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  • St. John’s Suspends CBP Partnership

    St. John’s Suspends CBP Partnership

    Two CBP officers recently shot and killed Alex Pretti, a Minnesota resident who was observing an immigration enforcement action.

    Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

    St. John’s University has backed out of a partnership with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol amid scrutiny of the agency’s violent conduct in a national immigration crackdown.

    Last May, the Catholic university in New York announced that it was partnering with CBP to create the Institute for Border Security and Intelligence Studies. A since-deleted webpage (accessible via the Wayback Machine) shows the partnership was intended to provide training opportunities for CBP employees and offer professional development for St. John’s students. The university also expected to use the program to place students into CBP internships and tap border patrol personnel “to serve as guest speakers, student mentors, and advisers to faculty.”

    But now, the partnership is dead.

    “After constructive, mission-focused conversations with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the decision was made to suspend, in advance of the one-year renewal, the academic partnership by mutual agreement,” SJU spokesperson Simon G. Møller told Inside Higher Ed by email.

    Reporting by Gothamist, a local news outlet, and student media indicate that the partnership faced backlash on campus. Critics reportedly accused St. John’s leadership of betraying the university’s Vincentian values and argued the partnership was incompatible with its mission.

    St. John’s is walking away from the CBP deal as the agency—alongside the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement—are facing sharp questions from the public and lawmakers over violent tactics. Last month, two CBP officers killed Alex Pretti, an American citizen and ICE protester. While some Trump administration officials have claimed, without any evidence, that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist,” his killing has led to heightened scrutiny of immigration enforcement tactics.

    CBP officials did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

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  • ICE Sued Over Policy Allowing Immigration Actions on Campus

    ICE Sued Over Policy Allowing Immigration Actions on Campus

    There has been a significant increase in ICE presence in Minnesota since late December and school districts have seen attendance drop.

    Lawrey/iStock/Getty Images Plus

    A collection of public school districts and university faculty members are challenging Department of Homeland Security policies that allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to conduct detainment activities on or near public education campuses.

    The complaint, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota, comes in the wake of a surge of ICE presence in Minneapolis and Saint Paul and the killing of two American protesters, Alex Pretti and Renee Good. As the threat of immigration enforcement grows, the plaintiffs argue that ICE action at public K-12 schools and on college campuses is not only a violation of the rights of immigrants but also a disruption to the lives of U.S. citizens. 

    Historically, federal regulations deemed public education institutions, churches and other religiously affiliated spaces as “sensitive locations” and therefore they were off limits to immigration enforcement teams, except in rare pre-approved circumstances. But on Jan. 21, 2025, President Trump revoked that policy, opening the flood gates to increased ICE activity in all spaces.

    That change has endangered students of all backgrounds, driven away families from classrooms and obstructed access to education, said Democracy Forward, the nonprofit law firm that is representing plaintiffs. The firm specifically pointed to overall attendance rates among schools in the Twin Cities, saying in a news release that “some districts [are] reporting attendance declines of nearly one-third within weeks.”

    “This is unlawful, reckless, and legally and morally indefensible,” Democracy Forward president and CEO Skye Perryman said in a news release. “We are in court because children should never have to look over their shoulders at school or worry that their loved ones could be taken away at the schoolhouse gate, and because the government cannot undermine decades of settled policy without regard for students, educators, or the law.”

    The firm, which has led many lawsuits against the Trump administration in its first year, is hopeful that the court will rule in its favor once again as it has already seen success in a similar case concerning religious houses of worship.

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  • Texas can’t build a premier workforce without foreign researchers

    Texas can’t build a premier workforce without foreign researchers

    For all his criticism and condemnation of higher education, Texas governor Gregg Abbott is proud of the state’s institutions. He’s designated billions of public dollars to fund them. Speaking to a crowd of 400 higher ed leaders at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s leadership conference in 2023, Abbott praised attendees for putting the state “on a trajectory of excellence in higher education.”

    A high-quality higher education has many components, he said, but one of the most important elements “is having top-notch research universities to educate the next generation of innovative leaders needed by employers in the state.”

    He told the crowd that the reason CEOs are choosing to call Texas home is because of the “premier workforce” universities are creating.

    It’s puzzling, then, that as he’s championing the state’s research might, he has made it harder for institutions to attract the best academic talent in the world. Last week Abbott put a freeze until the end of May next year on public universities granting new H-1B visas without first obtaining written permission from the Texas Workforce Commission.

    For nearly 40 years, universities have used H-1B visas to attract the best and brightest minds to their institutions. With 12 public, R-1 research universities, Texas has the second highest number of H-1B visa holders in the country, behind California’s colleges. Lawmakers allowed universities to be exempt from the national annual cap on H-1B visas because they recognized how important foreign academic talent is to the innovation economy and training the next generation of workers.

    When Abbott announced the freeze, he cited reports of abuse of the H-1B visa program and said he wanted to ensure “American jobs are going to American workers.” But higher education isn’t using cheap foreign labor to avoid hiring American citizens. On the contrary, institutions are competing in a global marketplace against China, who introduced its own version of an H-1B visa last year, and English-speaking peers in the U.K., Canada and Australia to bring the best mathematicians, epidemiologists, economists and others to their campuses.

    Abbott understands how important academic research is to the Texas economy. In 2023, he signed into law the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund meant to encourage the expansion of the semi-conductor industry in the state and “further develop the expertise and capacity of Texas institutions of higher education” in order to maintain the state’s position as “the nation’s leader in semiconductor manufacturing.”

