The partnership will see David Game responsible for international marketing and student recruitment, while Aberystwyth will deliver its international foundation program on campus. Students will receive a single, integrated Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies (CAS) covering both their foundation and undergraduate studies.
Harriet Howse, head of global engagement and associate director of global marketing and student recruitment at Aberystwyth University, said the institution was “delighted” to be working with David Game.
“This collaboration supports Aberystwyth’s strategic goal of expanding our global footprint while offering talented students around the world a high-quality and supportive route into our university community. We look forward to welcoming our first cohort in 2026,” she said.
Theo Theodorou, director of partnerships, collaborations and transnational education at David Game College, added: “This partnership represents the next chapter in David Game College’s commitment to building meaningful, high-impact collaborations with leading UK universities.”
“Aberystwyth University’s academic reputation, combined with our recruitment infrastructure and global networks, creates an exceptional opportunity to attract diverse and high-calibre international students to study in Wales,” he said.
Aberystwyth University’s academic reputation, combined with our recruitment infrastructure and global networks, creates an exceptional opportunity to attract diverse and high-calibre international students to study in Wales Theo Theodorou, David Game College
David Game College – with a presence in London, Liverpool and Bath – offers A Levels, foundation pathways and international programs, with a network of recruitment partners around the world.
Meanwhile, Aberystwyth University is one of the UK’s oldest higher education institutions, having been founded in 1872. Located in west Wales, King Charles III spent 10 weeks studying at the university in 1969 to learn Welsh and study about the country’s history before becoming the Prince of Wales.
This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
When Hurricane Helene swept through Kelsey Crabtree’s small hometown of Black Mountain, North Carolina, two years ago, its fierce winds uprooted a large tree that landed on the roof of her house, jolting her and her husband awake. She went into the living room and noticed a huge crack where water had started to pour in. The couple grabbed their two sons, dragged a spare mattress to their laundry room and sheltered there overnight.
Eventually, Crabtree and her family made their way to her mother-in-law’s home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They later moved into an Airbnb, where they stayed for nearly a year. The months after the storm were a blur, she said — lots of phone calls with insurance and hands-on work to fix their home, and all of that while scrambling to care for the boys, who were two and five at the time.
“We needed time to be childfree so we could work. We needed to be bringing money in so we could have our house back in order,” said Crabtree, who works as a therapist. “The limited child care was really making it challenging. It was limiting my ability to see clients.”
So she got in contact with Silke Knebel.
A single mom, Knebel founded the National Emergency Child Care Network a few months earlier to help other mothers who might need child care in an emergency. What constitutes an emergency is broadly defined in Knebel’s mind: It could be a disaster like Helene, It could be snowstorms, like the one that brought massive damage to a big slice of the northeast, or just the need for a few hours to recharge after a particularly stressful day.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
In the last decade, weather and climate-related disasters have caused damages worth over $200 billion and affected the availability of child care in the long and short term. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 damaged over 650 child care centers, permanently closing 52 facilities. The Maui wildfire in 2023 destroyed four of the nine child care programs that were available in the city of Lahaina. Last year, the Los Angeles wildfires affected over 500 child care providers, with Altadena losing 60 percent of its child care centers in the tragedy.
Knebel’s desire to help others when a disaster strikes comes from her own experience as a single mom. In kindergarten, her eldest son was diagnosed with a mental health condition known as “conduct disorder,” which manifests as aggressive and behavioral issues. It soaked up a lot of Knebel’s emotional and physical energy. “I feel for other moms, because I had weekends where I cried all day and I needed that five or six hours of [care] from just somebody showing up at my door,” she said.
Her nonprofit is designed to do exactly that — deploy to families in a crisis. The organization is staffed by volunteers who have undergone extensive background checks and are trained in trauma-informed care: “We don’t bring on 16-year-old Care.com babysitters,” Knebel said. The volunteers are typically deployed in pairs to families in need, at no cost. Many of them are retired teachers, pediatricians, social workers, and mothers and grandmothers who simply want to help.
For Crabtree, they were a godsend. “The kids loved the people who came out and played with them,” she said. They would show up and have different games and toys and animal crackers and the kids were just so excited.”
In the weeks and months after Hurricane Helene, Knebel connected over 50 families like Crabtree’s with child care volunteers. One mother had a sick and disabled husband at home and when the storm hit, she was left to figure out how to do basic things like find water while taking care of her children and partner. Another, a mother of four, was worried that if she didn’t return to work soon, she wouldn’t be able to pay rent, but her child care center had been closed due to the storm. Then there was the family whose nanny’s house was destroyed in the hurricane. Sometimes, the mothers who called — the callers were almost always moms — were just exhausted or in desperate need of a few hours away from their kids to sort through the piles of paperwork, to call insurance adjustors, to figure out how to rebuild.
The first person to call Knebel’s child care emergency hotline was, however, the manager of a local bank. One of his employees was struggling to find child care weeks after the storm. Employers “try to be accommodating and compassionate,” she said. “But after a while, they’re like, ‘Okay, you need to come to work.’ And that’s when the real burden and stress hits families, because the child care is still not open.”
