Senate plan does keep the current gainful-employment rules in place while House Republicans want to repeal them. The Trump administration is currently defending the regulations in federal court, but a judge could throw them out.
Still, policy experts cautioned against thinking of the Senate proposal as an add-on to Biden’s version of gainful employment.
“I think it would be inaccurate to say the Senate took the Biden gainful-employment rules and tinkered around the edges,” Altmire said. “They took one concept from the Biden rules but then did a lot of other things that greatly improved that concept and made it more fair across all schools.”
Beyond covering all degree programs, the Senate plan doesn’t specifically include credential programs, which currently fall under gainful employment. That’s a change that some experts say is a mistake, especially when the Senate is looking to expand the Pell Grant to cover some of these credentials. However, that plan comes with its own guardrails.
“Certificates, beyond any other type of program, are most typified by extremely low earnings, and having those low earnings leads to a lot of loan defaults over all. So the fact that the Senate proposal ignores the certificate space altogether is baffling,” Matsudaira said.
The Senate also changed the test itself. This version only measures a student’s earnings, while the Biden rule measures both income and whether students can pay off their loans. Furthermore, the Senate’s calculation includes all program enrollees, regardless of whether they completed their degree. The current gainful-employment regulations only count completers.
Of these changes, the most debated has been whether to include in the earnings calculation students who stopped out before completing their degrees.
Some policy experts argue that it’s fair to hold colleges accountable only for the earnings of students who complete their degree programs. If the goal is also to increase degree completion, that’s great, they say, but it should be handled through a separate provision than the one focused on return on investment.
“If the goal is to actually measure the ROI, we should be looking specifically at those who earned a degree,” said Craig Lindwarm, senior vice president for governmental affairs at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. “There are a lot of other ways of supporting efforts to boost college completion, like investment in the Postsecondary Student Success Grant program.”
But others say it is entirely fair.
“You shouldn’t be rewarded when a student chooses your school, takes a bunch of financial aid, doesn’t complete the program,” said Altmire from CECU. “That makes no sense.”
That said, higher education leaders from all sectors of the industry are generally pleased with the proposal and say it shows that the Senate has been listening to their concerns.
“We’re encouraged that the Senate is heading down a more productive path,” one collegiate lobbyist said. “This is a much fairer, simpler and [more] effective approach to accountability.”
Undocumented students and immigrant advocacy organizations are still reeling after Texas, earlier this month, swiftly sided with a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against its policy of permitting in-state tuition for undocumented students. The two-decade-old law, which Republican state lawmakers had recently tried and failed to quash, was dismantled within a matter of hours in a move some critics called collusive.
Now the DOJ is employing the same strategy all over again—this time in Kentucky. The department filed a complaint in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky on Tuesday challenging the in-state tuition policy for undocumented students. The lawsuit, which names Democratic governor Andy Beshear, Commissioner of Education Robbie Fletcher and the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, takes issue with a policy that allows graduates of Kentucky high schools who live in the state, regardless of citizenship, to access in-state tuition benefits.
“No state can be allowed to treat Americans like second-class citizens in their own country by offering financial benefits to illegal aliens,” U.S. attorney general Pamela Bondi said in a statement. “The Department of Justice just won on this exact issue in Texas, and we look forward to fighting in Kentucky to protect the rights of American citizens.”
Beshear is trying to distance himself from the legal battle. Crystal Staley, communications director for the governor’s office, said in a statement that the office hasn’t been served with a lawsuit, nor did it receive advance notice or hold prior conversations with the department about the regulation. She emphasized that the in-state tuition policy was established by the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education more than a decade ago.
“Under Kentucky law, CPE is independent, has sole authority to determine student residency requirements for the purposes of in-state tuition, and controls its own regulations,” Staley wrote. “The Governor has no authority to alter CPE’s regulations and should not be a party to the lawsuit.”
The Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education also only became aware of the lawsuit Wednesday morning and reported that afternoon that it had not yet been served legal documents.
“Our staff General Counsel is reviewing pertinent federal laws and state regulations at this time to determine next steps,” Melissa Young, the council’s communications senior fellow, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.
As of Wednesday evening, no new developments in the case had taken place, but Kentucky attorney general Russell Coleman, a Republican, indicated in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that his office planned to support the lawsuit.