    In December, Abbott awarded $4.8 million from the fund to the Texas Quantum Institute (TQI) at the University of Texas at Austin to establish the QLab, a quantum-enhanced semiconductor metrology facility.

    TQI co-director Elaine Li is a physicist from China. According to her UT Austin bio, she came to the U.S. after her professor at Beijing Normal University encouraged her to expand her horizons. She thought “What the heck? It might be fun,” and so she enrolled at the University of Michigan to get a Ph.D. She’s been at UT Austin since 2007.

    I don’t know if Li was ever in the country on an H-1B visa, but her story is typical of so many other international researchers who come here—she’s smart, hungry and passionate about working on complex problems with the best minds in the world. Those are the type of talented people who help cultivate Abbott’s premier workforce in Texas. Fewer H-1B visa holders means fewer physicists advancing Texas’s semiconductor economy, fewer biomedical researchers at its health centers and fewer top-notch professors in its classrooms inspiring the next generation of innovative leaders.

    In September, Trump raised the cost of an H-1B visa to $100,000, making it prohibitive for many colleges to recruit talented researchers. On the back of that decision, economists downgraded their predictions for the country’s economic growth because of the loss of foreign talent. That Texas doubled down on the restrictions by freezing new applications is short-sighted and economically risky. Abbott, up for reelection in November, may have scored a political win by stopping universities from recruiting foreign scholars, but the long-term consequences to the state’s innovation economy could outlast his time in office.

    Sara Custer is editor in chief at Inside Higher Ed.

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  • “Unavoidable” Home Office delays disrupt January intake

    “Unavoidable” Home Office delays disrupt January intake

    The Home Office has written to UK universities to explain that “mandatory checks” have caused “unavoidable delays” for students hoping to enrol in the January intake.

    Despite institutions issuing CAS numbers as early as September 2025, some applicants have been experiencing long delays as they wait for the outcome of their visa application. The situation has meant that many students have missed the start date for their course as they have been unable to travel.

    In communications seen by The PIE, the Home Office has invited universities to extend the latest day of acceptance for any student still waiting on a visa decision, in a bid to clear a backlog that has extended into the month of February.

    Pakistan has been widely reported as experiencing visa delays, however, a wider range of nationalities appear to have been impacted than initially expected, with university stakeholders reporting applicants from other South Asian and African countries still awaiting decisions.

    Syed Nooh, head of global insights and market development at the University of East Anglia spoke to The PIE, explaining that “a number of colleagues across the sector” had raised the alarm that “up to 50% of students were still awaiting a decision” for the winter intake.   

    “At UEA, we issued almost all CAS numbers before Christmas to ensure students had ample time to submit their visa applications. Despite this proactive approach, a significant number of our students are still awaiting visa decisions,” continued Nooh.

    The PIE also spoke to a Russell Group university representative who described the level of delays in visa decisions as a “new” and “concerning” scenario for the institution.

    Katie Layt, director of partnerships and growth at Enroly, has been exploring CAS issuance data on the platform, revealing that while individual institutions and students have been experiencing problems, the overall trend has been faster CAS processing than the same previous year.

    “The recent uptick in India and Nigeria processing times reflects seasonal patterns rather than systemic delays,” explained Layt.  

    “Both countries are still processing significantly faster than last January (by 17% and 25% respectively). While we’re seeing a temporary spike from their December lows, these remain within normal ranges. We’re monitoring all key markets closely to identify any emerging trends.”

    When asked for further information on the mandatory checks causing delays, a Home Office spokesperson told The PIE: “All visa applications are assessed on individual merit in line with immigration rules.”

    “Where further information or checks are required, decisions may take longer. This helps prevent abuse of the immigration system and non-genuine students, including individuals who attempt to use the student route to claim asylum in the United Kingdom.”

    Where further information or checks are required, decisions may take longer. This helps prevent abuse of the immigration system and non-genuine students, including individuals who attempt to use the student route to claim asylum in the UK

    UK Home Office

    Many UK universities have been performing pre-emptive compliance controls by pausing recruitment from countries that are perceived to be higher compliance risk, in accordance with Home Office action plans.

    They are attempting to meet new Basic Compliance Assessment (BCA) metrics that were outlined in the government’s white paper on immigration, where breach of a tighter five-percentage-point benchmark for visa refusals may result in the revocation of a university’s sponsor licence or damage to reputation through a public red-amber-green rating system.

    If a student exceeds the latest date of acceptance listed on their CAS number, they are likely to to be refused a visa. Consequently, many applicants have now been deferred or withdrawn already as universities cannot risk potential visa rejections.

    It is not clear how many decisions remain outstanding for students who are still in a position to travel and start their courses in the UK.

    The situation comes at a time when university stakeholders are reacting to a new international education strategy that prioritises diplomatic support for activity delivered overseas. The strategy has been criticised for failing to address the ongoing disconnect between immigration policy and international education policy at home.

    There is hope that the Home Office will join a new Education Sector Action Group (ESAG) to help improve visa issuance and service standards for future intakes, including improve data infrastructure.

    The PIE understands that some universities are seeking legal advice on the potential impact of visa rejections and delays linked to UKVI operational standards, the accuracy of immigration data and the timing of when BCA metrics will be measured and made public.

    Join us at The PIE Live Europe 2026 as we discuss navigating success and setbacks in high risk markets, the impact of the new BCA requirements in admissions, and the UK’s new international education strategy. See the agenda here.