And it wasn’t the only employer she helped out. United Way of Asheville, an organization that provides disaster relief, requested volunteers to staff a pop-up child care for their employees. Also, an area school requested help for 40 teachers who all needed care for their own kids.
At the same time that parents were struggling to find care, some 148 child care centers and home-based providers had been damaged by Helene — and no one knew how or when they would reopen.
The barriers to getting child care back up and running after a disaster are immense, says Susan Butler-Staub, a senior vice president at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy organization. “One of the biggest issues is finding a suitable environment,” she said. “If you’re a home-based provider and your home has been flooded or your home is gone, then can you find a temporary place that meets regulation?”
If a provider is able to stay in their location, there’s usually a long list of issues they have to deal with first. “With a flood, you’re going to be dealing with mold in the walls,” she said. In western North Carolina, where Helene hit, “they are still dealing with water quality issues, so you have to filter the water before you can give it to children.”
But even when facilities recover, paying for child care can become too much for families. Crabtree, who utilized child care volunteers mostly to assist while she rebuilt her house, said she could only afford to pay for child care when her extended family helped cover the cost.
A few months after Hurricane Helene, Knebel was faced with another call to action: Catastrophic wildfires were sweeping through Los Angeles and families would need help in the aftermath.
Knebel’s organization promptly recruited and trained around 70 volunteers and connected with mothers like Briana Pozner, who had a 2-year-old and went into early labor with twins after the fires. While Pozner’s house wasn’t destroyed by the fire, it was contaminated with lead and other heavy metals, forcing the family to move out for a few months.
Kids’ lunch boxes sit in a locker at an elementary school that was destroyed by the Palisades Fire on January 14, 2025 in Pacific Palisades, California. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Pozner and her family had already been preparing for how life would change with twins before the fires struck. She had recently enrolled her son in preschool — but then the preschool burned down. “It was like, OK, we’ve got to figure out how to get stability and figure out our son’s school.”
In Los Angeles, the impact of the wildfires on child care was devastating. Cindy Esquivel, program manager at the Low Income Investment Fund, a nonprofit that provided small grants to child care providers recovering from the wildfires, said that many home-based providers were still struggling to reopen. In some cases, they lost their homes and their businesses in one fell swoop.
Finding the money for them to rebuild has been difficult. Of the 136 grantees that Esquivel surveyed after the disaster, 40 percent did not have insurance. Many home-based providers also rent their homes and in the aftermath, rents skyrocketed in the region, making it difficult to find a suitable and affordable location.
Private child care providers do not qualify for FEMA funding. They can apply to the Small Business Administration for low-interest loans, but the process for approval is long and bureaucratic. Instead, a lot of funding comes from foundations and grant-making organizations. States have also chipped in, but the amount available varies by state and is usually a drop in the bucket compared to need, say experts. It’s an industry that, in the best of times, is already underfunded and operating at capacity.
A friend who had been volunteering with Knebel’s organization suggested that Pozner reach out and ask for assistance. Once the family was able to return home, “We had to get the whole house back in order with these little babies that I was breastfeeding,” she said. The volunteers watched her newborns while Pozner and her husband unpacked and organized.
Her son’s preschool eventually reopened, but it is now in its third location. Similar to North Carolina, it has been challenging for child care facilities and schools to find new homes.
Knebel is only set up to offer help in California and North Carolina because that’s where she has volunteers. She plans to expand to other disaster prone states like Florida and Texas but needs to raise more funding to make that a reality. In the meantime, however, she gets calls from all over the country, for women experiencing all sorts of challenges. A few weeks ago, she heard from a woman in a domestic violence shelter who needed someone to watch her two children for a few hours. She has also fielded several calls from women at hospitals who need someone to watch their kids while they undergo surgery. Once, a grandmother whose daughter had just been incarcerated called, in need of someone to help watch her grandkids.
Knebel wishes she could help everyone. “It isn’t really just disasters. It’s school shootings, divorces, it’s a medical crisis, just experiencing a car accident,” she said.
Lately, she’s wondered how she can tap into the network of volunteers her organization trained in Los Angeles to help families who are afraid to send their kids to school because of ICE raids. In the last few days, she’s been emailing volunteers about the potential need for deployments if child care and schools closed in North Carolina, one of the states hit hard by the weekend’s winter storm.
“We just want to be there when children and parents need us,” she said. “Especially now, when things are getting so doom and gloom.”
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At the time of the attack, Hadi was campaigning for parliamentary elections scheduled for February 2026, elections meant to restore civilian rule after months of interim governance led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.
Almost immediately after Hadi’s shooting, speculation filled the vacuum left by unanswered questions.
Protesters accused the interim government of negligence, while social media amplified claims, without evidence, that the attackers had fled to India. “India killed Hadi” became a rallying cry in protest marches from Dhaka to Chattogram.
“This wasn’t just about justice for one man,” said Zaheer Ahmad, a political analyst in Dhaka. “Hadi’s death became a vessel for accumulated anger, against the state, against elites, and against India.”
That anger soon found a tangible target. Newsrooms perceived as sympathetic to the former Awami League government — or insufficiently hostile toward India — were singled out.
Media takes the blame.
