The article reflects on the UK’s AI Opportunities Action Plan, aiming to position the country as a leader in AI development rather than merely a consumer. It highlights the crucial role of education in addressing AI skills shortages and emphasizes the importance of focusing both on the immediate needs around AI literacy, but also with a clear eye on the future, as the balance moves to AI automation and to a stronger demand for uniquely human skills.
These guidelines include recommendations for researchers, recommendations for research organisations, as well as recommendations for research funding organisations. The key recommendations are summarized here.
OpenAI has launched the ‘NextGenAI’ consortium, committing $50M to support AI research and technology across 15 institutions, including the University of Michigan, the California State University system, the Harvard University, the MIT and the University of Oxford. This initiative aims to accelerate AI advancements by providing research grants, computing resources, and collaborative opportunities to address complex societal challenges.
José Luis Cruz Rivera, President of Northern Arizona University, shares his AI exploration journey. « As a university president, I’ve learned that responsible leadership sometimes means […] testing things out myself before asking others to dive in ». From using it to draft emails, he then started using it to analyze student performance data and create tailored learning materials, and even used it to navigate conflicting viewpoints and write his speechs – in addition to now using it for daily tasks.
This study investigates the relationship between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, focusing on cognitive offloading as a mediating factor. The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading. Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants. Furthermore, higher educational attainment was associated with better critical thinking skills, regardless of AI usage. These results highlight the potential cognitive costs of AI tool reliance, emphasising the need for educational strategies that promote critical engagement with AI technologies.
In this opinion piece, Simon Bates, Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President for Teaching and Learning at UBC, reflects on how the ‘fricitonless efficiency’ promised by AI tools comes at a cost. « Learning is not frictionless. It requires struggle, persistence, iteration and deep focus. The risk of a too-hasty full scale AI adoption in universities is that it offers students a way around that struggle, replacing the hard cognitive labour of learning with quick, polished outputs that do little to build real understanding. […] The biggest danger of AI in education is not that students will cheat. It’s that they will miss the opportunity to build the skills that higher education is meant to cultivate. The ability to persist through complexity, to work through uncertainty, to engage in deep analytical thought — these are the foundations of expertise. They cannot be skipped over. »
The article discusses the increasing use of generative AI tools like among university students, with usage rising from 53% in 2023-24 to 88% in 2024-25. It states that instead of banning these tools, instructors should ofcus on rethinking assessment strategies to integrate AI as a collaborative tool in academic work. The authors share a list of activities, grounded in the constructivist approach to education, that they have successfully used in their lectures that leverage AI to support teaching and learning.
The authors share three reasons why AI tools are only deepening existing divides : 1) student overreliance on AI tools; 2) post-pandemic social skills deficit; and 3) business pivots. « If we hope to continue leveling the playing field for students who face barriers to entry, we must tackle AI head-on by teaching students to use tools responsibly and critically, not in a general sense, but specifically to improve their career readiness. Equally, career plans could be forward-thinking and linked to the careers created by AI, using market data to focus on which industries will grow. By evaluating student need on our campuses and responding to the movements of the current job market, we can create tailored training that allows students to successfully transition from higher education into a graduate-level career. »
This week I dug into how the Trump administration’s anti-climate blitz is hampering schools’ and colleges’ ability to green their operations, plus a new report on the California wildfires’ impact on students. Thank you for reading, and reply to this email to be in touch. — Caroline Preston
LeeAnn Kittle helps oversee the Denver public school district’s work to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2050.
In January, her job got a lot tougher.
Denver expected to receive tax credits via the Inflation Reduction Act for an additional 25 electric school buses. President Donald Trump attempted to freeze clean energy funds through the IRA in his first days in office. Kittle, the district’s executive director of sustainability, also considered applying for tax credit-like payments for energy-efficient heat pumps for the district’s older buildings that lack air conditioning. And she’d intended to apply this spring for a nearly $12 million grant through Renew America’s Schools, a Department of Energy program to help schools become more energy efficient. Staff working on that program have left and its future is uncertain.
“I think we’re all in shock,” said Kittle. “It’s like someone put us in a snow globe and shook us up, and now we’re asked to stand straight. And it’s like I don’t know how to stand straight right now.”
Since January, the Trump administration has launched a broadside against efforts to reduce gases that cause climate change, including by freezing clean energy spending, slashing environmental staff and research, scrubbing the words “climate change” from websites, and rethinking decades of science showing the harms of global warming to human health and the planet. Experts and education leaders say those actions — some of which have been challenged in court — are disrupting, but not extinguishing, efforts by schools and colleges to curtail their emissions and reduce their toll on the planet.
Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.
At the start of the year, the State University of New York was awarded $15 million to buy 350 electric vehicle charging stations. “We have yet to see the dollars,” said its chancellor, John B. King Jr. A webinar on the Department of Transportation grant program, which is funded by the bipartisan infrastructure act, was canceled. “It’s been radio silence,” said Carter Strickland, the SUNY chief sustainability officer.
The SUNY system, which owns a staggering 40 percent of New York State’s public buildings, had also planned to apply for IRA payments for a variety of projects to electrify campuses, reduce pollution and improve energy efficiency. In November, it applied for approximately $1.45 million for an Oneonta campus project that uses geothermal wells to provide heating and cooling. It still expects to get that money since the project is complete and the IRA remains law, but it can no longer count on payments for newer projects, King said.
“What the IRA did was turbocharged everything and gave many more players the ability to see themselves as part of a clean energy economy,” said Timothy Carter, president of Second Nature, a group that supports climate work in higher education. But the confusion that the Trump administration has sowed — even though the IRA has not been repealed — means both K-12 and higher education institutions are reconsidering clean energy projects.
There’s no count of how many colleges have sought funding through the IRA and bipartisan infrastructure act-funded programs, said Carter, but the work is spread across red and blue states, and some education systems have dozens of projects under construction. The University of California system, for example, filed applications for more than 70 projects, including a $1 billion project to replace UC Davis’s leaky and inefficient heating and cooling system and a project at UC Berkeley to phase out an old power plant and replace it with a microgrid.
“We remain hopeful that funding will be provided per the program provisions,” David Phillips, associate vice president for capital programs at the University of California, wrote in an email.
Sara Ross, co-founder of Undaunted K12, which helps school districts green their operations, said her group tells school leaders that for now, “energy tax credits are still the law of the land.”
But she expects those credits could be eliminated in the new tax bill that Congress is negotiating this year.
In the past, entities that begin construction on projects before any changes in a new law go into effect have been grandfathered in and still received that money, she said. “No promises,” Ross said, but historically that’s how such tax credit scenarios have worked. She said some school districts are speeding up projects to beat that possible deadline, while others are abandoning them.
There is some political movement to preserve clean energy tax credits. Roughly 85 percent of the private-sector dollars that have gone into clean energy projects are in GOP-led districts, according to a report last year. Some GOP lawmakers have advocated for maintaining that funding, which has contributed to a surge in renewable energy jobs.
Steven Bloom, assistant vice president of government relations with the American Council on Education, said that gives supporters of the IRA some hope. But he said that many higher education institutions are facing so much pain and uncertainty from other Trump administration actions, like the National Institutes of Health’s plan to slash overhead payments and investigations into alleged antisemitism, that unfortunately “climate investments may get pushed down the ladder of priorities in the near term.”