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  • Student work is here to stay: how universities can respond effectively

    Student work is here to stay: how universities can respond effectively

    Author:
    Professor Adrian Wright, Martin Lowe, Dr Mark Wilding and Mary Lawler

    Published:

    This blog was kindly authored by Professor Adrian Wright, Martin Lowe, Dr Mark Wilding and Mary Lawler from the University of Lancashire, authors of Student Working Lives (HEPI report 195).

    Our Student Working Lives report paints a stark picture of how paid work has become woven into the student experience. In the recent HEPI webinar discussing the report, the panel was asked what we would like to see to support students in paid work while studying. The answer isn’t down to one department or process. It requires university departments to work collectively to embrace the modern realities of student life and maximise the benefits of paid work for students.  

    Why does this matter?

    The hours students work have an impact on engagement, belongingness, likelihood of withdrawal and student outcomes. Furthermore, the quality of work also affects outcomes, with those working reasonable hours in good quality jobs being significantly more likely to obtain a good honours degree. These findings advance conversations about working hours and highlight that job quality is a critical, often-overlooked, determinant of student success. As the HEPI/Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey points out, 67% of students are working. This issue impacts most students, and in the context of increasing pressure on universities to respond to B3, BCA and TEF metrics. If universities want to close attainment gaps, improve wellbeing, and support diverse learners, a priority needs to be how universities can best support students working while studying.

    What universities can do?

    Universities can respond by working internally and cross-institutionally to focus on the tensions that students experience and ease pathways for better quality employment, whilst lobbying for better financial conditions for students.

    Firstly, universities can ensure institutional practices are sympathetic to the modern-day student experience. This means regularly updating and clearly communicating cost‑of‑living guidance so applicants and current students can plan and make informed financial decisions. Some universities, including our own, are introducing timetables and assessment calendars that shift towards a more inclusive and student-focused model of course delivery.  Also, mitigating circumstances policies provide a vital lifeline for students; therefore, recognising the centrality of paid work enables students to succeed alongside the increased burden of paid work.

    Universities can fully integrate students’ working lives into the learning experience. This involves developing credit-bearing curriculum interventions that help students recognise, reflect on, and leverage the transferable skills they gain through paid work, and treating paid work as an integral part of learning. This would further enhance employability within courses, creating a framework to support progression and graduate outcomes.

    Universities should invest in expanding careers provision to help students access quality jobs that are meaningful, skilled and career relevant. This would maximise the benefit of curriculum interventions for students and leverage and expand the work careers services in finding quality jobs for students.

    Partnership working is an essential part of supporting students in the context of a continuing cost-of-living crisis, improving access to good-quality work and protecting students from inhospitable work conditions that can be detrimental to student success. Universities can use their collective voice, through mission groups and policy responses, to encourage the government to further acknowledge the financial realities of students to influence policy decisions on maintenance loans, grants, and thresholds to ensure financial policy decisions have the most impact, alongside articulating the vital social and economic contribution students in paid work make within their communities.

    Partnerships with student unions around employment rights training can ensure students can access good employment advice when needed and lead an important conversation about the quality of employment within student communities.  To support this, universities should work in partnership with local employers and authorities to create structured pathways into meaningful local employment, ensure students can access roles aligned with regional skills needs, and contribute to regional growth and graduate retention.

    As this blog makes clear, universities that recognise and respond to this reality will improve academic outcomes, support wellbeing, reduce inequalities, and build stronger relationships with their local communities. However, no one response is more important than another; institutional working is required to maximise the benefits of paid work for students.

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  • Kindergarten readiness varies widely by income, new data shows

    Kindergarten readiness varies widely by income, new data shows

    This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission. 

    SAN ANTONIO — Sandra Mosqueda watched with an amused smile as her 2-year-old son, Atreus, began sweeping the floor with a miniature mop.

    Atreus is part of the inaugural class of infants and toddlers receiving free preschool in a citywide program in San Antonio, Texas. It’s something his mother doesn’t take for granted. As a child, she herself wasn’t able to start preschool this young. In the case of her two older boys — now in first grade and kindergarten — the free preschool set them up for success in elementary school.

    The first five years of a child’s life are among the most critical for their development. Those years lay a foundation and prepare them for kindergarten, often setting them up for success throughout school and beyond. But immense disparities exist in whether parents across the country report their child as ready for kindergarten, new data from the National Survey for Children’s Health shows.

    Nationally, nearly two-thirds of children were reported in the survey as on track for kindergarten, regardless of their families’ income. However, the gap in kindergarten readiness is substantial when comparing reports from the poorest families and the wealthiest — approximately a 20 percent difference.

    Administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, the federal survey offers a glimpse into school readiness by collecting responses annually from thousands of parents and guardians on their children’s early learning, social-emotional development, self-regulation, motor development and health. The latest results were released in December.

    Low-income children often have less access to experiences that boost school readiness, such as high-quality early learning opportunities. That isn’t to say those kids haven’t made gains. Over the past few years, the survey’s portion of on-track children from families earning less than the federal poverty line — just under $32,000 for a family of four in 2024 — has trended upward nationwide by a few percentage points.

    Some city and state programs are working to boost that improvement by expanding preschool opportunities for children from low-income families. The mission is even more urgent as parents juggle soaring child care costs and a widening affordability gap. 

    San Antonio’s program, called Pre-K 4 SA, is a prime example. It’s designed to serve low-income and working-class families throughout the city, offering 2,000 preschool seats for 3- and 4-year-olds — 80 perecnt of them free to families who qualify. The program, which opened in 2013, is funded through the city’s sales tax and expanded last year to include four infant and toddler classrooms in its new South Education Center. The preschools also offer an unusually broad mix of services, in recognition that poverty raises a complex blend of obstacles to kindergarten readiness.