On 18 December, mobs stormed Prothom Alo and The Daily Star, ransacking offices, looting more than 150 laptops and desktops and torching sections of the buildings. Journalists described choking smoke, emergency stairwells blocked by debris and colleagues helping one another escape through back doors.
“For decades, we reported from conflict zones,” said editor Meezan Khan. “We never imagined our own newsroom would become one.”
The violence spread beyond media houses. Cultural institutions such as Chhayanaut were vandalized.
Nurul Kabir, editor of New Age, was assaulted while trying to help trapped journalists. For the first time in Bangladesh’s history, the country’s two largest newspapers suspended both print and online operations simultaneously.
International press freedom groups reacted with alarm. The UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression called the attacks “deeply disturbing,” while free speech advocacy organization ARTICLE 19 warned that Bangladesh was entering “a phase of open hostility toward independent media.”
Journalists caught in communal crossfire
As protests intensified, journalists, particularly from minority communities, faced growing danger. On 18 December, Dipu Chandra Das, a Hindu journalist who also ran a small grocery shop in Mymensingh district, was lynched and set on fire by a mob.
Local police cited allegations of derogatory remarks, but colleagues and rights groups say the killing occurred amid politically charged unrest.
In separate incidents, a Hindu factory owner was shot dead in Jashore, and a Hindu woman was gang-raped and tortured in Khulna district. While fact-checkers caution against exaggeration and misinformation, minority communities report a sharp rise in fear since Hasina’s removal.
“Hindus are seen as extensions of India,” said, Mohammad Jameel, a rights activist in Dhaka. “That perception makes them targets when anti-India sentiment spikes.”
Bangladesh’s interim government has condemned the attacks, but critics say protection has been inadequate. Human Rights Watch reports hundreds of journalists detained or charged since August 2024, often under vague accusations of “instigating unrest.”
Economic anger beneath the slogans
Behind the political slogans lies deep economic anxiety. Bangladesh’s economy, once hailed as a South Asian success story, has slowed under inflation, unemployment and post-pandemic strain. Youth unemployment remains stubbornly high, while growth has dipped below pre-Covid levels.
The protests that toppled Hasina began over student job quotas but quickly evolved into broader demands for accountability and reform. Anti-India narratives, framed around water-sharing disputes, trade imbalances and alleged political interference, have offered protesters a clear external villain.
“India has become shorthand for everything people feel powerless about,” said an economist based in Dhaka. “It simplifies complex failures into a single enemy.”
Social media has played a decisive role in amplifying anger. Platforms like X have been flooded with videos, slogans and claims, many misleading or false, blaming India for Hadi’s death and exaggerating communal violence.
Fact-checking organizations have debunked viral claims of “genocide” and mis-captioned videos recycled from unrelated incidents.
Disinformation fuels the fire.
A recent EU DisinfoLab report documented long-running influence operations involving Indian-linked networks spreading anti-Bangladesh narratives, while local disinformation within Bangladesh has fueled communal mistrust. Caught in the middle are journalists, accused simultaneously of serving Indian interests and of endangering national stability.
“We’re attacked online as Indian agents, and offline as enemies of the people,” said, Abdul Qyoom a Dhaka-based reporter. “There is no safe space left.”
The turmoil has implications far beyond Bangladesh’s borders. India–Bangladesh relations, already strained by Hasina’s exile, have deteriorated further amid vandalism of Indian diplomatic properties and cultural symbols. Analysts warn that unchecked disinformation risks inflaming communal tensions in India as well, where reports of anti-Hindu violence, often exaggerated, are used to stoke Islamophobia.
Despite the hostility, India continues to supply Bangladesh with food grains, electricity and water. Yet public perception in Bangladesh remains deeply skeptical.
“Diplomacy cannot survive if public anger is this raw,” said a former Bangladeshi diplomat. “And press freedom is often the first casualty.”
Bangladesh now ranks near the bottom of global press freedom indices. Editors warn of rising self-censorship as reporters weigh professional duty against personal safety.
India-Bangladesh tensions rise.
With elections approaching and political tensions unresolved, journalists fear the worst may be yet to come.
“The press is being punished for reflecting reality,” said Usmaan Ahmad, another senior editor. “When truth becomes dangerous, democracy is already in trouble.”
Relations between India and Bangladesh have sharply deteriorated since the ouster of Sheikh Hasina, plunging from a “Golden Era” of cooperation to a phase marked by recrimination and distrust by January 2026. Tensions escalated after India provided refuge to Hasina following her resignation, a move seen by many in Bangladesh as supporting an “autocratic” leader.
The interim Bangladeshi government has formally sought her extradition to face trial for alleged crimes during the 2024 uprising, and India’s refusal has become a major bilateral irritant.
Violence against the Hindu minority in Bangladesh, including the lynching of Dipu Chandra Das, a 25-year-old Hindu garment factory worker in December 2025, has drawn sharp Indian condemnation.
In response, right-wing groups in India staged protests near the Bangladesh High Commission New Delhi and vandalized the visa center in Siliguri, further deepening mutual suspicion between the two countries.