“Preserving in-state tuition for our citizens at the commonwealth’s premier public universities is important to fostering Kentuckians’ potential and encouraging a vibrant state economy,” Coleman said in the statement. “Our Office will support the Trump Administration’s efforts to uphold federal law in Kentucky.”
As in Texas, a group of Republican lawmakers proposed legislation earlier this year to prevent noncitizens in Kentucky from qualifying as residents and accessing in-state tuition benefits. But the bill didn’t proceed further.
The new lawsuit heightens fears among undocumented students’ advocates that the Trump administration could target in-state tuition policies across the country, which help undocumented students in 23 states and D.C. pay for college when they can’t access federal financial aid. Advocates also worry the Trump administration could continue to sue red states to secure policy wins desired by both Republican state lawmakers and the federal government. (In Kentucky, Republicans control the attorney general’s office and the State Legislature.)
Monica Andrade, director of state policy and legal strategy at the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education, predicted after the Texas lawsuit, “This might only be the beginning, and there might be future actions that extend beyond Texas.”
Now she worries she’s been proven right.
Pushback in Texas
The move in Kentucky comes as undocumented students and civil rights organizations are fighting back in Texas.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a Latino civil rights organization, filed a motion on behalf of undocumented students in Texas to intervene in the DOJ lawsuit. The motion argues that the speed at which Texas and the DOJ came to an agreement and the judge closed the case provided no opportunity for a hearing or for the public to weigh in.
“Our federal courts are public agencies,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel at MALDEF. “They’re supposed to undertake their work in the public eye. The two parties and the court did all of this behind closed doors in one afternoon, without setting a public hearing … That is a complete abuse of the judicial system.”
“To come up with a consent judgment like that, they had to have been planning this for weeks,” he said. “Every Texan should be offended if something their legislators passed and then never repealed was so easily killed by the attorney general acting in collusion with the Department of Justice.”
MALDEF is representing unnamed affected students, including three DACA recipients: a third-year biomedical science student at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley who is planning to pursue medical school, a student earning a master’s in higher education at University of Houston who was planning to apply to Ph.D. programs and a master’s student in clinical mental health counseling at the University of North Texas.
“She cannot afford to pay out-of-state tuition and will likely be forced to drop out of her program,” the motion says of one student.
The goal is for the student group to become a party in the lawsuit so that it can appeal the decision. Texas and the federal government have until early July to oppose MALDEF’s motion to intervene, but if the judge denies an intervention, MALDEF could appeal that decision as well.
Andrade said that what MALDEF is doing could possibly be replicated in other states if the DOJ challenges more in-state tuition laws, though some states might face different challenges that require different approaches. For example, Republican lawmakers in Arizona included a provision in their House budget, approved June 12 by the House Appropriations Committee, that colleges can’t use public money to reduce tuition for noncitizens, The Arizona Capitol Times reported. Some cited the Texas lawsuit.
The Presidents’ Alliance is in “close coordination with legal, with advocacy and institutional partners to explore—whether it’s immediate or longer-term—actions that we can take” to prepare for different kinds of attacks, Andrade said. “Folks in the states where we’re having conversations, their laws comport with federal law. But given everything that’s been going on, that doesn’t mean that folks should not be preparing for any type of challenge.”
The organization is also trying to advise Texas undocumented students who are “scrambling,” in the absence of any state guidance to higher ed institutions as to when the tuition rate change goes into effect and to whom the shift applies. It’s unclear, for example, whether students with DACA or Temporary Protected Status are included.
“We’re telling students to continue to take their classes and do not make any drastic changes based on this,” Andrade said.
TheDream.US, a scholarship provider for undocumented students, is also gearing up to help Texas students find more affordable programs if they can’t pay their colleges’ out-of-state tuition prices. MALDEF predicted some students’ costs would increase up to 800 percent—in some cases, from $50 to $450 per credit hour.
Gaby Pacheco, president and CEO of TheDream.US, said the organization is prioritizing helping students connect with online programs, because many live in Texas border towns, where commuting to a more distant college could require having to cross immigration control checkpoints.
In the meantime, Texas institutions and students are embroiled in “confusion and uncertainty and chaos” as they await more information, she said.
Daniel I. Morales, an associate professor of law and Dwight Olds Chair at University of Houston Law Center, said what happened in Texas is the latest example of a national trend: the “absolute erasure” of state and local issues in favor of the administration’s priorities.