    Citywide early childhood programs have also emerged in recent years in Denver, New York, Boston, and Chicago, among others.

    Students who have completed Pre-K 4 SA have scored higher than the state average on third grade math and reading, according to the Urban Education Institute at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Those outcomes contribute to what Sarah Baray, CEO of Pre-K 4 SA, views as a key success of the program: Children with the greatest needs receive the same quality education as kids from wealthier families.

    “The quality is so high that even families who could afford to go anywhere try to get into our schools,” Baray said.

    Pre-K 4 SA students arrive to catch the school bus, Oct. 9, 2025, in San Antonio. Credit: Eric Gay/AP Photo

    Related: Let’s talk: Teachers pushed to converse more with the youngest kids 

    Many experts agree that one of the best ways to boost school readiness is to ensure programs meet high-quality standards, such as smaller class sizes and child-to-staff ratios.

    Pre-K 4 SA has implemented a “whole child” approach that develops a range of skills, including socioemotional learning. Baray said the program prepares children “not just (for) academic success, but life success.”

    Kids in Deziree Arce’s class learn to count and recognize shapes just like other preschoolers. But the children also receive guidance from Arce on social-emotional skills to test out all day, whether it’s consoling a crying classmate or resolving a conflict on who sits where at their classroom table.

    “When I see kids that come from, like, where I came from, I’m giving them something that I never got,” said Arce, who grew up in a low-income family and has taught at Pre-K 4 SA for nine years.

    Pre-K 4 SA also intentionally incorporates opportunities for children to refine their motor skills. For lunch, the children in Arce’s class pinched turkey burgers — provided by a local food bank — with tongs out of aluminum trays and onto their plates. Exploding ketchup packets were met with celebration, as some students opened them by themselves for the first time.

    Outdoor play is another critical component to improving motor skills. Students spend an hour outside every day unless weather conditions are severe. In an era of much screen time and time indoors, Pre-K 4 SA students are encouraged to engage in “risky play.” That could mean racing tricycles around the perimeter of the playground, climbing up the slide or spraying water from a pump. Those experiences teach students their physical limits early, said Pre-K 4 SA Chief of Schools Tonda Brown.

    A Pre-K 4 SA student paints during class time, Oct. 9, 2025, in San Antonio. Credit: Eric Gay/AP Photo

    Related: One city’s big bet on finding badly needed early childhood educators — and getting them to stay 

    A major challenge for San Antonio’s program, as well as in citywide efforts around the country, is meeting the demand.

    More than 1,600 families were on Pre-K 4 SA’s waitlist this school year, Baray said. To help wait-listed families, the program’s enrollment team connects them with other local options, such as school district-run preschools or private centers partnered with Pre-K 4 SA.

    Other cities distribute the demand across a wide variety of high-quality preschool programs by offering financial assistance to families.

    Denver Preschool Program offers tuition credits to all families with 4-year-olds. Selected families can then put that money toward any licensed public or private preschool participating in the sales tax-funded program, said Priscilla Hopkins, executive director of Denver Public Schools’ early education office. About 80 percent of DPP’s providers were rated four- or five-star in Colorado’s quality rating system, according to the program’s 2024 impact report.

    The level of financial support given to a family is determined by income. In 2024, nearly 1,800 4-year-olds who received DPP’s tuition support were in the lowest income tier — up to 135% of the federal poverty line. More than $21 million in tuition credits were dispersed in the 2023-2024 school year, according to program leaders.

    However, in large swathes of the country, especially rural areas, private preschools are the only high-quality option but often come with a hefty price tag and little financial assistance. That leaves low-income families with fewer preschool options than their wealthier peers, said Kelly Purtell, a human development and family science professor at Ohio State University.

    “There’s all sorts of challenges that then really limit what preschools are even kind of on the table for them,” Purtell said.

    Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues. 

    A Pre-K 4 SA student walks a beam on the playground, Oct. 9, 2025, in San Antonio. Credit: Eric Gay/AP Photo

    Reliable transportation can be another obstacle for low-income families, especially for parents who work outside normal business hours, Purtell said.

    Pre-K 4 SA’s South Education Center offers free bus transportation to fill that gap.

    As children boarded the bus at a designated pickup spot near Southside Lions Park, cheerful bus monitors greeted them and strapped each one into their seat with a safety harness. Their bus driver offered each child a cartoon sticker for their school-provided backpacks.

    The stress of poverty can hinder a parent’s ability to give their child enriching experiences key to school readiness, which is why services that promote family stability are important, said Katie Paschall, a researcher at Child Trends. At Pre-K 4 SA, that means healthy cooking classes, mobile vaccination clinics and even “family cafes” where parents can get help from staff to apply for jobs. By eliminating those at-home issues, parents can focus more on setting their children up for a better future.

    In Mosqueda’s case, having her kids in preschool allowed her to return to school after Atreus’ birth halted her studies to become a respiratory therapist. She completed a dental assistant degree and got a job at a nearby dental office. No one has cheered on Mosqueda more than her boys — her oldest son proudly took videos of his mom at her graduation last year.

    “It’s showing them you can still do anything, no matter what comes in your way, and having the help to do it makes it possible,” she said.

    Data journalist Todd Feathers contributed reporting.

    The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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    If you believe stories like the one you just finished matter, please consider pitching in what you can. This effort helps ensure our reporting and resources stay free and accessible to everyone—teachers, parents, policymakers—invested in the future of education.