Questions to consider:
1. Why do some people blame the news media when political actions make them angry?
2. Why did people in Bangladesh attack the offices of Prothom Alo and The Daily Star?
3. Who do you tend to blame when something angers you?
by Concepción González García and Nina Pallarés Cerdà
Debates about generative AI in higher education often start from the same assumption: students need a certain level of digital competence before they can use AI productively. Those who already know how to search, filter and evaluate online information are seen as the ones most likely to benefit from tools such as ChatGPT, while others risk being left further behind.
Recent studies reinforce this view. Students with stronger digital skills in areas like problem‑solving and digital ethics tend to use generative AI more frequently (Caner‑Yıldırım, 2025). In parallel, work using frameworks such as DigComp has mostly focused on measuring gaps in students’ digital skills – often showing that perceived “digital natives” are less uniformly proficient than we might think (Lucas et al, 2022). What we know much less about is the reverse relationship: can carefully designed uses of AI actually develop students’ digital competences – and for whom?
In a recent article, we addressed this question empirically by analysing the impact of a generative AI intervention on university students’ digital competences (García & Pallarés, 2026). Students’ skills were assessed using the European DigComp 2.2 framework (Vuorikari et al, 2022).
Moving beyond static measures of digital competence
Research on students’ digital competences in higher education has expanded rapidly over the past decade. Yet much of this work still treats digital competence as a stable attribute that students bring with them into university, rather than as a dynamic and educable capability that can be shaped through instructional design. The consequence is a field dominated by one-off assessments, surveys and diagnostic tools that map students’ existing skills but tell us little about how those skills develop.
This predominant focus on measurement rather than development has produced a conceptual blind spot: we know far more about how digital competences predict students’ use of emerging technologies than about how educational uses of these technologies might enhance those competences in the first place.
Recent studies reinforce this asymmetry. Students with higher levels of digital competence are more likely to engage with generative AI tools and to display positive attitudes towards their use (Moravec et al, 2024; Saklaki & Gardikiotis, 2024). In this ‘competence-first’ model, digital competence appears as a precondition for productive engagement with AI. Yet this framing obscures a crucial pedagogical question: might AI, when intentionally embedded in learning activities, actually support the growth of the very competences it is presumed to require?
A second limitation compounds this problem: the absence of a standardised framework for analysing and comparing the effects of AI-based interventions on digital competence development. Although DigComp is widely used for diagnostic purposes, few studies employ it systematically to evaluate learning gains or to map changes across specific competence areas. As a result, evidence from different interventions remains fragmented, making it difficult to identify which aspects of digital competence are most responsive to AI-mediated learning.
There is, nevertheless, emerging evidence that AI can do more than simply ‘consume’ digital competence. Studies by Dalgıç et al (2024) and Naamati-Schneider & Alt (2024) suggest that integrating tools such as ChatGPT into structured learning tasks can stimulate information search, analytical reasoning and critical evaluation—provided that students are guided to question and verify AI outputs rather than accept them uncritically. Yet these contributions remain exploratory. We still lack experimental or quasi-experimental evidence that links AI-based instructional designs to measurable improvements in specific DigComp areas, and we know little about whether such benefits accrue equally to all students or disproportionately to those who already possess stronger digital skills.
This gap matters. If digital competences are conceived as malleable rather than fixed, then AI is not merely a technology that demands certain skills but a pedagogical tool through which those skills can be cultivated. This reframing shifts the centre of the debate: away from asking whether students are ready for AI, and towards asking whether our teaching practices are ready to use AI in ways that promote competence development and reduce inequalities in learning.
Our study: teaching students to work with AI, not around it
We designed a randomised controlled trial with 169 undergraduate students enrolled in a Microeconomics course. Students were allocated by class group to either a treatment or a control condition. All students followed the same curriculum and completed the same online quizzes through the institutional virtual campus.
The crucial difference lay in how generative AI was integrated:
In the treatment condition, students received an initial workshop on using large language models strategically. They practised:
contextualising questions
breaking problems into steps
iteratively refining prompts
and checking their own solutions before turning to the AI.
Throughout the course, their online self-assessments included adaptive feedback: instead of simply marking answers as right or wrong, the system offered hints, step-by-step prompts and suggestions on how to use AI tools as a thinking partner.
In the control condition, students completed the same quizzes with standard right/wrong feedback, and no training or guidance on AI.
Importantly, the intervention did not encourage students to outsource solutions to AI. Rather, it framed AI as an interactive study partner to support self-explanation, comparison of strategies and self-regulation in problem solving.
We administered pre- and post-course questionnaires aligned with DigComp 2.2, focusing on five competences: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, safety, and two aspects of problem solving (functional use of digital tools and metacognitive self-regulation). Using a difference-in-differences model with individual fixed effects, we estimated how the probability of reporting the highest level of each competence changed over time for the treatment group relative to the control group.
What changed when AI was taught and used in this way?
At the overall sample level, we found statistically significant improvements in three areas:
Information and data literacy – students in the AI-training condition were around 15 percentage points more likely to report the highest level of competence in identifying information needs and carrying out effective digital searches.
Problem solving – functional dimension – the probability of reporting the top level in using digital tools (including AI) to solve tasks increased by about 24 percentage points.