Morales said two decades ago, Texas’s in-state tuition policy was born out of Republican governor Rick Perry’s recognition of “the reality locally in Texas, that we have an enormous undocumented population that is enormously productive if given the opportunity to go to college,” which benefits the state economy. But now, state lawmakers fear risking their career trajectories if they don’t prioritize partisan national interests, he said.
He doesn’t know what’s going to happen in Kentucky. But if it goes the way of Texas and the attorney general files a joint motion with the DOJ, civil rights organizations such as MALDEF would have to be the ones to fight it, with students as the plaintiffs, he said.
“Students, if they don’t have the resources to pay out-of-state tuition, they don’t have the resources to litigate, either,” at least not on their own, he said. “There’s very little recourse.”
Johns Hopkins, Arizona State and Cornell Universities are among a coalition of 12 higher education institutions and three trade groups that filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense on Monday over the agency’s plan to cap universities’ indirect research cost rates at 15 percent.
While DOD secretary Pete Hegseth said in a memo last month that the policy is aimed at “accountability” and rooting out “waste,” the lawsuit argues that slashing indirect costs rates “will stop critical research in its tracks, lead to layoffs and cutbacks at universities across the country, badly undermine scientific research at United States universities, and erode our nation’s enviable status as a global leader in scientific research and innovation.”
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Boston issued a temporary restraining order, prohibiting the DOD from enacting the cap. A hearing in the case is set for July 2.
The litigation filed this week is the latest legal challenge universities and their advocates have mounted against the federal government’s attempts to cap the amount of money it gives universities for the indirect costs of conducting federally funded research. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy have all attempted to unilaterally enact similar caps, and federal judges have blocked those efforts for now.
For decades, universities have periodically negotiated with the federal government to calculate bespoke indirect cost reimbursement rates to pay for research costs that support multiple grant-funded projects, such as facilities maintenance, specialized equipment and administrative personnel. Universities factor those rates into their institutional budgets.
For example, Johns Hopkins and the DOD currently have in place a negotiated indirect cost rate of 55 percent. In 2024 JHU received $32 million from the DOD to cover indirect costs, according to the lawsuit. If the DOD’s plan moves forward, however, the university would lose $22 million.
The war in Gaza and the adverse reaction of U.S. colleges to the pro-Palestinian movement have completely changed students’ relationship to higher education, according to the maker of a new film about last year’s protests.
A new documentary, The Encampments, follows the movement from Columbia University, where the first tents were erected in April 2024, as protests spread to hundreds of campuses worldwide, including the University of Tokyo and Copenhagen University.
Not just isolated to Ivy League institutions in the U.S.,the movement spread to many traditionally Republican-dominated states as well, Michael Workman, co-director of the film, told Times Higher Education.
“These are not just places where the coastal elite are,” he said. “This movement touched and reached into the middle of America. In places like [Idaho], there were protests every day in solidarity and support.”
He hopes that the film, which he sees as a “counternarrative” to the media’s negative portrayal of the encampments, will “haunt” higher education leaders for being on the wrong side of history.
“For some reason camping out on the lawn demanding an end to a genocide made all these administrators around the world, and especially in the U.S., lose their minds,” said Workman.
Workman said the “twin demands” of many of the students were to support Palestinians and to take universities, which they were paying lots of money, back to being educational institutions.
“Students have seen their educations get turned into moneymaking machines, [instead of institutions] that are primarily there to teach students,” he said.
“This has completely changed this generation’s relationship to higher education, and I think their relationship to the U.S. and U.S. foreign policy.”
He said the war in Gaza has “woken up this generation,” which is why colleges reacted with such force.
“It’s why they responded in the way that they did, because they felt they couldn’t do anything else. The cat was out of the bag,” he said.
“These students are not going to go back to thinking what Israel is doing in Gaza was justified … and they’re going to continue to grow their movement to raise awareness around what’s happening and to fight against it.”
Workman, who also teaches documentary film production at the University of San Francisco, said the response by faculty in the U.S. is “not a monolith” but that it is becoming increasingly supportive of the students.
This has been particularly evident since the detention of activist and green card–holder Mahmoud Khalil, who features in the documentary, he said. Khalil, an international student who moved to the U.S. in 2022, was arrested in March following a crackdown on student protesters by President Donald Trump’s administration.