Another important vehicle for greening schools, the Renew America’s Schools grant program, was started in 2022 with $500 million for school districts. Many of the Department of Energy staff working on that effort have left, Ross said, and some school districts have not heard back about the status of funding for their projects.
In Massachusetts, the Lowell school district won a prize through the Renew America program that could unlock up to $15 million to help the district improve its aged facilities. The district’s facilities for the most part lack air conditioning and schools have been closed on occasion due to high temperatures.
Katherine Moses, the city of Lowell’s sustainability director, wrote in an email that the district had so far pocketed $300,000 that it is using for energy audits to identify inefficiencies and lay the groundwork for a larger investment. It’s unclear what could happen beyond that and if the district will receive more money. She said Lowell is proceeding according to the requirements of the grant “until we hear otherwise from DOE.”
More than 3,400 school districts have applied for money through programs created under the bipartisan infrastructure law and the IRA to electrify school buses. After a federal judge ruled against the administration’s freeze on clean energy spending, grants through those programs appear to have been unfrozen and districts have been able to access payments, said Sue Gander, director of the electric school bus initiative with the nonprofit World Resources Institute.
But rebates for electric buses are still stalled, she said. Districts are submitting forms to receive rebates, she said, “but there’s no communication coming back to them through the system about the status of their award or any indication that any payment that may have been requested is being provided.”
The Transportation and Energy departments and the Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the Clean School Bus Program, did not respond by deadline to requests for comment for this article.
King, of SUNY, noted that climate change is already negatively affecting young people and contributing to worsening disasters like floods and fires. For some faculty, staff and students, the backtracking from climate action at the federal level is stirring disappointment and fear, he said. “There is this very intense frustration that as a society we are stopping efforts to deal with what is truly an existential threat.”
Contact Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CPreston.83 or via email at [email protected].
This story about clean energy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our climate and education newsletter.
What I’m reading:
My colleague Neal Morton traveled to northwest Colorado for a story on how phasing out coal-powered plants affects school budgets and career prospects for graduates. School districts haven’t done enough to plan for those changes or prepare students for alternate careers, he writes, and renewable energy projects are not popping up fast enough to smooth the financial pain.
Some 725,000 students at more than 1,000 schools faced school closures during the California wildfires in January, according to a new report from Undaunted K12 and EdTrust. The fire had a disproportionate impact on students living in poverty and from underrepresented backgrounds, the report says: Three-quarters of the affected students came from low-income households, and 66 percent were Hispanic.
The U.S. Coast Guard Academy removed the words “climate change” from its curriculum, reports Inside Climate News. The academy falls under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, whose new director, Kristi Noem, issued a directive in February to “eliminate all climate change activities and the use of climate change terminology in DHS policies and programs.”
Schools with satisfactory heating systems reduce student absences by 3 percent and suspensions by 6 percent, and record a 5 percent increase in math scores, according to a study by researchers at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Schools with satisfactory cooling systems see an increase of 3 percent in reading scores.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CPreston.83 or via email at [email protected].
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
On March 14, the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that it had opened Title VI investigations into 45 universities. In a news release, ED noted that these investigations follow a Feb. 14 Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) signed by Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights. According to the ED release, the DCL — sent to all educational institutions that receive federal funding — reiterated that schools were obligated “to end the use of racial preferences and stereotypes in education programs and activities.”
Among the universities being investigated are both public and private institutions that include Clemson University, Cornell University, Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Kentucky.
An article from the Courier Journal reported that University of Kentucky spokesperson Lindsey Piercy said, “We have not received any official notification of this review. However, the university complies with both the constitution and Title VI. Our graduate programs are open to all qualified applicants. We will continue to monitor and review this issue, cooperate with any official inquiries and, as always, comply with the law.”
Montana State University-Bozeman (MSU) is also among the 45 institutions under investigation. MSU vice president for communications Tracy Ellig released a statement which reads in part: “MSU strictly adheres to all federal and state laws in the hiring of its faculty and staff. … Montana State University strictly adheres to all applicable laws with regard to its students. MSU has well-established processes and procedures in place to investigate any claim of discrimination by students, faculty, staff or the public.”
The ED press release noted that the investigations were prompted by these institutions having partnered with The PhD Project, an organization founded in 1994 with the goal of creating more role models leading business classrooms. It endeavors to improve diversity in the business world by encouraging people from underrepresented backgrounds to attain doctoral degrees in business. ED asserted that The PhD Project “limits eligibility based on the race of participants.”
The PhD Project issued the following statement: “For the last 30 years, The PhD Project has worked to expand the pool of workplace talent by developing business school faculty who inspire, mentor, and support tomorrow’s leaders. Our vision is to create a broader talent pipeline of current and future business leaders who are committed to excellence and to each other, through networking, mentorship, and unique events. This year, we have opened our membership application to anyone who shares that vision. The PhD Project was founded with the goal of providing more role models in the front of business classrooms, which remains our goal today.”
OCR is also investigating six universities that have allegedly awarded race-based scholarships, which it asserts is not allowed, and one university that allegedly administers a program that “segregates students on the basis of race.” Among those schools are Grand Valley State University, Ithaca College and the University of Tulsa School of Medicine.
“The Department is working to reorient civil rights enforcement to ensure all students are protected from illegal discrimination,” noted U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. “Students must be assessed according to merit and accomplishment, not prejudiced by the color of their skin.”
Kelly Benjamin, media and communications strategist for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), noted that AAUP was a plaintiff in a case for which the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland has granted a preliminary nationwide injunction on parts of two executive orders issued by President Donald J. Trump that sought to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs among federal government grantees and contractors, which includes most colleges and universities.
“Unfortunately, the Office of Civil Rights within the Education Department has…intensified the clamp down on speech and expression related to race and identity, and they’ve moved beyond censorship into a true weaponization of federal civil rights law,” said Benjamin. “It’s fundamentally at odds with what the mission of higher education should be, which is the search for knowledge that serves the common good.
“They’re trying to remake higher education into their own agenda, where they can control not only who has access to higher education but what is taught in the classroom, what can be researched, what can be written about,” he added. “It’s an assault on the very core mission of higher education.”
The defendants, which include President Trump and ED, filed for a stay of the injunction pending appeal, which the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit granted. “Having reviewed the record, the district court’s opinion, and the parties’ briefing, we agree with the government that it has satisfied the factors for a stay under Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 426 (2009).” Entered at the direction of Chief Judge Albert Diaz, with the concurrence of Judge Pamela Harris and Judge Allison Rushing.
EdTrust issued a statement from Augustus Mays, vice president of partnerships and engagement, condemning the investigations. He noted: “By using federal investigations as a weapon to intimidate institutions committed to racial equity, the Trump administration is not only undermining the fundamental mission of higher education but is also jeopardizing student success. These attacks are grounded in a false narrative that DEI initiatives are about exclusion. The reality is the opposite: these programs are designed to expand access, increase opportunity, and strengthen institutions by ensuring that all students, particularly underserved students, can thrive.”
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights launched investigations into 51 colleges on Friday, accusing them of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and flouting guidance put forth in the department’s Dear Colleague Letter last month, which warned colleges that all race-conscious programs and policies would be considered unlawful.