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    Liz Willen
    Editor in chief

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  • “Data steward” is just one of the missing 21st-century professions that universities could be creating

    “Data steward” is just one of the missing 21st-century professions that universities could be creating

    Every day, we generate data simply by living our lives – from the apps tracking our morning run to the NHS recording our health appointments.

    For many communities, this data isn’t just a vulnerability to be managed; it’s potentially a powerful tool for social and political change. Environmental groups use air quality data to hold polluters accountable. Patient communities pool health data to accelerate research into rare diseases. Neighbourhood organisations leverage local data to campaign for better services. Yet unlike other professions born from power imbalances and the vulnerabilities they entail – medicine, law – we have no equivalent professional class trained to help communities harness this power. We have no data stewards.

    This gap between data’s potential as a tool for collective action and our ability to wield it effectively isn’t just a policy problem. It’s an education crisis. And the Centre for Data Futures at King’s College London has launched what may be the UK’s first endeavour to address it: the Data Empowerment Clinic. Led by Suha Mohamed, it is the first dedicated educational infrastructure designed to train a new generation of data professionals who can help communities unlock the power of their data, not just protect themselves from its misuse.

    What makes a profession “missing”

    Consider this: when you’re ill, you rely on doctors whose professional obligations require them to prioritise your wellbeing. When you need legal representation, lawyers are bound by duties to act in your best interests. But when your health data, location history, or browsing patterns are being negotiated for use in AI training, algorithmic decision-making, or commercial exploitation – who represents you?

    The answer, currently, is largely no one. We’ve responded to our growing data vulnerability with top-down regulation like the GDPR, which is crucial but insufficient. Rights on paper don’t automatically translate into practical power, especially when individuals face off against well-resourced data controllers alone. What’s missing is the intermediary layer: independent professionals trained to represent groups of data subjects, to negotiate on their behalf, and to monitor data-sharing agreements over time.

    This is what makes data stewardship the “missing profession of the 21st century”: not because people aren’t managing data (they are), but because the professional infrastructure to serve communities’ interests simply doesn’t exist. There are plenty of data protection officers serving organisations, but vanishingly few professionals trained to represent the people whose data is at stake.

    When universities address missing professions

    The consequences of this absence became starkly visible during the Covid-19 pandemic. We faced an agonising dilemma: either accept increased surveillance to enable essential public health tools, or protect privacy at the cost of forsaking potentially life-saving data-dependent interventions. Had community-led data empowerment structures with trained stewards already existed, we might have navigated this tension more effectively. Communities could have collectively negotiated terms, set boundaries, and monitored safeguards – all while enabling crucial data sharing for the public good.

    This isn’t hypothetical hand-wringing. The lack of data stewardship infrastructure has real-world costs: eroded public trust, abandoned data-sharing initiatives like care.data (a former NHS initiative designed to extract data from GP surgeries into a central database to improve health services and research), and widening power imbalances between individuals and institutions. Recent backlash against UK Biobank’s data-sharing plans – despite built-in consultation mechanisms – demonstrates that consultation alone cannot substitute for genuine empowerment through professional representation.

    Universities are uniquely positioned to address this capability gap. Just as medical schools responded to advances in medical science by gradually professionalising medicine in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, higher education institutions can help build the professional infrastructure for twenty first century data stewardship. The question is whether we’ll take decades to do it – or whether we’ll move with the urgency the moment demands.

    A bold experiment

    Launched in October 2025, and funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, the King’s College London’s Data Empowerment Clinic represents something new: a collaborative “think-and-do” space where students gain hands-on experience in data empowerment practices while supporting real-world communities and organisations.

    The model is deliberately interdisciplinary. Students from across King’s work alongside experts and community partners to tackle challenges at the intersection of governance, technology, and ethics. This isn’t theoretical training; students are engaging with actual organisations in education, health, and creative industries, grappling with thorny questions about how communities can harness data for collective benefit.

    In practice, this might mean helping a neighbourhood group use environmental data to campaign for better air quality. It could involve supporting patients who want to pool their health data to accelerate research into new treatments. Or it might mean working with creative industry workers exploring how to protect their intellectual property in an age of generative AI.

    Beyond the classroom

    What makes this educational infrastructure significant is its recognition that building a new profession requires more than coursework. Along with the clinic’s experiential learning opportunities, the Centre for Data Futures has developed “Skilling for Data Empowerment” in partnership with the Mozilla Foundation – modular learning materials on ethical and participatory data practices designed for students, academics, and practitioners.These materials address the full spectrum of what data stewards need: understanding what data empowerment means, enabling meaningful participation at the point of data generation, identifying the operational, legal, technical, and ecosystem requirements for effective support, and translating concepts into practice across different contexts.

    This is professional training with an infrastructure mindset. Just as medical education doesn’t simply produce individual doctors but builds the foundation for medical boards, standards-setting bodies, and oversight mechanisms, our approach recognises that training data stewards requires building the ecosystem in which they’ll operate. The clinic explicitly aims to support grassroots data empowerment movements globally, not just in the UK.

    The implications for higher education

    What we are attempting matters beyond data stewardship. It’s a model for how universities can respond to urgent societal needs by creating new professional pathways, not just new degree programmes. It recognises that some challenges require what we might call “accelerated professionalisation” – building in years what historically took decades.

    This raises important questions for the sector. How do universities balance the need for rigorous professional training with the urgency of societal challenges? How do we build professional standards and ethics when the profession itself is still emerging? And how do we ensure that tomorrow’s data stewards develop the technical expertise, ethical grounding, and institutional legitimacy they’ll need?