“The more they repress the movement, in a lot of ways, the stronger it gets, because people aren’t backing down,” Workman said.
“That doesn’t mean that we have this huge moment like the encampment moment, but we’re building a sustained foundation that is continuing to grow with really committed organizers.”
When I was teaching, I always thought of this time on the calendar as the “postexhale” period.
The end of the semester is a headlong sprint to the finish, which, unlike a race where you get to break the tape and coast to a stop, is more like hitting a wall and collapsing on the spot. At least that’s how it always felt to me, at least until I started ending the semester at week 13 (of 15) and using the last two weeks for wind-down and reflection on what we’d all learned.
In the immediate aftermath of the semester, particularly spring semester, I couldn’t be bothered with any thinking or planning for the next semester. The next scheduled activity, usually something I started around the first week of August, would be the specific planning for the forthcoming semester, but there is also this postexhale period where no work needs to be done, conditions that are fertile for thinking and dreaming before the planning.
The postexhale period is the spot where you’re likely to gestate your best ideas, because at least for the next month or so, you don’t have to do anything with them.
I want to plant a seed of thought for anyone who is confronting having to or wanting to make changes to their course in order to accommodate the reality of generative AI technology being in the world.
Here it is: Next semester, do less that means more.
As I’ve been traveling around talking to people about how we can (and should) adjust how we think about teaching writing, one of the persistent worries is that introducing some AI-related content or experiences around ethics or safe use or whatever requires layering something new on what’s already happening. For many instructors, it’s an uninvited and therefore unwelcome burden.
I get it. We can never cover everything to begin with. Here’s one more thing to cover.
But what if we can use this as an opportunity to rethink what learning looks like? As we move through this period where we can reflect and reconsider, we can think about how to boil the experiences in the classroom down to an essence that can be reflected in learning experiences.
Consider the learning that has proved most enduring from the full trajectory of your education and I think you’ll find that it clusters around essential, deep lessons. What has mattered are the moments where we have learned how to learn and think and act inside a particular domain. It is this learning that allows us to go forth and continue to learn eagerly, ceaselessly.
Even as a decidedly and well-documented overall mediocre student, there are numerous learning experiences (in and out of class) that I can point to as inflection points that made a significant difference in the overall trajectory of my life because they provided something essential to my journey forward.
One moment I invoke frequently is when my third-grade teacher asked us to write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then had us try to make the sandwiches following the instructions to the letter. Because I forgot to say that you should use a knife to spread the peanut butter on the bread, I ended up sticking my hand in the jar of peanut butter to fulfill my own directive. I have a picture memorializing the occasion.
That moment introduced me to the rhetorical situation and the fact that writing has a purpose and an audience—and careless writing has consequences. I’m sure I learned all kinds of other things in third grade and maybe some of them were important, but only one moment was indelible, and that’s all I needed.
In high school, excited about the subject matter for my junior-year English term paper (the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe), while being not enthused about the parameters of what I was supposed to do with that subject matter, I decided to write my term paper in the style of Tom Wolfe, earning a not-so-great grade from my teacher, but a meaningful lesson in how to keep myself interested with a task. (I wrote in more detail about this previously.)
Some reflection unearths other moments. A college nonfiction writing class had us pretending we were writing for specific publications and producing columns that could fit under the editorial banner. I chose Esquire, imagining myself a sophisticated male, I guess. We were required to understand how to write for very specific audiences with very specific aims, excellent practice for all kinds of different futures. At the end of the semester, we had a competition where we voted for the “best” columns across a number of different categories. I was a finalist in several but won zero, losing out to one specific classmate’s work every time.
In a conference with the instructor, I must’ve expressed some kind of disappointment, and he said something that stuck with me: “X’s stuff sounds like themselves writing for a publication. You sound like someone doing an imitation of someone writing for a publication.” I walked away believing that authenticity was ultimately the differentiator in connecting with readers.
I could name more moments. My first semester of grad school, my professor, Robert Olen Butler, had us do an in-class writing exercise based in sense memory (which can be found in his book From Where You Dream), and I experienced what it was like to tap into my artistic subconscious for an extended, focused period. Bob was not the most engaged of mentors, but I’m not sure I’d still be writing if I hadn’t had that experience.
When I started teaching, the indelible lessons delivered by my students came even more often, possibly because I recognized my responsibility over the work in ways I hadn’t achieved as a student.