Problem solving – metacognitive dimension – a similar 24-point gain emerged for recognising what aspects of one’s digital competences need to be updated or improved.
In other words, the AI-integrated teaching design was associated not only with better use of digital tools, but also with stronger awareness of digital strengths and weaknesses – a key ingredient of autonomous learning. Communication and safety competences also showed positive but smaller and more uncertain effects. Here, the pattern becomes clearer when we look at who benefited most.
A compensatory effect: AI as a potential leveller, not just an amplifier
When we distinguished students by their initial level of digital competence, a pattern emerged. For those starting below the median, the intervention produced large and significant gains in all five competences, with improvements between 18 and 38 percentage points depending on the area. For students starting above the median, effects were smaller and, in some cases, non-significant.
This suggests a compensatory effect: students who began the course with weaker digital competences benefited the most from the AI-based teaching design. Rather than widening the digital gap, guided use of AI acted as a levelling mechanism, bringing lower-competence students closer to their more digitally confident peers.
Conceptually, this challenges an implicit assumption in much of the literature – namely, that generative AI will primarily enhance the learning of already advantaged students, because they are the ones with the skills and confidence to exploit it. Our findings show that, when AI is embedded within intentional pedagogy, explicit training and structured feedback, the opposite can happen: those who started with fewer resources can gain the most.
From ‘allow or ban’ to ‘how do we teach with AI?’
For higher education policy and practice, the implications are twofold.
First, we need to stop thinking of digital competence purely as a prerequisite for using AI. Under the right design conditions, AI can be a pedagogical resource to build those competences, especially in information literacy, problem solving and metacognitive self-regulation. That means integrating AI into curricula not as an add-on, but as part of how we teach students to plan, monitor and evaluate their learning.
Second, our results suggest that universities concerned with equity and digital inclusion should focus less on whether students have access to AI tools (many already do) and more on who receives support to learn how to use them well. Providing structured opportunities to practise prompting, to critique AI outputs and to reflect on one’s own digital skills may be particularly valuable for students who enter university with lower levels of digital confidence.
This does not resolve all the ethical and practical concerns around generative AI – far from it. But it shifts the conversation. Instead of treating AI as an external threat to academic integrity that must be tightly controlled, we can start to ask:
How can we design tasks where the added value lies in asking good questions, justifying decisions and evaluating evidence, rather than in producing a single ‘correct’ answer?
How can we support students to see AI not as a shortcut to avoid thinking, but as a tool to think better and know themselves better as learners?
Under what conditions does AI genuinely help to close digital competence gaps, and when might it risk opening new ones?
Answering these questions will require further longitudinal and multi-institutional research, including replication studies and objective performance measures alongside self-reports. Yet the evidence we present offers a cautiously optimistic message: teaching students how to use AI can be part of a strategy to strengthen digital competences and reduce inequalities in higher education, rather than merely another driver of stratification.
Concepción González García is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), Spain, and holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Alicante. Her research interests include macroeconomics, particularly fiscal policy, and education.
Nina Pallarés is Assistant Professor of Economics and Academic Coordinator of the Master’s in Management of Sports Entities at the Faculty of Economics and Business, Catholic University of Murcia (UCAM), Spain. Her research focuses on applied econometrics, with particular emphasis on health, labour, education, and family economics.
Convening at the IFE conference 2026 at Tec de Monterrey, US colleges said their doors remained open to international students, despite the Trump administration’s ongoing anti-immigrant crackdown.
“Internationalisation is more difficult to execute 1769982477, but in my 46 years in international education, I can’t think of a time when it has been more vital,” said University of Washington president Robert Jones.
“Student mobility has been at the absolute core of what has made higher education in the US what it is today,” he said. “Notwithstanding the nationalism and divisiveness in our society, institutions are not giving up on the commitment of attracting students from across the world.”
Following unprecedented attacks on US international students under Trump’s second term, the university of Washington saw a 5-7% decline in new international enrolments this fall – a figure Jones said was “significantly less” than he feared, and markedly better than the overall 17% drop recorded across institutions.
“There’s a lot of expertise globally. We can’t sit in our labs in America and continue to think the world is going to come to our door,” said Jones.
Elsewhere, University of Washington vice provost for global affairs Ahmad Ezzedine highlighted the demographic cliff facing US domestic enrolments, making it even more vital for institutions to maintain inbound flows of international talent.
We can’t sit in our labs in America and continue to think the world is going to come to our door
Robert Jones, University of Washington
“This year, the US will have the lowest number of high school graduates that we’ve had in 25 years. There aren’t enough students coming in to meet the demands of today’s industries.”
“We need international students to bring talent in, but students, particularly graduates, have options now, and they don’t need to come to the US,” said Ezzedine.
Across the conference, stakeholders emphasised the wide-ranging repercussions of Trump’s funding cuts, creating uncertainty in global research ecosystems and causing scientists to increasingly opt for shorter-term, adaptable projects.
At the same time, alternative destinations have galvanised to attract talent pivoting away from the US, with notable examples following the administration’s shock hiking of the H-1B visa fee to $100,000 for certain petitions.