    The stakes extend to students as well. As our economy becomes increasingly data-dependent, graduates who can navigate the complex intersection of technology, governance, and community interests will be invaluable. But these aren’t just career skills – they’re civic competencies that will shape how we manage one of our most precious collective resources.

    A profession worth building

    Our clinic cannot solve this issue alone so the question now is whether other universities will follow suit – and whether we’ll move quickly enough. Data empowerment structures are already being experimented with around the world, but they’ll struggle to scale without trained professionals to staff them. We don’t have centuries to let this profession emerge organically. We need to build it deliberately, rapidly, and well.Just as we’d be shocked to learn that no one was training doctors or lawyers, future generations may look back and wonder why it took us so long to train the professionals who could help us navigate our data age with dignity and power. Thanks to the Centre for Data Futures at King’s College London, at least now we’ve started.

    Find out more about the Data Empowerment Clinic and how to get involved here.

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  • What the Keep Britain Working review means for higher education

    What the Keep Britain Working review means for higher education

    When the Keep Britain Working review was published last autumn, it confirmed that Britain is facing a health-related work crisis – something that many in higher education already knew.

    Across the UK, nearly 800,000 more people are now out of work because of long-term illness than before the pandemic, a 40 per cent increase. Ill health now costs the economy around £150 billion a year.

    For higher education, the implications are profound. The sector’s people are its greatest strength – yet the data shows a pattern of strain and sickness that can no longer be dismissed as individual misfortune.

    The health of our workforce

    Across multiple UK universities, sickness absence has increased markedly, with working days lost rising by over 50 per cent in some cases. Several institutions now report thousands of staff days lost each year, while stress-related absence accounts for a growing share of overall absence, and mental health-related absence has risen rapidly in a short period of time.

    The figures vary, but the direction is clear: absence is rising and long-term illness is becoming part of the picture. What’s missing is a shared understanding. There is still no consistent dataset on long-term sickness in higher education, which means universities often work in the dark when trying to understand what is happening or whether their wellbeing strategies are effective. That lack of visibility echoes what many staff describe when they are struggling: feeling unseen, unsupported or left to cope alone.

    Alongside those who are off sick, there are many more who are “burnt-on”: still working but running on empty. They keep showing up, doing good work, but at a personal cost that is neither visible nor sustainable. The danger for the sector is not just losing people to illness, but eroding the health and hope of those who remain.

    Beyond wellbeing rhetoric

    The earlier Keep Britain Working discovery review warns that once someone becomes economically inactive for health reasons, they have only a 3.8 per cent chance of re-entering employment within a year. Intervention needs to happen before they leave.

    Universities invest heavily in recruitment and retention, but few make equivalent investments in prevention or in the leadership practices that keep people well. Workload management, line manager training and wellbeing initiatives have improved, but remain patchy. Support often arrives after someone has already reached crisis point.

    Across the sector, some people are getting this right. I have seen leaders and teams who act with compassion, flexibility and courage every day. Managers who hold thoughtful return-to-work conversations, HR teams who design genuinely inclusive policies, and departments where kindness shapes how work is organised. These examples show change is possible, but making it systemic remains the challenge.

    From insight to action

    Here are three recommendations from the review, as well as one from my own work on burnout prevention.

    Audit the stay-in-work journey: Ask whether flexible options such as reduced workloads or redeployment are truly accessible, or simply written down in policy. Look closely at what staff actually experience often reveals good intentions, but also gaps and inconsistencies. The aim should be a clear, kind process that encourages early, honest conversations and helps people stay connected and supported.

    Invest in line manager capability: Most absences escalate not because people don’t care, but because managers don’t know what to do. Many fear saying the wrong thing or overstepping HR boundaries, which leaves staff feeling isolated. Mismanaged returns cost workplaces dearly. We need to build managerial confidence, helping leaders recognise early signs of burnout and respond with empathy and flexibility. Psychological safety must extend to managers too; they need permission to lead with kindness.

    Make wellbeing structural, not symbolic: Wellbeing cannot be reduced to a campaign or themed week. It has to be part of how the organisation works: built into strategy, policy and everyday leadership. Too often, institutions say the right things but leave the underlying pressures untouched. Real wellbeing means redesigning workloads, expectations and what we recognise as success.

    Universities are excellent at tracking student outcomes and research performance – but few give the same attention to staff health or return-to-work rates. Building wellbeing into governance sends a clear signal that caring for people is not an optional extra. It is how we sustain our capacity to teach, research and serve society.

    Create spaces for recovery and repair: Burnout is about more than workload. It grows from disconnection and loss of trust after constant change. Prevention must sit alongside recovery, through reflective spaces, manager supervision sessions and wellbeing-led leadership programmes where people can rest and rebuild.

    Recovery begins with listening to those who are exhausted or unwell and asking what they need, without defensiveness. Their stories are data. Recovery is not rest; it is restoration. It is not about fixing individuals but rebuilding the conditions that allow people to return with energy and purpose.

    Each person’s needs are different, shaped by health, identity, caring responsibilities or neurodivergence, but the principle is the same: people cannot get well in the place that made them sick. The environment has to change if recovery is to be real.

    Kind, brave leadership

    If universities can align around these four commitments – clarity of process, capable leadership, structural accountability and compassionate recovery – they can begin to reverse the trends highlighted in the Keep Britain Working review. Not through slogans or short-term fixes, but through culture: by making kindness a core part of how the sector keeps its people well and working.