All these moments are rooted in very specific and specifically designed experiences. These kinds of experiences are not threatened by the existence of large language models, because it was clear to me that the point of the exercise is to have the experience.
Of course, generative AI tools could be present as part of an important learning experience, but when generative AI is used by students as a substitute for the experience, the learning is obviously deformed. Injecting LLMs into our courses simply because it seems like something we have to be doing is not a great recipe for learning.
There are some, perhaps many, places where it is not and should not be welcome because it is not conducive to the experience of learning we’re trying to instantiate.
As I think about these experiences, what I learned was really contained in a crystallizing moment made possible by the earlier experience of that class, or even before that class. This is not necessarily predicated on the amount of material covered or the volume of what students are exposed to.
As you enjoy this exhale period, maybe spend some time thinking how little you could do in your course and still have students walk away with something that will be meaningful years down the road. That may be the core of your course when you come back and start thinking about it for real in a month.
In 2023, New Jersey’s Office of the Secretary of Higher Education signed a first-of-its-kind agreement with a digital mental health provider, Uwill, to provide free access to virtual mental health services to college students across the state.
Over the past two years, 18,000-plus students across 45 participating colleges and universities have registered with the service, representing about 6 percent of the eligible postsecondary population. The state considers the partnership a success and hopes to codify the offering to ensure its sustainability beyond the current governor’s term.
The details: New Jersey’s partnership with Uwill was spurred by a 2021 survey of 15,500 undergraduate and graduate students from 60 institutions in the state, which found that 70 percent of respondents rated their stress and anxiety as higher in fall 2021 than in fall 2020. Forty percent indicated they were concerned about their mental health in light of the pandemic.
Under the agreement, students can use Uwill’s teletherapy, crisis connection and wellness programming at any time. Like others in the teletherapy space, Uwill offers an array of diverse licensed mental health providers, giving students access to therapists who share their backgrounds or language, or who reside in their state. Over half (55 percent) of the counselors Uwill hires in New Jersey are Black, Indigenous or people of color; among them, they speak 11 languages.
What makes Uwill distinct from its competitors is that therapy services are on-demand, meaning students are matched with a counselor within minutes of logging on to the platform. Students can request to see the same counselor in the future, but the nearly immediate access ensures they are not caught in long wait or intake times, especially compared to in-person counseling services.
Under New Jersey’s agreement, colleges and students do not pay for Uwill services, but colleges must receive state aid to be eligible.
The research: The need for additional counseling capacity on college campuses has grown over the past decade, as an increasing number of students enter higher education with pre-existing mental health conditions. The most recent survey of counseling center staff by the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD) found that while demand for services is on the decline compared to recent years, a larger number of students have more serious conditions.
Over half of four-year institutions and about one-third of community colleges nationwide provide teletherapy to students via third-party vendors, according to AUCCCD data. The average number of students who engaged with services in 2024 was 453, across institution size.
Online therapy providers tout the benefits of having a service that supplements on-campus, in-person therapists’ services to provide more comprehensive care, including racially and ethnically diverse staff, after-hours support and on-demand resources for students.
Eric Wood, director of counseling and mental health at Texas Christian University, told Inside Higher Ed that an ideal teletherapy vendor is one that increases capacity for on-campus services, expanding availability for on-campus staff and ensuring that students do not fall through the cracks.
A 2024 analysis of digital mental health tools from the Hope Center at Temple University—which did not include Uwill—found they can improve student mental health, but there is little direct evidence regarding marginalized student populations’ use of or benefits from them. Instead, the greatest benefit appears to be for students who would not otherwise engage in traditional counseling or who simply seek preventative resources.
One study featured in the Hope Center’s report noted the average student only used their campus’s wellness app or teletherapy service once; the report calls for more transparency around usage data prior to institutional investment.
The data: Uwill reported that from April 2023 to May 2025, 18,207 New Jersey students engaged in their services at the 45 participating institutions, which include Princeton, Rutgers, Montclair State and Seton Hall Universities, as well as the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Stevens Institute of Technology. Engaged students were defined as any students who logged in to the app and created an account.
New Jersey’s total college enrollment in 2022 was 378,819, according to state data. An Inside Higher Ed analysis of publicly available data found total enrollment (including undergraduate and graduate students) among the 45 participating colleges to be 327,353. Uwill participants in New Jersey, therefore, totaled around 4 percent of the state’s postsecondary students or 6 percent of eligible students.