“There are countries following very smart strategies to attract talent,” said Ezzedine, pointing to China’s K1 visa and Canada’s CA$1.7bn investment into research – strategies both launched in response to US policy.
“In the current geopolitical situation, our world sometimes feels upside down. Some of the things we used to be able to control now feel out of control,” said Ezzedine: “It’s also making the world look to alternative hubs for education – in East Asia and the Middle East, for example”.
Across the conference, delegates emphasised the growing trend of students and faculty pivoting to East Asian destinations, pointing to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), which announced an open invitation to Harvard University’s international students – who have become a central target of the Trump administration.
“People seem to think that the United States of America has been the best place for higher education… that may be true, but that will not continue to be true if we isolate ourselves,” said Michael Rao, president of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).
Rao emphasised the importance of global interconnectedness and said he had faith in the “masses of increasingly intelligent human beings” who would continue to seek the value of getting together globally.
“Electronic technologies connect us better than ever… We have to watch the expenses and communicate the value of those outcomes so the public understands why they are investing in international education,” he advised US colleagues.
Meanwhile, Jones said the University of Washington was making efforts to expand international recruitment beyond its top sending nations, with a particular focus on South Africa, Vietnam, Mexico and Brazil.
Despite barriers created by Trump’s travel ban blocking students from 39 nations and the Palestinian Authority from obtaining US visas, Jones vowed his institution was “not retreating” but thinking innovatively about reaching students in the global south.
He praised the litigation efforts of UW in association with the American Association of Universities (AAU), in their successful blocking of government attempts to slash the university’s F&A research funding by $200m – cuts that are currently “put on hold”, said Jones.
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Dive Brief:
School staff are challenged by limited knowledge of how assistive technology can help students with disabilities participate more fully in learning, as well as the rapid pace of changes in tech, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Other factors like insufficient time and opportunities for training, staff shortages and high turnover, technology compatibility issues, and funding constraints also create hurdles for the use of assistive technology in schools, the GAO study found.
Strategies some school districts are using to overcome these barriers include forming assistive technology teams that create standardized processes to identify the best tech for students’ individualized needs and to coordinate procurement processes, the report said.
Dive Insight:
Assistive technology in schools can run the gamut of low-tech tools like pencil grips and swivel chairs to high-tech ones like large mobile touch screens and voice recognition software.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires a student’s individualized education program team to consider assistive technology use, at no cost to the student, for every student receiving special education services. However, not much is known about how this requirement is implemented, the GAO report said.
Additionally, students may receive assistive technology under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
To conduct the study, GAO interviewed staff from state and regional education agencies, visiting eight school districts and eight schools across four states — Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming. Researchers also reviewed documents from the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as surveyed Education Department-funded Parent Centers across the country.
The GAO report highlighted examples from school staff about how assistive technology has benefited students, including one student who “blossomed” after accessing eye gaze technology that allows students to interact with devices with just their eyes and another student who was able to express more words verbally through a communication device and special education supports.
But the study found that in many school districts that GAO visited, staff said teachers often only think of high-tech devices and may not consider low-tech devices to be assistive technology. “This may result in students not having simple solutions that could meet their individual needs,” the report said.
Myths about assistive technology or attitudes that such tech can give students with disabilities an unfair advantage were also barriers, the report said. In 2024, the Education Department issued guidance to dispel myths about the use of assistive technology for young children and students.
Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., requested the report and is ranking member of the House Education and Workforce Committee. “Assistive technology is critical to helping students with disabilities fully participate in their school environment,” Scott said in an email statement to K-12 Dive Thursday. “This report demonstrates that school districts are struggling to implement assistive technology to comprehensively address student needs.”
He added that the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize and eventually close the Education Department will “exacerbate challenges students with disabilities, parents, and schools are already experiencing.”
The GAO report highlighted practices from the schools it interviewed that mitigated some of the challenges. Those practices included:
Establishing assistive technology teams to improve coordination and collaboration and build knowledge and capacity related to assistive technology.
Developing or expanding school districts’ standardized assistive technology processes, such as how to identify the best assistive technology for students’ needs, document assistive technology use in students’ IEPs, and acquire assistive technology.
Providing training, resources or consultations to school staff, as well as creating resources like internal websites or tools.
Coordinating with IT departments to address technology challenges.
Tapping into federal, state or regional assistive technology resources to train school staff or provide assistive technology to students.
Leveraging external training and expert consultations to support students’ use of assistive technology.
Creating assistive technology lending libraries to try out such devices and tools with students.
If 2025 is any indication of what’s to come, 2026 will likely be another life-changing year for the higher education sector. On top of perennial challenges — such as enrollment and rising costs — some college leaders are grappling with extraordinary federal pressure on their institutions.
The Trump administration by now has a well-worn playbook: Launch civil rights investigations into high-profile colleges, freeze or terminate their federal research grants, and then pressure them into adopting policy changes to regain access to that critical funding source. Higher education experts predict this pressure campaign will only expand in the year ahead.
Still, some higher education institutions and researchers have challenged these moves in court, notching some wins along the way. This year could bring major rulings on pending litigation, including the Trump administration’s appeal of the ruling that reinstated some $2.2 billion of Harvard University’s frozen research funding.