“The Department is working to reorient civil rights enforcement to ensure all students are protected from illegal discrimination,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote in a statement. “Today’s announcement expands our efforts to ensure universities are not discriminating against their students based on race and race stereotypes.”
According to the department’s statement, all but six of the investigations revolve around colleges’ partnerships or support for The PhD Project, a nonprofit organization that connects prospective business doctoral candidates from underrepresented backgrounds with academic networks and hosts recruitment events for business school faculty. In its statement, the Education Department said the organization “limits eligibility based on the race of participants.”
A spokesperson for the PhD Project told Inside Higher Ed the organization works “to create a broader talent pipeline of current and future business leaders…through networking, mentorship, and unique events.”
The spokesperson also said they changed their membership requirements “this year” to include “anyone who shares that vision,” but did not say exactly when the change was made. Snapshots of the organization’s website, captured on the WayBack Machine, show different language as recently as two weeks ago, including a section on the homepage titled “we believe inclusion is critical,” which has since been scrubbed.
The OCR is also investigating five additional colleges for allegedly using race in scholarship eligibility requirements. One institution, the department said, was included for “administering a program that segregates students on the basis of race.”
Representatives for the education department did not respond to multiple questions from Inside Higher Ed in time for publication.
Inside Higher Ed also contacted the two dozen institutions under investigation, and their responses varied. The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Carnegie Mellon University said they had yet to be formally notified of any complaint by the OCR, and were awaiting more information to determine how to comply with an investigation.
A spokesperson for the University of Notre Dame, which is still listed as a PhD Project partner, said the university “follows the law and in no way practices or condones discrimination.”
“As a Catholic university, we are fully committed to defending the dignity of every human person and ensuring that every person can flourish,” the spokesperson added.
At least one university on the list has already terminated its partnership with the PhD Project. A spokesperson for Arizona State University said the business school “would not be supporting [faculty] travel to the upcoming PhD Project Conference.”
“The school also this year is not financially supporting the PhD Project organization,” the spokesperson added.
A spokesperson for Ithaca College, one of the five institutions accused of limiting scholarship eligibility based on race, denied that the scholarships the department cited violated Title VI. The department targeted two scholarships, the spokesperson said: the African Latino Society Memorial Scholarship and the Rashad G. Richardson “I Can Achieve” Memorial Scholarship. Both recognize students who work with the college’s BIPOC Unity Center, but don’t list any racial eligibility requirements on their respectivewebpages.
The Dear Colleague Letter released by the OCR last month aimed to greatly expand the scope of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, from one squarely focused on the policies and practices of admission offices to a sweeping decree on the illegality of all educational programs that consider race.
Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education, said the investigations were “cause for concern” among higher ed institutions that may have thought they were in compliance with the Dear Colleague Letter. But he said institutions shouldn’t panic yet.
“This is very clearly [the administration’s] first effort to try and enforce their interpretation of SFFA, as opposed to what most legal scholars accept that case means,” Fansmith said. “I think that schools understand, especially post-SFFA, what constitutes an impermissible benefit to a student based on race…it seems to me that they will probably be on solid ground defending their actions in these cases.”
Recruitment in the Crosshairs
The PhD Project has been a target of conservative activists in the past. In January, Christopher Rufo—a stalwart anti-DEI crusader who Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the board of New College in 2023—brought attention to institutions attending the organization’s annual recruiting conference.
In a tweet, Rufo showed screenshots of the organization’s eligibility requirements for attendance, which stated that applicants had to be Black, Hispanic or Indigenous. Shortly after, Texas A&M University announced it would not send business faculty to the conference, following a threat by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to fire the university president. Rufo did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment.
On Friday morning, the PhD Project website included a list of all university partners, accessible via drop-down menu. By that evening, the list had disappeared from the site. A spokesperson for the organization did not say why it was removed.
Inside Higher Ed catalogued the list before its removal. Of the 45 institutions that the department alleges violated civil rights by partnering with the PhD Project, 31 were listed as partners on the organization’s website Friday morning, including ASU. It’s not apparent what connection the other 14 institutions have to the PhD Project, and the education department did not respond to requests for clarification. But more than half of the 97 U.S. partner colleges the organization had listed on its website are not included in the OCR’s investigation. Its unclear why some PhD Project partners are under investigation while others are not.
A spokesperson for Boise State University, which is under OCR investigation but not on the PhD Project’s list of partners, told Inside Higher Ed the institution is “working with our general counsel’s office to look into the matter.” A spokesperson for the California State University system, which has two campuses under investigation—CSU San Bernadino and Cal Poly Humboldt—said the system “continues to comply with longstanding applicable federal and state laws.” A spokesperson from the University of North Texas, also under investigation, said they are “fully cooperating” with investigations but are “not affiliated with the PhD Project.”
The PhD Project’s annual conference is set to start next week in Chicago. A spokesperson for the organization did not say how many universities have pulled their support for attendees, or if they’d seen an uptick in requests to cancel registrations.
Fansmith said that initiatives to recruit a more diverse applicant pool shouldn’t be viewed as discriminatory—especially in academic fields that have struggled to diversify. Only 35 percent of doctoral candidates in business, and 26 percent of business school faculty, are people of color, according to a 2023 report from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
“There’s lots of admissions initiatives seeking to put institutions in front of groups of students so they become aware of the programs they offer. Those are not discriminatory,” Fansmith said. “The reason these programs exist is because there are categories of students who are underrepresented in many fields… it would be a shame to see schools walk away from them.”
On a recent rainy day, several dozen students sat in a UC Riverside classroom, planning their path to college.
These weren’t high school seniors. They were seventh graders getting a jump-start on the competitive university application process. They’re part of a university program called the Middle School Initiative that aims to get Inland Empire students thinking about higher education long before they take their first AP class or submit an application.
With a four-year college graduation rate about half the state average of 35%, the Inland Empire is falling behind in educating students for well-paid, professional jobs, limiting the economic prospects of the region’s youngest inhabitants. In an effort to raise that ceiling, educators are trying to get tweens to envision their potential for a college education and career.
The students from Riverside middle schools discussed how to write college application essays, toured the university campus and learned about admission standards for California universities.
“I like that there’s something you can do in middle school so you can do more in high school,” said 13-year-old Simone Reid, a seventh-grader at Villegas Middle School who wants to major in business. “I want to get started early so I have more opportunities.”
UC Riverside Dean of Education Joi Spencer said she introduced the program this year to reach students who might not consider attending a university, or know how to prepare for it. Middle grades “are where kids get sorted into who’s going to go to college and who’s not,” she said.
The initiative aims to change that pattern. With an annual budget of $15,200, the program launched has so far reached 500 students, including more than 300 who joined campus tours at UC Riverside.
“Our first goal is to invoke a conversation across the Inland Empire related to university access and eventual success,” Spencer said. “First and foremost, too many youngsters do not even see university attendance as a possibility for them. This is our fault as adults and educators. We keep producing the same winners and losers in education and we need to break this cycle.”
The Middle School Initiative is open to students throughout Riverside and San Bernardino counties, with Jurupa, Moreno Valley, Alvord and Riverside Unified school districts among the first participants. Any students in the Inland Empire can participate, but in the early days of the program, administrators have prioritized students who have fallen through the cracks in class.