The state paid $4 million for the first year of the Uwill contract, as reported by Higher Ed Dive, pulling dollars from a $10 million federal grant to support pandemic relief and a $16 million budget allocation for higher education partnerships. That totals about $89,000 per institution for the first year alone, or $12 per eligible student, according to an Inside Higher Ed estimate.
In a 2020 interview with Inside Higher Ed, Uwill CEO Michael London said the minimum cost to a college for one year of services is about $25,000, or $10 to $20 per student per year.
New Jersey students met with counselors in more than 78,000 therapy sessions, or about six sessions per student between 2023 and 2025, according to Uwill data. Students also engaged in 548 chat sessions with therapists, sent 6,593 messages and requested 1,216 crisis connections during the first two years of service.
User engagement has slowly ticked up since the partnership launched. In January 2024, the state said more than 7,600 students registered on the platform, scheduling nearly 20,000 sessions. By September 2024, Uwill reported more than 13,000 registered students on the platform, scheduling more than 49,000 sessions. The most recent data, published June 6, identified 18,000 students engaging in 78,000 sessions.
Over 1,200 of Montclair State’s 22,000 students have registered with Uwill since June 2023, Jaclyn Friedman-Lombardo, Montclair State’s director of counseling and psychological services, said at a press conference, or approximately 6 percent of the total campus population.
The state does not require institutions to track student usage data to compare usage to campus counseling center services, but some institutions choose to, according to a spokesperson for both the office of the secretary and Uwill. The secretary’s office can view de-identified campus-level data and institutions can engage with more detailed data, as well.
Creating access: One of the goals of implementing digital mental health interventions is to expand access beyond traditional counseling centers, such as after hours, on weekends or over academic breaks.
Roughly 30 percent of participants in the Uwill partnership completed a session between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. on a weeknight or on the weekends. Over the 2024–25 winter break, students engaged in 3,073 therapy sessions. More than 90 of those took place outside New Jersey. Students also used Uwill services over summer vacation this past year (9,235 sessions from May 20 to Aug. 26, of which 10 percent took place outside New Jersey).
A majority of users were traditional-aged college students (17 to 24 years old), and 32 percent were white, 25 percent Hispanic and 17 percent Black. The report did not compare participating students’ race to those using on-campus services or general campus populations.
About 85 percent of New Jersey users were looking for a BIPOC therapist, and 9 percent requested therapists who speak languages other than English, including Hindi and Mandarin.
Postsession assessment completed by students who do schedule an appointment has returned positive responses, with a feedback score of 9.5 out of 10 in New Jersey, compared to Uwill’s 9.2 rating nationally.
Unanswered questions: Wood indicated the data leaves some questions left unanswered, such as whether students were also clients at the on-campus counseling center, or if the service had improved students’ mental health over time from a clinical perspective.
“Just because a student had four sessions with a telehealth provider, if they came right back to the counseling center, did it really make an impact on the center’s capacity to see students?” Wood said.
The high cost of the service should also give counseling center directors pause, Wood said, because those dollars could be used for a variety of other interventions to create capacity.
The data indicated some benefits to counseling center capacity, including diverse staff and after-hours support. But to create a true return on investment, counseling centers should calculate how much capacity the tele–mental health service created and its direct impact on student wellness, not just participation in services.
“It would be ideal to compare the number of students receiving services (not just creating an account) through the platform to the number of students who would likely benefit from receiving treatment, as identified by clinically validated mental health screens on population surveys,” said Sara Abelson, assistant professor at the Hope Center and the report’s lead author.
What’s next: New Jersey renewed its contract with Uwill first in January 2024 and then again in May, extending through spring 2026. State leaders said the ongoing services are still supported by pandemic relief funds.
On May 2, New Jersey assemblywoman Andrea Katz from the Eighth District introduced a bill, the Mental Health Early Access on Campus Act, which would require colleges to implement mental health first aid training among campus stakeholders, peer support programs, mental health orientation education and teletherapy services to ensure counseling ratios are one to every 1,250 students per campus. The International Accreditation of Counseling Services recommends universities maintain a ratio of at least one full-time equivalency for every 1,000 to 1,500 students.
“We know that mental health services that our kids need are not going to end when we change governors,” Katz said at a press conference. “We need to make sure that all of this is codified into law.”