Meanwhile, major policy shifts are on college leaders’ radars as well, from the U.S. Department of Education’s planned accreditation overhaul to the U.S. Department of Justice’s campaign against state policies that allow certain undocumented students to receive in-state tuition rates.
Below, we’re rounding up our pieces breaking down each of these trends, and more, for the year ahead.
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WASHINGTON — After a tumultuous year for the higher education sector, accreditors — the quality-control bodies that act as gatekeepers to federal student aid for institutions — are taking stock.
This week, the Council for Higher Education Accreditation held its annual conference in Washington, D.C., as the sector tries to chart a path forward amid policy uncertainty, political pressure and wavering support for higher ed.
Here’s a look at some of the big issues that took center stage, including potential regulations for accreditors from the Trump administration and the launch of new accreditation bodies.
A year of policy whiplash, and more to come
Higher education has seen tidal policy shifts under President Donald Trump’s second term, and it’s only been a year.
At this week’s CHEA conference, Jon Fansmith, the American Council on Education’s senior vice president for government relations, said more potential shifts could be coming down the pike, including to the accreditation system.
The administration is “moving away from the individual targeting of institutions to a broader, systematic set of changes that will impact all institutions — and accreditation is the forefront of that effort,” Fansmith said.
He pointed to Trump’s executive order last April mandating accreditors to focus on student outcomes and taking aim at their requirements around diversity, equity and inclusion.Additionally, the president directed the U.S. Department of Education to lift a pause on reviewing new accreditors and to make it easier to bring more into the field.
Fansmith also pointed to the Education Department redistributing grant funding to give nearly $15 million to support creating new institutional and programmatic accreditors and to help institutions switch agencies. More recently, the department said it plans to develop new regulations to make it easier for new accreditors to gain recognition and to curb their DEI standards.
“We are very worried about the independence of accreditation … and this administration’s efforts to bring more political and ideological influence over the accreditation process,” Fansmith said. “We would be concerned about any administration having that authority. That’s not the purpose of accreditation. That is not why accreditation has worked so successfully over time.”
The accreditor-college relationship in turbulent times
Trust between institutions and accreditors plays a crucial role in the higher ed system. But that relationship is under scrutiny, as politicians — especially Republicans — look to shake up accreditation and add new quality control bodies.
One of those is the Commission for Public Higher Education,an accreditor formed last year by six Southern public higher education networks.The body plans to seek federal recognition in fiscal 2027 and has received $1 million in grants from the Education Department to help it get off the ground.
Speaking on a panel, CPHE board chair Mark Becker — who has also served as president of Georgia State University and of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities — said he called the leaders of the systems that launched the accreditor “to make sure that this wasn’t a political boondoggle.”
“Within those systems, they’ve been frustrated with accreditation for a long time,” Becker added, pointing to what he described as “overly intrusive accreditors” getting “in the business of institutions when it wasn’t their job.”
Among CPHE’s founding state systems, Florida’s has come under scrutiny by its accreditor over potential political interference, while the University of North Carolina has faced similar scrutiny over governance in creating a new civic life center.Both states enacted laws mandating their public colleges to seek new accreditors every cycle, though North Carolina lawmakers rolled back that requirement last year.
Becker said the focus of CPHE is to create an accreditor focused on efficiency and transparency, as well as on outcomes over process and bureaucracy.
Positive or negative, the relationship between institution and accreditor is arguably more important than ever. Amid the uncertainty hanging over higher ed, “there has to be trust with the universities and their accreditors,” said Darryll Pines, president of the University of Maryland, College Park. He noted that he was happy with UMD’s accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.
For the relationship between quality assurers and institutions to work, Pines said accreditors need to communicate their standards clearly, provide useful examples how to meet those standards, and respect the mission and core values of the institutions they work with.
Do colleges actually want to switch accreditors?
Politicians like Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who championed the formation of CPHE — have heaped criticism on legacy accreditors and the system writ large. They have also backed the creation of new accreditors and supported making it easier for colleges to change agencies.
Moreover, regulatory changes under the first Trump administration eliminated the geographic boundaries of regional accreditors, opening up more options for colleges.
But do colleges actually want to change?
At the CHEA conference, Cecilia Bibbò, a visiting professor at the University at Albany, discussed a survey she and colleagues conducted examining this question, as well as the practical obstacles to changing accreditors.
They found that 80% of college leaders surveyed had no plans to change accreditors, and only a very small fraction had begun the process to switch. Reasons that could drive a switch include legislation mandating a change, as well as the accreditor being sanctioned or losing federal recognition, which would require the institution to produce excess paperwork or having DEI criteria.
Roughly half of respondents said they were “very satisfied” with their accreditor and another one-third said they were “somewhat satisfied.”
“Accreditor choice has not triggered rapid movement,” Bibbò said.
Surveyed leaders expressed concern over managing the transition between accreditors, with a large majority expecting such a process to bring some level of disruption. They anticipated heavy institutional costs, such as additional staff workload and the expense of maintaining two accreditors until the transition is complete.
Among the anticipated extra administrative tasks was producing new documentation for an accreditor, realigning processes and establishing the relationship.