“Some of the students are high flyers, but are somehow overlooked in their school setting,” Spencer said. “Others may have average achievement, but high aspirations.”
The program isn’t just an introduction to college readiness. Program administrators plan to follow students along their academic journey, meeting with them throughout middle and high school and during the transition to college. They will also track college enrollment of students who participate in a related summer program called the STEAM Academy, which increases exposure to the fields of science, technology, education, art and math.
“This middle school period is the pivotal period to prepare for college,” said Elizabeth Benitez, Middle School Initiative coordinator.
For instance, she said, many middle schools have foreign language options. Taking that early, in seventh or eighth grade, can pave the way for advanced placement language classes in high school, which boost students’ grade point averages and allow them to earn credits for college.
Some students may be a step ahead because of their family background, Frances Calvin, director of the university’s Early Academic Outreach Program, told the group. During the campus workshop she asked seventh graders to raise their hands if they spoke a second language. Several responded that they spoke Spanish, Portuguese or other languages at home.
“If you speak a second language you are becoming marketable because the world is getting smaller and smaller,” Calvin said.
Students at the campus event said they clearly heard the message about academic achievement and vowed to work on raising their grade-point averages.
“I personally think I should focus more on my GPA,” said Dike Okeke, 12. “Then when I have that figured out I could find work to save for college.”
Money matters loom large for many of the students, especially those hoping to be the first in their family to attend a university. The initiative offers instruction on how to fill out financial aid forms and tips on finding scholarships. Students can come back to the program later in high school to seek help with that process, Benitez said.
“My family didn’t have the resources to experience college,” said Jeremiah Stinson, 12, who aims to study business and play college football. “I think I need to start saving money to afford this. I need to focus on a scholarship. Debt lasts forever. I don’t want to struggle with that.”
Interestingly, the seventh graders also discussed personal discipline, and almost universally acknowledged that they needed to curtail electronics use and pay attention to school.
“I also need to get rid of all my devices because I spend a lot of time on social media,” said Tatum Tobios, an aspiring fashion designer who favors Victorian Gothic styles and plans to go to art school.
Her peers nodded in agreement. How will they scale back their TikTok and Instagram habits?
Some of their solutions: “Delete the apps,” “Lock them away,” “Give it to my mom,” “Hide it from myself.”
Emma Bittner considered getting a master’s degree in public health at a nearby university, but the in-person program cost tens of thousands of dollars more than she had hoped to spend.
So she checked out master’s degrees she could pursue remotely, on her laptop, which she was sure would be much cheaper.
The price for the same degree, online, was … just as much. Or more.
“I’m, like, what makes this worth it?” said Bittner, 25, who lives in Austin, Texas. “Why does it cost that much if I don’t get meetings face-to-face with the professor or have the experience in person?”
Among the surprising answers is that colleges and universities are charging more for online education to subsidize everything else they do, online managers say. Huge sums are also going into marketing and advertising for it, documents show.
Universities and colleges “see online higher education as an opportunity to make money and use it for whatever they want to make money for,” said Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at the left-leaning think tank New America.
Bittner’s confusion about the price is widespread. Eighty percent of Americans think online learning after high school should cost less than in-person programs, according to a 2024 survey of 1,705 adults by New America.
After all, technology has reduced prices in many other industries. And online courses don’t require classrooms or other physical facilities and can theoretically be taught to a much larger number of students, creating economies of scale.
While consumers complained about remote learning during the pandemic, online enrollment has been rising faster than was projected before Covid hit.
Yet 83 percent of online programs in higher education cost students as much as or more than the in-person versions, an annual survey of campus chief online learning officers finds. About a quarter of universities and colleges even tack on an additional “distance learning fee,” that survey found.
In addition to using the income from their online divisions to help pay for the other things they do, universities say they have had to pay more than they anticipated on advising and support for online students, who get worse results, on average, than their in-person counterparts.
Bringing down the price of a degree “was certainly a key part of the appeal” when online higher education began, said Richard Garrett, co-director of that survey of online education managers and chief research officer at Eduventures, an arm of the higher education technology consulting company Encoura.
“Online was going to be disruptive. It was supposed to widen access. And it would reduce the price,” said Garrett. “But it hasn’t played out that way.”
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Today, online instruction for in-state students at four-year public universities costs $341 a credit, the independent Education Data Initiative finds — more than the average $325 a credit for face-to-face tuition. That adds up to about $41,000 for a degree online, compared to about $39,000 in tuition for a degree obtained in person.
Two-thirds of private four-year universities and colleges with online programs charge more for them than for their face-to-face classes, according to the survey of online managers. The average tuition for online learning at private universities and colleges comes to $516 per credit.
And community colleges, which collectively enroll the largest number of students who learn entirely online, charge them the same as or more than their in-person counterparts in 100 percent of cases, the survey of online officers found (though Garrett said that’s likely because community college tuition overall is already comparatively low).
Social media is riddled with angry comments about this. A typical post: “Can someone please explain to me why taking a course online can cost a couple $1000 more than in person?”
Online education officers respond that online programs face steep startup costs and need expensive technology specialists and infrastructure. In a separate survey of faculty by the consulting firm Ithaka S+R, 80 percent said it took them as much time, or more, to plan and develop online courses as it did in-person ones because of the need to incorporate new kinds of technology.
Online programs also need to provide faculty who are available for office hours, online advisors and other resources exclusively to support online students, who tend to be less well prepared and get worse results than their in-person counterparts. For the same reasons, many online providers have put caps on enrollment, limiting those expected economies of scale.
“You still need advisers, you still need a writing center, a tutoring center, and now you have to provide those services for students who are at a distance,” said Dylan Barth, vice president of innovation and programs at the Online Learning Consortium, which represents online education providers.
Still, 60 percent of public and more than half of private universities are taking in more money from online education than they spend on it, the online managers’ survey found. About half said they put the money back into their institutions’ general operating budgets.
Such cross subsidies have long been a part of higher education’s financial strategy, under which students in classes or fields that cost less to teach generally subsidize their counterparts in courses or disciplines that cost more. English majors subsidize their engineering classmates, for example. Big first-year lecture classes subsidize small senior seminars. Graduate students often subsidize undergrads.
“Online education is another revenue stream from a different market,” said Duha Altindag, an associate professor of economics at Auburn University who has studied online programs.
Universities “are not trying to use technology to become more efficient. They’re just layering it on top of the existing model,” said New America’s Carey, who has been a critic of some online education models.
“Public officials are not stopping them,” he said. “They’re not coming and saying, ‘Hey, we’re seeing this new opportunity to save money. These online courses could be cheaper. Make them cheaper.’ This is just a continuation of the status quo.”
Another page that online managers have borrowed from higher education’s traditional pricing playbook is that consumers often equate high prices with high quality, especially at brand-name colleges and universities.
“Market success and reputation can support higher prices,” Garrett said. It’s not what online courses cost to provide that determines the price, in other words, but how much consumers are willing to pay.
With online programs competing for customers across the country, rather than for those within commuting distance of a campus or willing to relocate to one, universities and colleges are also putting huge amounts into marketing and advertising.