    Many in higher education know what needs to change, but struggle to begin. The review shows that waiting is no longer an option. Kindness in leadership isn’t soft, it’s urgent. The question I ask my coaching burnout clients feels like the right one to be asking here as well: if you don’t act now, then when?

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  • Maybe a graduate tax wasn’t such a bad idea after all

    Maybe a graduate tax wasn’t such a bad idea after all

    The student loans story rumbles on.

    Today’s “one of the few stories still running alongside the Mandelson scandal” intervention comes from former NUS President Wes Streeting, who was asked on LBC about the fairness of the system.

    He argued that it is “fair” to ask graduates to “make a contribution”, but insisted that a “serious discussion” about the current repayment system is needed.

    Producers had a run at linking his day job via a caller from Bournemouth who’s a dementia nurse that has £105,000 of student debt, and needs to earn £90,000 a year to break even on current interest rates.

    Are student loans “fair and reasonable for healthcare”, asked Elliot. Streeting:

    I think it’s fair to ask graduates to make a contribution… when everyone’s fees were funded and there were maintenance grants, a privileged group of people could go to university.

    You’ll note that “a contribution” is a line that suggests that nobody knows quite how high that contribution is, and masks that it has in fact being getting smaller a) to cover poor initial projections on recovery, b) to cover poor economic performance, and c) to cover the fact that even now repayment recovery seems to be getting worse every time someone in DfE looks at the figures.

    As I often say, there are no “Mickey Mouse” courses, but some provision in the system doesn’t half look like it has ears.

    Quite right

    Meanwhile on the discussion on student loans on Michael Gove’s Spectator podcast “Quite Right”, there’s a grimly amusing machinery of government story, a huge wedge of nonsense about skills and massification, and a clue as to the biggest problem that graduates are raising that government is going to need to address.

    First the Gove-gossip bit, on the introduction of £9k fees:

    … the reason it was Vince Cable who introduced it is because when Peter Mandelson was taken back into government by Gordon Brown to be business secretary, he agreed to be business secretary, but only on condition that what was then a separate department for universities and skills and innovation and all the rest of it was subsumed. So he came back to have a bigger empire and to be first secretary of state.

    Fast forward to the coalition negotiations of 2010:

    Vince Cable was going to be business secretary. The Conservatives had said that we were going to take universities away from the business department and put them back in education where they belonged. And I remember a conversation with George Osborne and I said uh to George, well, you know, if you’re going to make me the education secretary, which you know, that’s wonderful and I’m delighted and thank you, but surely the universities should be part of it. I’m not sort of empire building. It’s just logical.

    So what then happened? Osborne replied as follows:

    Firstly, Vince will only accept the business department or the Lib Dems accept the business department uh if it is just as grand as Peter Mandelson’s business department. Vince Cable won’t accept any diminution in the scale of the business department.

    Gove wondered why they would give in to the Lib Dems’ “vanity and grandiosity” on the issue. Osborne looked at him pityingly and said:

    Do you want to be the minister who’s introducing this tuition fee reform or would you like the Liberal Democrats to?

    Gove continues:

    And then there was a Cheshire cat smile on his face. And I realized then that it would be the undoing of the Liberal Democrats to introduce tuition fee legislation when, as I’m sure listeners will remember, they had campaigned so vigorously before the 2010 election against it.

    Yep. Higher education was a whisker away from a DfE that had Dominic Cummings roaming around it as the key special advisor.

    Cable ties

    Of course the fact that delivering a version of the Browne Review was handed to a Lib Dem-led department then had a major impact on the character of the scheme that was delivered.

    Over that summer, several press stories suggested that Cable was interested in a graduate tax, principally because it would be more progressive than a loan system – something that Wes Streeting had had a serious run at when at NUS.

    As I’ve discussed on here before, when considering a graduate contribution scheme people make competing arguments about fairness. Some say it’s fair for all students to pay the same amount, even if it takes some to pay longer. That’s the features that make a scheme feel more like a loan – here’s a debt, you pay it off.

    But in the end, partly under pressure from the Treasury who at the time had fiscal rules that allowed the subsidies in the loan scheme to be hidden from the books (the so-called “fiscal illusion”), it had to be loan – albeit one whose repayments were to be collected through the tax system by HMRC.

    So to make it more “progressive” – to make it more like a tax – the design was to ask better paid graduates to pay more than average (via interest on their loans) to subsidise less successful graduates who, via the repayment threshold and the 30 year term, would pay less than the average.

    I’ve discussed at length many of the issues with all of that in previous articles. But what’s now becoming very clear is the number one issue for those making a noise isn’t how progressive the scheme is in the aggregates of both all earners and the span of time. It’s the issue raised both on LBC and by Michael Gove’s podcast partner Madeline Grant:

    I have friends who earn really good salaries, really like on paper extremely successful and they have hardly made a dent into their student loan because of the amount of interest.I don’t understand why students are being – I would say gouged is the word I would use.

    Aside from the interaction between this issue and wider intergenerational issues in the tax system, coupled with wider economic performance and graduate jobs, the design issue runs like this.

    Don’t worry, be happy

    In the Cable “it has to be loan but I still want it to be progressive like a tax” settlement, there is no real difference between a £50k loan balance and a £250k loan balance. Under Plan 2, the majority of graduates don’t pay any more – they’re not (at least on a strict technical reading) being “gouged”. They will pay their graduate tax for 30 years.