If college leaders hypothetically had resources to manage the costs of switching, a majority said they were still likely to stick with their current accreditors.
“Responses emphasize stability, familiarity and trust,” Bibbò said. “So many institutions describe their accreditors as collegial, helpful and sensible, and value the longitudinal knowledge the accreditor has developed about their institution over time.”
It’s a topic that came up with some frequency at the CHEA conference, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the role quality assurance bodies play in public perceptions of the sector, not to mention college operations themselves.
“It’s a real problem of public relations. I think it’s our fault,” UMD’s Pines said. “We haven’t done a really good job as leaders in higher education, all of us in this room, of conveying to the general public — and to our own clients and decision-makers for our own respective states — of what is the value of higher education to the citizens of that state.”
For his part, Pines pointed to UMD’s role as a land-grant university, which includes conducting research to benefit its home state. He touted the university’s Grand Challenges Grants program, which launched in 2022 and provided institutional funding to support projects to address pressing issues. It has, among other things, led to a research program that helped reduce gun violence in Baltimore, Pines said.
“All we had to do was show faculty the money, and they come up with great ideas.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated how much grant money the Education Department had allotted to support new accreditors and institutions trying to change agencies. The story has been updated to revise that figure and also include additional information about North Carolina’s accreditation laws.
Imagine trying to teach a student how to navigate the city of New York in 2026 using a map from 1950. The streets have changed names, new bridges have been built, and the traffic patterns have completely changed and are unrecognizable. The student fails not because they lack intelligence, but because the data provided is obsolete.
Sadly, that’s exactly how we teach kids about money in American high schools today.
In high schools across the country, we give students older resources like textbooks printed three years ago or PDFs from 2022, and we expect them to navigate a financial landscape that is dynamic and always changing. We teach them about 2 percent mortgage rates when they are really around 6-7 percent and talk about tax rules that haven’t been valid for years.
We are not teaching financial literacy–rather we are teaching financial history. The latency is costing the next generation their economic future. This must change.
The latency problem
The fundamental flaw in traditional edtech is that it treats finance like literature or a history class where things do not change. For example, the American revolution in 1776 is the same whether you learn it in 2001 or 2025–but in finance and money, things like interest rates, contribution limits and rules are always changing.
When the Federal Reserve changes the federal funds rate, rates on student loans or savings accounts also changes. A paper textbook can’t keep up with that, nor can a pre-recorded video module capture this change. By the time an old-fashioned curriculum is approved, printed, and distributed, things might even change again, which leads to outdated information regarding financial realities.
This delay gap creates a disconnect between the classroom and the real world. Students learn definitions for a test, but when they open a real brokerage app or apply for their first credit card, they realize what they learned in class doesn’t match what’s happening, which makes them find connecting the classroom to the real world difficult.
The Live-State solution
Some might argue that the solution is better or fancier textbooks, but I say we retire the static finance textbook completely and move to the future of money education: something called Live-State Logic. This is a big change from old, static content to systems that use live data.
With Live-State Logic, school curriculum will function like a living thing. Instead of fixed printed lessons, the educational platform will act like a bridge that connects the classroom to the real world. For example, updated financial info would feed straight to the software, so that when the IRS changes the standard deduction, the platform receives that data and automatically updates the lesson on tax filing for our young students. Also, if the Fed hints at a rate hike, the ‘Buying Your First Car’ module and the interest rate part instantly adjust the monthly payment calculations for students. I truly believe this is a necessary evolution of education, especially personal finance education for young students. We see this technology in high-frequency trading and institutional accounting, so why isn’t it in our classrooms?
From memorization to simulation
When we link real-word data with education, we unlock a very powerful pedagogical tool I call “True Simulation.” No one has been able to learn to swim by reading a book about water or without getting into the water. You must get wet. Similarly, you cannot learn to manage risk by reading a definition of “volatility”–you must experience it to really understand it.
Live-State architecture lets us build safe practice areas where students can deal with today’s reality. They can build or wreck their credit using live credit simulation. They can manage a budget against current inflation numbers and make critical decisions before they use their own money. They can even try out a sample investment portfolio against live market conditions.
This way, they see the results of their choices right away, in a safe place, before making mistakes that cost them real money later.
The equity imperative
Critics might say this technology is too complex for high schoolers. I say we have a moral duty to provide it
As a professional who also works in finance, I know wealthy families have always had access to Live-State logic–it’s called a private wealth manager or a CPA who navigates the changing rules for them. Low-income students rely entirely on the school system. If the school system gives them old info, we’re putting these students, who need high-quality financial tools the most to succeed today, at a disadvantage.
Democratizing financial intelligence means democratizing the technology that delivers it. We must stop giving our students maps from the 1950s if we want them to succeed in 2026. It’s time to build a bridge to the present and give our future leaders the tools they need in our modern, tech-driven world.
MY BIO:
Isaac Lamptey, Piggy Investors
Isaac Lamptey is an Investment Accountant and the Founder/Chief Architect of Piggy Investors, an edtech company. He holds a patent-pending status for the “Regulatory Bridge,” an AI-driven architecture designed to integrate real-time financial compliance into educational simulations for financial education for middle and high schools in the United States.
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