An example of this kind of spending was exposed in a review by the consulting firm EY of the University of Arizona Global Campus, or UAGC, which the university created by acquiring for-profit Ashford University in 2020. Obtained through a public-records request by New America, the report found that the university was paying out $11,521 in advertising and marketing for every online student it enrolled.
The online University of Maryland Global Campus committed to spending $500 million foradvertising to out-of-state students over six years, a state audit found.
“What if you took that money and translated it into lower tuition?” asked Carey.
The online University of Maryland Global Campus is spending $500 million to market and advertise to out-of-state students over six years.
While they’re paying the same as or more than their in-person counterparts, meanwhile, online students get generally poorer success rates.
Online instruction results in lower grades than face-to-face education, according to research by Altindag and colleagues at American University and the University of Southern Mississippi — though they also found that the gap is narrowing. Students online are more likely to have to withdraw from or repeat courses and less likely to graduate on time, these researchers found, which further increases the cost.
Another study, by University of Central Florida Institute of Higher Education Director Justin Ortagus, found that taking all of their courses online reduces the odds that community college students will ever graduate.
Lower-income students fare especially poorly online, that and other research shows; scholars say this is in part because many come from low-resourced public high schools or are balancing their classes with work or family responsibilities.
Students who learn entirely online at any level are less likely to have graduated within eight years than students in general, who have a 66 percent eight-year graduation rate, data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows.
Graduation rates are particularly low at for-profit universities, which enroll a quarter of the students who learn exclusively online. In the American InterContinental University System, for example, only 11 percent of students graduated within eight years after starting, federal data shows, and at the American Public University System, 44 percent. The figures are for the period ending in 2022, the most recent for which they have been widely submitted.
Several private, nonprofit universities and colleges also have comparatively lower eight-year graduation rates for students who are online only, the data shows, including Southern New Hampshire University (37 percent) and Western Governors University (52 percent).
If they do receive degrees, online-only students earn more than their entirely in-person counterparts for the first year after college, Eduventures finds — perhaps because they tend to be older than traditional-age students, researchers speculated. But that advantage disappears within four years, when in-person graduates overtake them.
For all the growth in online higher education, employers appear to remain reluctant to hire graduates of it, according to still other research conducted at the University of Louisville. That study found that applicants for jobs who listed an online as opposed to in-person degree were about half as likely to get a callback for the job.
How strongly consumers feel that online higher education should cost less than the in-person kind was evident in lawsuits brought against universities and colleges that continued to charge full tuition even after going remote during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Yet students keep signing on. For all the complaining about remote learning at the time, its momentum seems to have beenspeeded up by the pandemic, which was followed by a 12 percent increase in online enrollment above what had been projected before it hit, according to an analysis of federal data by education technology consultant Phil Hill.
Online students save on room and board costs they would face on residential campuses, and online higher education is typically more flexible than the in-person kind.
Sixty percent of campus online officers say that online sections of classes tend to fill first, and nearly half say online student numbers are outpacing in-person enrollment.
There have been some widely cited examples of online programs with dramatically lower tuition, such as a $7,000 online master’s degree in computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (compared to the estimated nearly $43,000 for the two-year in-person version), which has attracted thousands of students and a few copycat programs.
There are also early signs that prices for online higher education could fall. Competition is intensifying from national nonprofit providers such as Western Governors, which charges a comparatively low average $8,300per year, and Southern New Hampshire, whose undergraduate price per credit hour is a slightly lower-than-average (for online courses) $330.
Universities have started cutting their ties with for-profit middlemen, called online program managers, who take big cuts of up to 80 percent of revenues. Nearly 150 such deals were canceled or ended and not renewed in 2023, the most recent year for which the information is available, the market research firm Validated Insights reports.
Another thing that could lower prices: As more online programs go live, they no longer require high up-front investment — just periodic updating.
“It is possible to save money on downstream costs if you offer the same course over a number of years,” Ortagus said.
A student studies on her laptop. The number of college students who learn entirely online will this year surpass the number who take all their classes in person.
While that survey of online officers found a tiny decline in the proportion of universities charging more for online than in-person classes, however, the drop was statistically insignificant. And as their enrollments continue to plummet, institutions increasingly need the revenue from online programs.
Bittner, in Texas, ended up in an online master’s program in public health that was just being started by a private, nonprofit university, and was cheaper than the others she’d found.
Her day job is at the national nonprofit Young Invincibles, which pushes for reforms in higher education, health care and economic security for young Americans. And she still doesn’t understand the online pricing model.
“I’m so confused about it. Even in the program I’m in now, you don’t get the same access to stuff as an in-person student,” she said. “What are you putting into it that costs so much?”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The HEPI blog was kindly authored by James Pitman, Chair of IHE and Managing Director U.K. and Ireland, Study Group
The Graduate Route has been extraordinarily powerful in driving international education value in the UK. Although all the surveys show students choose universities and courses for their reputation or fit, the opportunity to translate this into a first job in another country to strengthen English language skills as they earn is evidenced by what happens as soon as that is taken away.
The correlation between removing the Post Study Work Visa scheme on the back of statistically invalid analysis and the drop in international students choosing the UK in 2012 is irrefutable. This is strengthened by the significant international student growth linked to the re-introduction of the Graduate Route in 2021.
Why is the graduate route visa such a powerful incentive for some international students to come and study in the UK? The simplest explanation came from an agent in India, who explained:
‘An Indian student can recoup much of their investment in a UK degree over a few years of employment in the UK when it would take several decades to do the same back in India.’
International students contribute a net £100,000 to the UK economy during their degree study. A degree is required to enter the Graduate Route. Therefore, one could consider the ‘entry ticket’ for a Graduate Route visa to be a £100,000 investment in the UK – which may be worth up to £30,000 to the exchequer. From a Treasury growth perspective, international students drive employment and economic benefit in every constituency of the UK, especially in university towns and cities. I doubt the mandarins at the Treasury could think of a more cost-effective measure that seeds prosperity right across the country while building connections and loyalty that last a lifetime amongst the very group who will, in years to come, shape societies and build companies.
Oxford Economics concluded that every 10 international students supports 6 jobs, with half in Higher Education and half in the local economy. If this remains accurate, the reported loss of approximately 10,000 jobs in Higher Education last year, mainly attributed to the decline in international students, should correspond to a similar loss in local economies across the country.
And yet this is economic harm proactively driven by policy choices which raised uncertainty regarding the future of the Graduate Route. If you were thinking of making a £100,000 investment, uncertainty would not exactly be conducive to choosing to invest in the UK. As one local businessman in Sheffield put it, “If you walk past a shop window swinging a baseball bat for a couple of weeks, it doesn’t matter if you never hit it, the people inside will still get worried.” Even just the threat of future policy changes creates “a massive amount of uncertainty, and uncertainty for students is a big problem.”
Subsidising the domestic tax payer
Students on the Graduate Route, like all international students, pay the Immigration Health Surcharge (currently £776 p.a. for students and £1035 p.a. for graduates on the Graduate Route). The actual costs according to the Department of Health and Social Care in 2018 were £480 p.a. including dependants. Given the restrictions on dependants, a shift in the mix (until recent restrictions) to shorter PG courses, the prevalence of private insurance that many students have and the reality of waiting times for treatment, this is a subsidy to the NHS.