    As such, the only real purpose of the balance and interest calculations was to have it treatable as a loan (one that Osborne, for a while, was able to pretend there were to be no losses on), and in system terms to calculate which lucky few rich graduates were to be let off paying their graduate tax in their fifties.

    Four problems have come to interrupt the logic. The first is that inflation plus three percent for most of the last decade meant 3.2 or 3.5 percent. The days of ultra low inflation are now long gone – which also makes the borrowing required to then loan it back out to students more expensive too.

    The second is that every time new modelling is done on how much graduates will repay, it seems to get worse. That feels bad for them, and bad for the Treasury.

    The third – the kernel of the Martin Lewis point – is that government then reserves the right, via fiscal drag, to hold down the repayment threshold to improve its recovery rates long after the initial loan was made. The cheek!

    But the biggest problem of all is that to keep it as a “progressive” loan scheme, you end up plunging the majority of graduates into a set of fictions – that they are never paying down their debt, and that they “owe” a ballooning amount as a result.

    And theres only two ways out of that bind. One is to reduce interest – which has already been done for Plan 5, but whose graduates will eventually also be in journalism jobs, finding it hard to buy a house and get a job, and who will be upset about repayment rates and just how long it will take them to pay off the debt now the term is 40 years.

    The other? To return to the graduate tax.

    My beautiful balloon

    Whenever graduate tax has been floated as a system, a lot of arguments (and proponents of those arguments) have claimed credit for eventual defeat.

    Some argue it’s a surcharge on success with no cap or finish line. But it could be time limited.

    Some argue it would be difficult to collect from graduates who move abroad. Just like student loan repayments are.

    Some argue that it breaks the link between cost and contribution. But it’s long been abundantly clear that endless cross-subsidies exist in the system, and the same people seem to think that students as consumers means they’re too entitled.

    (They really mean a student’s funding voucher should go to a given university, only for the bulk of it to be spent on other students in many cases).

    Some argue that hypothecation would mean the Treasury could end up cutting funding to universities. Because the current system is what, delivering untold riches?

    Some say that “with tuition fees you know how much you’ll pay (back) in debt”. Actually, it turns out that you really really don’t, because the government can change the terms, and because nobody understands that many won’t pay it all back by design.

    Some say that moving from loans to a graduate tax creates a generation who are paying both – existing borrowers still repaying loans while new graduates enter the tax. But nobody’s proposing that all graduates ever start paying a grad tax.

    I could go on, but as well as a whole field of straw men, funding (principally) by voucher has other downsides. The people in universities that make calls about programme innovation investment tend to look back at what sells well, not forward at what society needs.

    It has encouraged universities to balance the books by flooding the market with cheap-to-teach degrees that the labour market doesn’t need, cheer-led on by the old left on the romantic idea of “education-for-education’s-sake”.

    Vouchers have put power in the hands of open day attendees much more than they have current students or graduates, with shiny buildings, posh prospectuses and unhelpful levels of confidentiality and competition in the mix. They encourage raising expectations beyond that which is realistically deliverable or experienceable – just to get the sale.

    Vouchers’ defenders invent other problems. “But who would decide where the money is spent”, they wonder, as if there are literally no other ways of deciding how to spend money than through individual transactions.

    “But they wouldn’t start paying this tax for years”, they crow, pointing out the upfront investment required whilst ignoring the debt mountain that’s piling up and is causing public support for mass HE to atrophy, even among those who ought to be cheerleaders – those who’ve been to university.

    A plan for higher education

    The point missed by many of its critics is that there are all sorts of ways of implementing a graduate tax. There are types that protect the contributions raised from graduates into a co-operative trust that can’t be meddled with by ministers. There are types that can invest in diversity of provision, or widening access, or geographical cold spots. There are ways to drive efficiency and increase quality and reduce cross subsidy. Planning, god forbid, could return.

    But most importantly, a graduate tax has a totally different psychology to that of debt. In my later life I’m making a contribution back towards current higher education – feeding forward, rather than struggling to get the weight of debt off my back.

    Crucially, a graduate tax could spur interest and involvement from successful graduates in the continuing success of higher education, rather than the current burning resentment prompted by the psychology of debt.

    As I say, the real reason that student loans are student loans is that for a long time, they were a way of keeping the subsidies involved in the investment in human capital out of the accounts. But the fiscal illusion is long gone. It’s time for graduate tax to go back on the table.

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  • New HEPI Debate Paper: ‘Making Metrics Matter: A more ambitious approach to tackling racial inequality in higher education’

    New HEPI Debate Paper: ‘Making Metrics Matter: A more ambitious approach to tackling racial inequality in higher education’

    Author:
    Dr Katharine Hubbard

    Published:

    A new HEPI Debate Paper makes a stark case that progress on racial equity in English higher education has been far too slow – and that existing accountability mechanisms are failing to drive meaningful change.

    In Making Metrics Matter: Tackling Racial Inequity in Higher Education (HEPI Debate Paper 43), Dr Katharine Hubbard sets out compelling evidence that deep disparities in student outcomes and staff representation persist, even at institutions widely regarded as sector leaders.

    Using new analysis of TEF 2023 results, the paper reveals that high performance on headline metrics can mask serious inequities. Some TEF Gold institutions have Black degree-awarding gaps exceeding 25 percentage points, while many Gold and Silver providers significantly under-recruit Black academics – in some cases to the extent that students may never be taught by a Black member of staff. The findings raise fundamental questions about what ‘excellence’ should mean in a system with such disparities.

    To explore the evidence, analysis and recommendations in full, click here to read the press release and find a link to the full paper.

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