Another subsidy is less well known, but any student on the Graduate Route employed at any salary level, high or low, is actually subsiding the UK tax payer. In comparison with a domestic employee at the exact same level of remuneration, international students pay the same income tax and National Insurance, but critically, they can only access less than half of the services that those taxes pay for. International students on the Graduate Route are barred from benefiting from services provided in the areas of Education, Social Protection, and Housing, and they already subsidise the NHS, as shown above. Those four areas account for c.65% of public sector expenditure on services (PESA 2023/4). Another way of putting this is that international students employed on the Graduate Route are effectively paying income tax at double the rate of a domestic equivalent worker.
The dependants dilemma — a third way
However, the Migration Advisory Committee has argued that there is a subsidy element for international students. This seems to be based on the fact that international students could, until last year, bring unlimited numbers of dependants and that any child dependants had access to free education at the UK taxpayer’s cost. This option was then removed with a devastating knock-on impact for university finances.
However, it is instructive to note that the options considered around this issue were binary — either close the dependants route (the approach taken for any students other than for those on research-intensive PG courses) or leave the system as was. What was not considered was adapting the dependants’ visa by removing access to free childhood education but leaving the route, which would have caused far less damage to international student recruitment in 2024. Instead, removing the dependant’s route caused significant damage that disadvantaged female students and students from cultures where chaperones are required. I know the options considered, because the Home Office responded to an FOI on this matter. Let us also remember that dependants have always been (as the name implies) dependant on the international student that they accompany, not the UK tax payer.
Cost-benefit analysis
In reality, in economic terms, international graduates are more akin to tourists, having no recourse to public funds (apart from the historical significant exception of child dependants) and bringing resources into the UK to sustain themselves. However, unlike tourists, they do have to pay the Immigration Health Surcharge.
To give an indicator of the cost to the UK of restricting international students coming to study in the UK over that period, I compared the government-published data on value and growth rates of international education from 2010 to 2024 to the equivalent global international student mobility value growth rates published by Holon IQ (part of the QS Quacquarelli Symonds, group). It is only an indicator, but against the UK having been permitted by government to grow at the same growth rate as the global market (which I doubt many in the sector would have bet against), cumulative loss to GDP over that period was £66 billion, implying a cumulative loss of income to the exchequer of £23 Billion. How many hospitals, schools and roads would be in better shape today if that scale of investment had been funded by international education? What a wasted opportunity, and for what purpose?
Now, the Prime Minister tells us his priorities are security and growth. On both, international students can be a key part of a progressive policy shift. And yet it is sad to say that our new government, whilst saying the right things, has not yet done anything to undo the damage of the past. If reports are to be believed, they are even being tempted to impose even more restrictions on international students in the Immigration White Paper to be published this month, preceding the new iteration of the International Education Strategy in April.
Once again, it appears that those who are tasked with reducing immigration are acting in direct opposition to the avowed growth agenda of the Treasury, the Department of Business and Trade, the Department for Education and others and, quite frankly, considering the above, against the demonstrable interests of the UK.
Rethinking terms
I have a clear understanding of the root cause of this ambivalence towards international students, and I direct any interested readers to the HEPI blog ‘When is an Immigrant not an Immigrant’. Allpolling of the general public (most recently by Public Future) shows that they recognise international students are not immigrants, and a strong majority cannot comprehend why they are categorised in the same way. If our government is serious about growth, I urge them to separate international students from immigration immediately.
Finally, again, to demonstrate the value of international students, we should consider the increasingly dangerous situation we find ourselves in and the government’s commitment to ramp up defence spending. That incremental 0.2% GDP or £6 billion spend, announced recently, could have avoided the contentious cut in the overseas budget.
Why didn’t the Treasury consider international education instead? With no investment needed beyond the political will to enhance the UK’s international education offering, we could provide high-quality education to an additional 175,000 international students (that’s merely, on average, 1,250 per university). At current rates, this would generate around £6 billion for the exchequer from each cohort while also supporting the creation of approximately 50,000 jobs in higher education and another 50,000 jobs for hard-pressed families in local communities across the UK. Furthermore, it would significantly enhance the UK’s soft power in the long term.
Many in the international education sector believe that our ability to welcome students is, in financial terms, as near as our country can get to a golden goose, although not one that will live forever. The Graduate Route is a key golden lever in its nest. International students bring huge investments in order to access the benefits of the Graduate Route, subsidise the UK taxpayer while they are on it and can only remain in the UK after that with another category of visa.
If Columbia University wants a financial relationship with the federal government, the Ivy League institution will need to overhaul its discipline process, ban masks, expel some students, put an academic department under review, give its campus security “full law enforcement authority” and reform its admissions practices.
Those are just some of the sweeping and unprecedented demands the Trump administration made Thursday in a letter to the Manhattan-based institution. They come less than a week after the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts at the university. Columbia has until March 20 to respond.
“We expect your immediate compliance with these critical next steps,” three Trump officials wrote. “After which we hope to open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms that will return Columbia to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence.”
The demands escalate an already precarious situation for Columbia as it simultaneously faces pressure from the White House to comply and pressure from students and faculty to fight back.
“We are in a state of shock and disbelief, and we are working with our administration to … reaffirm free speech and shared governance on campus, and to resist all Trump efforts to take academic decisions out of the hands of academics,” said Jean Howard, a member of the executive committee of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “Our administration has been cautious in dealing with Trump up to now. We’re hoping they will take a more aggressive posture in the future.”
A Columbia spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that officials are reviewing the letter but didn’t say Friday whether the university will comply with the demands. Several free speech and higher ed policy experts say the letter amounts to an unprecedented assault on higher education that could threaten foundational principles such as academic freedom. The demands, which don’t appear rooted in any specific legal authority, also offer yet another hint at how President Trump could reshape higher education.
“The subjugation of universities to official power is a hallmark of autocracy,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, said in a statement. “No one should be under any illusions about what’s going on here.”
But the Trump administration says canceling the grants and contracts is necessary due to Columbia’s “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” In the letter, officials said that the university “has fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence.”
Building Tensions
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, criticized the letter as an “outrageous” example of “extreme federal overreach,” adding that institutional autonomy is a critical part of American higher education.
“It’s perfectly reasonable for the federal government to hold all of those institutions accountable to civil rights laws, and we expect that,” he said. “But for the government to prescribe changes in academic structure, changes essentially in curriculum and to curtail research, that’s beyond the pale.”
One of the letter’s 12 demands is for Columbia to put its Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department under academic receivership for at least five years. This would mean that faculty lose control of the department and the university puts an outside chair in charge. The letter didn’t specify why officials focused on this particular department. But it’s worth noting the academic division is home to Joseph Massad, a controversial tenured professor whom lawmakers have accused of making anti-Israel and anti-Jewish statements over the years.
Federal scrutiny of colleges and universities, especially by Republicans, ratcheted up after the wave of pro-Palestinian protests in fall 2023 and spring 2024. But the Trump administration has only added to the pressure on colleges since it took office in January, quickly moving to cut funding to programs and institutions seemingly at odds with the president’s priorities.
Columbia has been at the epicenter of the scrutiny, particularly after an encampment popped up on the small Manhattan campus’s central lawn last April. The protests culminated in early May, when students occupied a campus building and New York City police officers eventually stormed the hall, arresting those inside.
Although other colleges faced protests and were accused of mishandling reports of antisemitic harassment and discrimination, Columbia took a hard line with protesters and was one of the few to bring in law enforcement. But that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from targeting the university, nor has it led Columbia to draw a line and start fighting back.
On Thursday, the same day the letter was sent, Columbia handed down student sanctions related to the building occupation. The sentences ranged from multiyear suspensions and expulsions to temporary degree revocations for graduates.
Professors and other experts have warned that federal scrutiny—including high-profile grillings and subpoenas from Capitol Hill—could have damaging consequences for colleges. But alarm escalated significantly last week when the Trump administration bypassed the typical investigation process for civil rights violations and slashed Columbia’s access to grants and contracts.
The cuts, made by Trump’s novel multidepartment antisemitism task force, are the first but likely not the last.
The task force has already said at least 10 other universities are under review, including Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. Meanwhile, the Office for Civil Rights is investigating allegations related to antisemitism at at least 60 colleges.
Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, said Columbia needs to reject the demands and other universities need to speak up now in defense of higher education. If left on its own, Columbia could fail to defend itself, he said.
“Other universities have an imperative to come to the defense of Columbia, because this is not just about Columbia,” Enos said. “The Trump administration is trying to attack all of higher education, and Columbia cannot try to mount a defense on its own.”
Frustrations Abound
Outside policy analysts and scholars on both sides of the political spectrum are frustrated with the situation—but for different reasons.
Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, described Columbia’s handling of antisemitism on campus over the course of the past year as “egregious” and a “clear violation” of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on ethnicity or national origin. But at the same time, he said the Trump administration’s unclear process for determining a remedy is problematic.
“Some of the things on the list I find pretty facially plausible. Others require a much higher standard of justification,” he said. “But because they have not been transparent and … there has not been any back-and-forth, there has not been a proper demonstration of the misconduct, which would be necessary to convince me that these specific remedies are called for.”
Benjamin Ginsberg, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies American politics and Jewish history, sees the situation as one of “competing truths.”
“The Columbia administration has needed for a long time to act against antisemitic demonstrators and vandals on the campus,” Ginsberg said, noting that arrests without indictments or suspensions are not enough. But at the same time, “the Trump administration has overreached by threatening Columbia with dire consequences,” he added.
He noted that the situation presents Columbia administrators with an opportunity.
“Sure, the [Trump] administration has overstepped. It’s threatening to fire a cannon, drop a nuclear bomb,” Ginsberg said. “But as I say, that threat gives the Columbia administration an opportunity to do things that it has needed to do and probably wanted to do for some time.”
He added that though he’s certainly hesitant when the government tries to dictate what departments are valid, in this instance, higher education has failed in its responsibility to its students. He also trusts that the Trump administration will be satisfied so long as Columbia carries out disciplinary action against students who disrupt academic life and threaten others’ safety.
“Anytime the federal government tells the university how to organize its admissions processes, or which, if any, academic departments are valid and legitimate, of course I’m concerned,” Ginsberg said. “But my guess is that nothing will come of those particular demands. I mean, I hope the university won’t cave in.”
On the other hand, Eddy Conroy, a senior education policy manager at New America, a left-leaning think tank, said all the Trump administration’s recent actions should be “deeply troubling.”
Columbia has already demonstrated an aggressive response to student protests, which should be protected by the First Amendment, Conroy said, and it’s not up to the federal government to determine whether those disciplinary procedures were adequate.
“We have an important history of peaceful protest in the United States, and sit-ins are part of that. Columbia can choose if it wants to deal with those things through its own disciplinary procedure or by pursuing trespassing charges,” he said. But to Trump, this “is a test case of how far we can push things when it comes to suppressing speech.”
Conroy believes that the president is trying to make an example of Columbia in the hops that other institutions will then capitulate without fight, and the university’s response as a test dummy isn’t helping.
“The [Trump] administration hits Columbia, and Columbia cowers and says, ‘Please hit us harder,’” he said.
To Howard, the Columbia AAUP representative, Trump’s actions are a threat to the gemstone that is American higher education.
We’ve become “the greatest university system in the world. But that requires independence. It requires the free expression of differing viewpoints,” she said. Trump’s demands are “so undemocratic, so against the norms and conventions of university life, that to comply would just destroy the heart of the institution.”
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched investigations into more than 50 colleges Friday over allegations that their programs and scholarships have race-based restrictions, a move in line with the agency’s broad crackdown on diversity initiatives.
The civil rights investigations include prominent private colleges, such as Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as dozens of large public institutions, including Arizona State University and University of California, Berkeley.
The investigations follow the Education Department’s Dear Colleague letter last month that says colleges are barred from considering race in their programs and policies. The guidance has drawn at least two lawsuits that accuse the letter of being unconstitutional.
Dive Insight:
The new investigations are just one of the aggressive moves the Education Department has taken to carry out President Donald Trump’s policy priorities to reshape higher education.
Trump and his administration’s top officials have not only threatened to pull funding from colleges over their diversity initiatives but also over the way they handle student protests and if they allow transgender women to play on teams corresponding with their gender identity.
Friday’s announcement escalates the Trump administration’s threats to pull federal funding over diversity efforts.
The Education Department said it is investigating allegations that 45 colleges have partnered with an organization for doctoral students that has race-based eligibility criteria. It is also looking into allegations that six have race-based scholarships and that one has a “program that segregates students on the basis of race.”
The probes follow the Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter, which interpreted the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision against race-conscious admissions to also mean that colleges were prohibited from considering race in their policies and programs, including scholarships and housing.
The letter panned diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, describing them as discriminatory practices aimed at “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.”The guidance threatened to pull federal funding from colleges that didn’t comply with the Education Department’s interpretation of civil rights law.
At least two lawsuits have challenged the legality of the guidance, arguing that the letter is unconstitutionally vague, undermines academic freedom and violates free speech rights.
The plaintiffs and other critics have pointed out that the 2023 Supreme Court decision only touched on admissions.
“OCR’s letter goes beyond that in a way that is simply off-base, encompassing virtually all programs at schools and universities, including race-neutral policies,” researchers at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, said in a post this week.
Both The Century Foundation and some legal scholars have cautioned colleges to not overly comply with the letter.
“It is important to ensure that educational policy is not changed based on a letter that oversteps legal boundaries,” Liliana Garces, an educational leadership and policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in a February op-ed for The Chronicle for Education.
Two weeks later after the Education Department issued the Dear Colleague letter — amid widespread outcry — the agency appeared to walk back some of the most contested provisions of the guidance in a Q&A.
For instance, the Education Department said using words like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” would not necessarily mean colleges are violating civil rights law. The agency also noted that it doesn’t have the power to control classroom instruction.
Yet the American Federation of Teachers, one of the groups suing over the guidance, said the Q&A only made the letter “murkier.”
The Education Department’s new round of investigations also follow dramatic cuts at the agency, which eliminated nearly half its workforce through mass firings and voluntary buyouts. Department leaders concentrated many of the cuts in OCR, the very division responsible for carrying out the new civil rights investigations.
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Columbia University received a daunting laundry list of tasks Thursday from the Trump administration: Suspend or expel protesters. Enact a mask ban. Give university security “full law enforcement authority.”
The Ivy League institutionmust comply with these and other demands by March 20 or further endanger its “continued financial relationship with the United States government,”according to a copy of the letter obtained by multiple news sources.
Last week, the Trump administration’s newly created Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism canceled $400 million of Columbia’s federal grants and contracts,alleging the university had failed to take action “in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” It also noted that Columbia has $5 billion in federal grant commitments at stake.
The stunning move came only four days after the task force opened an antisemitism investigation into the university.
On Monday, the U.S. Department of Education also sent warnings to 60 colleges — including Columbia — that it could take punitive action if it determines they aren’t sufficiently protecting Jewish students from discrimination or harassment.
In Thursday’s letter, Trump administration officials said they expected Columbia’s “immediate compliance” after which they hope to “open a conversation about immediate and long-term structural reforms that will return Columbia to its original mission of innovative research and academic excellence.”
The letter’s edicts are just the latest in a series of decisions made by the Trump administration and Columbia officials that have put the well-known New York institution into a tailspin.
Strong language, few details
Officials at the Education Department, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and U.S. General Services Administrationsent Columbia Interim President Dr. Katrina Armstrongnine policy changes the Trump administration expects the university to make to retain federal funding.
The agencies — all of which are part of the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force — accused Columbia of failing “to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment,” along with other alleged violations of civil rights laws.
But despite the high stakes, the task force’s demands are ambiguous.
For example, its letter orders the university to deliver a plan on “comprehensive admissions reform.”
“The plan must include a strategy to reform undergraduate admissions, international recruiting, and graduate admissions practices to conform with federal law and policy,” it said.
The task force’s letter offers no further insight into what it expects Columbia to change or how it believes the university is out of line with federal standards.
The letter goes far beyond what is appropriate for the government to mandate and will chill campus discourse.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
The GSA directed an emailed request for comment to the Education Department. Neither the Education Department nor HHS responded to inquiries Friday.
The task force also ordered the university to ban masks that “are intended to conceal identity or intimidate others,” while offering exceptions for religious and health reasons.But it did not give criteria to determine why someone is wearing a mask.
“We are reviewing the letter from the Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, and General Services Administration,” a spokesperson for Columbia said Friday. “We are committed at all times to advancing our mission, supporting our students, and addressing all forms of discrimination and hatred on our campus.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil rights watchdog, criticized the federal officials’ demands Friday.
While the group has been critical of Columbia’s handling of student protesters, it said the letter does not follow “the normal procedure for revocation of federal financial assistance for violations of Title VI.” Title VI refers to the law barring discrimination on race, color and national origin at federally funded educational institutions.
“While these include some policy steps that Columbia should already have taken, the letter goes far beyond what is appropriate for the government to mandate and will chill campus discourse,” FIRE said in a statement.
A change in due process
The Trump administration’s task force is demanding Columbia completeongoing disciplinary proceedings against pro-Palestinian protesters who occupied campus buildings and organized encampments last year. The university must dole out meaningful discipline — meaning expulsions or multi-year suspensions — the letter said.
The same day the task force’s letter is dated, Columbiaannounced it had issued “multi-year suspensions, temporary degree revocations, and expulsions” related to the occupation of Hamilton Hall.
In April 2024,pro-Palestinian protesters occupied the university’s Hamilton Hall after then-President Minouche Shafik announced Columbia would not divest from companies with ties to Israel.
Columbia brought New York City Police onto its private campus for the second time that month — and only the second time since 1968— against the authority of the University Senate. Officers arrested more than 100 people.
The disciplinary rulings from Columbia’s University Judicial Board, the panel that reviews misconduct cases and issues sanctions, came 11 months later.
It is unclear if the UJB issued its rulings before or after Columbia received the task force’s letter. And a university spokesperson said in an email Friday that Columbia could not confirm who or how many protesters had been sanctioned due to student privacy laws.
Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student organizations that helped organize the protests, said on social media Thursday that 22 students had been disciplined.
Columbia University’s immediate submission and betrayal of the core mission of higher education reflects cowardice and capitulation to a government that seems intent on destroying US higher education.
Todd Wolfson
President of the American Association of University Professors
And the United Auto Workers union announced that the university had expelledGrant Miner, president of UAW Local 2710, which represents student workers at Columbia.
The move, effectively firing Miner, came “one day before contract negotiations were set to open with the University,” the union said in a statement.
“It is no accident that this comes days after the federal government froze Columbia’s funding, and threatened to pull funding from 60 other universities across the country,” it said. “It is no accident that the University is targeting a union leader whose local went on strike in the last round of bargaining.”
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, condemned Columbia’s decision against Miner as “a severe violation of student and worker rights aimed at silencing all voices of dissent who have spoken out for peace and against the war in Gaza.”
He also accused the university of being willing to “sacrifice its own students to the demands of an authoritarian government.”
“Columbia University’s immediate submission and betrayal of the core mission of higher education reflects cowardice and capitulation to a government that seems intent on destroying US higher education,” he said in a Friday statement.
The task force also told Columbia to dissolve UJB.The five-member board includes representatives from the faculty, student body and the university’s noninstructional employees such as librarians and administrative staff.
In lieu of this due process system, the letter instructed the institution to shift its disciplinary proceedings entirely under Armstong’s office.
Columbia must enact “primacy of the president in disciplinary matters,” giving the president’s office unilateral power to suspend and expel students and oversee the appeals process, the letter said.
Law enforcement on campus
The Trump administration also demanded that Columbia give its security force the power to arrest and remove “agitators who foster an unsafe or hostile work or study environment” or interfere with classroom instruction.
President Donald Trump has sought to crack down on campus demonstrations, threatening to pull federal funding from colleges that allow “illegal protests” and to arrest, deport and expel student demonstrators.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took the first step toward fulfilling that promise last week, again putting Columbia at the center of a firestorm.
On Saturday, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia student who completed his graduate studies in December, in his university housing.
Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident who holds a green card, served as a driving force behind the pro-Palestinian protests onColumbia’s campus and represented student activists in negotiations with the university’s administration.
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson alleged that he “led activities aligned to Hamas,” according to The Associated Press.
Khalil’s arrest and continued detention by ICE immediately drew condemnation from free speech and civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, which joined his legal team this week.
His detainment, which is shaping up to be a landmark civil rights case, has not deterred the Trump administration.
An official at the U.S. Department of Justice, which is also on the antisemitism task force, said Friday that the agency is investigating if campus protesters broke federal anti-terrorism laws and whether Columbia’s handling of earlier incidents violated civil rights laws.
“This is long overdue,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press conference.
And on Thursday, agents from Homeland Security searched two on-campus residences at Columbia, according to Armstrong.
“The University requires that law enforcement have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including residential University buildings,” she said in a statement. “Tonight, that threshold was met, and the University is obligated to comply with the law.”
No one was arrested or detained, and nothing was taken from the residents, Armstrong said.
“I understand the immense stress our community is under,” Armstrong said. She closed the letter with counseling and well-being resources for students and, in a separate statement that day, reiterated Columbia’s commitment to its international community.
On Friday, over 100 demonstrators gathered outside of the campus’ gates to protest the sanctions against the Hamilton Hall occupiers and the university’s response to Khalil’s detainment, according to the Columbia Daily Spectator.
